| The Queen (2006) In 1997, after the death of Lady Di in a car accident in Paris, the reluctant Queen and The Establishment do not accept to honor the "People's Princess" as a member of the Royal Family. However, the public and the media question the utility of the monarchy and the just-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair advises the Queen to make a public speech mourning the loss of Diana. Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her performance. Awesome, intense movie about real events. | |
| Quest for Fire (1981) 80,000 years ago, fire meant power. When a tribe is attacked by another aggressive tribe and their source of fire is stolen, three tribesmen travel in a quest for fire. They retrieve the source of fire from a primitive group of cannibals and a female prisoner escapes death. She follows the trio. Insight into our past. | |
| The Quiet American (2002) Saigon, 1952, a beautiful, exotic, and mysterious city caught in the grips of the Vietnamese war of liberation from the French colonial powers. New arrival Alden Pyle, an idealistic American aid worker, befriends London Times correspondent Thomas Fowler. When Fowler introduces Pyle to his beautiful young Vietnamese mistress Phuong the three become swept up in a tempestuous love triangle that leads to a series of startling revelations and finally - murder. Nothing, and no one, is as it seems, in this adaptation of Graham Greene's classic and prophetic story of love, betrayal, murder and the origin of the American war in Vietnam. Intense movie. Gives you an idea as to why America is not as popular in France as we think we should be. | |
| The Quiet Earth (1985) Scientist Zac Hobson wakes up in the morning and soon he discovers that he seems to be alone in the world. He drives around unsuccessfully seeking out other survivors and tries to figure out what might have happened. After a few days, he shows traces of insanity due to the loneliness. Out of the blue, Zac finds Joanne and they stay together looking for survivors. Zac meets the distrustful black Api and Zac explains that he believes that the project that he was researching in the government laboratory might have caused the phenomenon. Now the trio decides to blow-up the laboratory to stop the experiment. Typical of the Last Man Standing SciFi genre as well as a common male fantasy.
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| Quintet (1979) In the distant future the world is in the grip of another ice age. A city originally built to house five million people is now in its death throes as the relentlessly advancing glacier is slowly crushing the metropolis's steel infrastructure. The relatively few surviving fur-clothed inhabitants, perhaps thousands, perhaps only hundreds, drift aimlessly in their grim, drab world, awaiting their inevitable fate as they try to survive from day to day with scavenged firewood and a minimal diet. Their only solaces are booza, an alcoholic drink distilled from moss, and Quintet, a seemingly innocuous board game for six players. The only other surviving mammals are roving packs of hungry mastiffs which roam the city's corridors and quickly dispose of the remains of the dead. Newly arrived from the south is Essex with his pregnant wife Vivia, seeking shelter in the doomed city only to find it populated by people middle-aged or older. They had supported themselves by hunting seals, but now that the last of the aquatic mammals have been killed off, they seek shelter in the apartment of Essex's brother, a renowned Quintet player. The new arrivals quickly learn that the game has a more sinister side. Not great, but could have been. The pavilion was to be razed after filming was complete. 'Robert Altman' had developed an affection for the silk-screened glass panels that he had used to heighten the lost-world sense of the movie's setting. He salvaged the 44 panels and for a time displayed them at his Lion's Gate studio. When he and his wife found an apartment in Manhattan in 1984, about a dozen of the panels - some as tall as 18 feet - became the dominant decorative feature. (The history of the panels and the apartment, with photos, became an article in the March 1990 issue of "Architectural Digest", preserved online at www.sopot.org/altmanresidence.pdf.) |