Friday, March 16, 2007

Tony Blair's Creative Disorder

This guy puts kid art up on his walls. (According to Stephen Frears.)

I'm a little tired of this reality, so I checked out early yesterday and went to the movies. I saw The Queen. Short review: everyone is right, great great GREAT movie, go see it. I loved it.

All of the palace insider scenes were brilliant. But what I loved even more than seeing Lilibet giving her dogs walkies and slogging through a river trying to fix her Land Rover was Tony Blair's house.

Yes, that house, No. 10 Downing, or I guess No. 11 Downing in his case because that's the flat that's big enough for him to stow that big family. As an obvious contrast to the buttoned-up, no-tchotchke-out-of-place lifestyle of the royal family, Stephen Frears showed Blair and family living in what would politely be described as "creative disorder," and what might impolitely be described as a minor pigsty. Games and toys littering the floor and the shelves, breakfast dishes undone at the table, clutter on the countertops, you get the idea. If you've ever been to my place, you REALLY get the idea.

Blair has obviously had, ah, a spot of trouble since the time portrayed in the film. Let's just say that being Bush's Butt Boy does not agree with him. But watching the movie definitely gave me a nostalgic tug back to the whirlwind of his first year in office, and the first years of A Certain Other President on this side of the pond. Those were the days. Excuse me, I need to go weep for what has been lost again.

And if I may be sucked back into filmmaking fantasy again for a minute, despite Tony's own seeming departure from reality, I still feel that a PM who has the empty wine bottle from last night still on his kitchen counter in the morning can't be all bad. It gives me hope.

1 comment:

Julie Polito said...

Awesome!

I am not actually a Polito by birth, I'm a Polito by marriage. So your sister is the true Julie Polito. My husband's family is from Tucson, his grandfather was from Sicily. No Detroit relatives that they know of!

Small world!