Two reviews of two random things

Just to mix things up a bit, I just wanted to write a quick post reviewing two things I’ve come into contact with lately, one bad, and one good.

The first is The Iron Lady, which is a movie so awful and poorly-made I simply cannot believe anyone approved its release.

Other reviewers have danced around this fact, but I want to put it as bluntly as I can: it’s not a movie about the life and times of Margaret Thatcher. It’s primarily a fictionalized, speculative drama about her life as an old woman, long since retired from politics, and the difficulties and frustrations she experiences as she mourns the death of her husband and copes with her own descent into senility.

There are flashbacks to her political life, certainly, and these are all the stunning clips you see in the remarkably deceptive trailers. But the Iron Lady is not even a movie that uses nostalgia as a simple framing device to tell a story of the past, in the way, say, Hoover dictating his memoirs was the frame of J. Edgar. The point of the flashbacks is primarily to reveal character and emotion, not history. The three main characters are Thatcher, her daughter, and the ghost of Denis, and the climax of the plot is the ailing widow gaining the courage to clean out her dead husband’s closet. It’s not even worth harping on about all the important political episodes the film fails to show because, again, that’s not even the point of this movie.

I think anyone who’s interested in politics and politicians has often wondered what life is like for former heads of state after they leave office, and how they cope with a life of anonymity and weakness after years as the most powerful and well-known person in their nation. In the extremely unlikely event she would have agreed to it, a documentary about post-politics Thatcher might have been quite fascinating, and perhaps a different director could have made a compelling little film about the sad retired life of some other foreign prime minister who’s considerably less famous and important. But to ruin what should have been one of the great bio-pics of our time with one of the greatest actresses of our time is simply inexcusable, and outright depressing in its carelessness.

Changing gears, entirely, this Christmas I asked my parents to buy me a new computer monitor. Get me a big one, I said, and they bought me a 27-inch Samsung, which cost them around $300. At the risk of sounding like a spoiled brat, it wasn’t very good, but that was more my fault than theirs. I had done absolutely no research into how monitors work, and since returning it I’ve realized that you actually have to be a pretty discriminating shopper in order to come home satisfied.

My monitor set-up. Dell Ultrasharp attached to a Macbook pro.

Unless you are willing to spend over a grand for one of those super top-of-the-line Mac Thunderbolt things, most monitors on the market today max out at a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Which really isn’t really that great. As this clever XKCD comic notes, that’s an amazing twice the resolution of your average smartphone. In practical terms, this means there’s a very clear limit at how big a 1920 by 1080 screen can get before everything  just starts looking stretchy, blurry, and pixely, and in my experience that’s somewhere around 23 inches. I guess if all you want to do is watch movies, a stretched display doesn’t matter much, but if you’re an artist like me, and sharp focus and crisp pixels are important, anything above 23 is going to cause more problems than it solves.

Color also appears to be something most monitors simply aren’t interested in bothering to do right in any serious capacity. Apparently if you take color seriously, you’re supposed to buy some manner of $60 color-matching contraption to calibrate your monitor, since merely fiddling with the “RGB balance” settings won’t do much. Again, this might not matter much to some, but using a double-screen monitor set-up, as I do, I find it incredibly irritating to pull windows from one screen to the other only for all the hues and shades to brighten or darken or yellow or whatever.

I originally returned the Samsung for a smaller model, then returned that second Samsung again for my current monitor, a Dell Ultrasharp 23-inch, which I am incredibly satisfied with. It  also cost 300 bucks, but has much better sharpness, color, and clarity than the 27-inch Samsung, and did not require any special ports or cables I didn’t already own. It’s also capable of swinging around to provide a “vertical display,” which I must say, has already become one of those how-did-I-ever-live-without-it-experiences, in terms of how much more user-friendly it’s made word processing and web-browsing.

But I ordered it online, and only on the recommendation of a particularly tech-savvy friend, which was unto itself fairly revealing of how needlessly difficult monitor shopping remains for a layperson like me. I suppose it’s uniquely frustrating because few things seem like they should be easier to select based on nothing more than looks than a big, shiny, glowing screen.