I know I shouldn't do it, but a lot of people do: I refilled my drink after "Running With Scissors" then strolled into an afternoon screening of "The Queen" at The Grove. Two movies for the price of one! When watching "Scissors," you feel sure that Annette Bening will finally win the best actress Oscar. Then you see "The Queen" with Helen Mirren in a flawless performance as the reignig British monarch and you know who's going to be holding that statuette the night of the Academy Awards.

Mirren won the Emmy a few months ago for playing the first Queen Elizabeth and these two very different roles of a lifetime.

"The Queen" dramatizes the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in August 1997 in a horrific car crash in London. The story of her death has been often told but there has never been a movie focusing on the grieving British public's disbelief and anger toward their queen for staying holed up at the royal country estate without uttering a word or even issuing a statement about the death of her former daughter-in-law, Diana, who was the mother of her grandson William, the future King of England.

It took a new Prime Minister, Tony Blair (portrayed wonderfully in the film by Michael Sheen to convince the Queen - clearly out of touch with the public mood - to return to London, fly the flag over Buckingham Palace at half-mast, and to address her subjects in a live television address. I do wish the filmaker had allowed the audience to hear Mirren do the address in its entirety instead of having Blair's wife Cherie (Helen McCrory) talk over the last part of it. She was amusing through much of the film but in that scene, I did so want her to shut up.

But you just can't take your eyes off of Mirren who is imperious much of the time but her eyes are saying so much throughout the movie. "The Queen" takes care to help the audience understand Queen Elizabeth II more, to understand that being stoic and rigid about protoccal and clueless about real people (even her children) isn't so surprising when you consider she became Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at the age of 25 after the sudden death of her father King George. She's now been on that throne for more than 50 years! And given that her late mother, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, lived to be 101, chances are her daughter will around for a few more decades to come!

Any regular reader of "Out In Hollywood" knows that my personal experiences often find their way onto this blog and this is another one of those times. I was in London staying with my friends Danny and Lorna for two weeks in the summer of 1997 - about a month before Diana's death.

For many years, I had been obsessed with all things having to do with the royal family so was beside myself when Lorna secured tickets for us to tour Buckingham Palace (it was the first summer the palace had ever been open to the public). It was a thrill to be inside rather than just looking through the gates like in years past and waiting to watch the changing of the guard.

But my visit that summer was also memorable because of all the attention on Diana whose trip to Bosnia as part of her landmine work was all over the headlines. I loved scooping up all the papers every morning in Britain, they are such a good read. But in the days before I left, there was all this furor over photos taken of Diana on a boat kissing Dodi Al Fayed. It was HUGE news.

When the pictures were published in one of the tabloids, Lorna and I could not find one anywhere on our way to lunch at a pub. Good thing it was a gay pub though because there was one dog-eared copy of the paper with the pictures of Diana and Dodi snogging. I looked just like everyone else but I had this feeling, that day, that it was all too much, that there was too much heat on this woman and it seemed a bit scary and out of control. So when Diana was killed only weeks later, a part of me wasn't completely surprised because I had been witness to a bit of the madness that had surrounded her.
It's still so sad.