MOVIE REVIEW: The King's Speech (2010)

At the time of this writing, The King's Speech has won the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Picture (and, irrelevantly, Green Bay is beating the Bears in football). This puts the film in a strong running for it's Oscar chances as The Social Network's Best Picture-winning streak comes to an end. In my opinion, the film is certainly one of the best of the year, but definitely "Oscar bait" with some fine trimmings. The King's Speech presents a piece of strikingly complex British history, while it's nothing extraordinary or unique amongst it's competition, it's a fine piece of work.

In 1925, Prince Albert, The Duke of York delivers a speech on behalf of his father, King George V of England. His stutter botches the public display and he develops a reputation of social awkwardness amongst his people. Upon becoming the heir apparent to the British throne during the mid-1930s, an incognito Princess Elizabeth hires Lionel Logue, an ambitious but unorthodox speech therapist whose methods occasionally come at contention with his royal client. The two must realize the need to meet a consensus in their goals, as the morale of their country in the dawn of World War II unexpectedly depends on it.

The King's Speech fascinates me as a story, because of what I presume to be it's relative unfamiliarity to many Americans. Of particular interest to me is the theme revolving around the changing role and adaptation of age-old monarchy in modern society. With the advent of sound technology, and the increased role of Parliament in politics, the Royal Family started to rely more on their status to influence the people, rather than political power. Like Spider-Man "with great power, comes great responsibility". King Bertie understood this too, but in spite of his intellect and cunning, communication became an increased priority. Underneath it all, The King's Speech poises the question, how do we as people compromise in the face of technology and a changing world around us? If The Social Network does this on a more global level with Facebook, The King's Speech is pretty much the same theme on the more individual, local level.

2010 is going to face some tough acting competition from this film. While I still hold a candle for Jeff Bridges in True Grit, Colin Firth is very compelling and genuine in his portrayal of King George VI. I still give Bridges the slight edge because for an actor, it's more challenging in my opinion to create a fictional character as opposed to a slick imitation of a real-life figure, but that's my opinion, and nothing more. Geoffrey Rush as Logue and Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen Mother are the other big guns in this film, and service their parts with much needed jolts of charisma. The screenplay took me aback as incredibly humorous for a historical drama, you could almost classify The King's Speech as a frank comedy, but more in the vain of Pygmalion, given the context.

As good as this all may sound, The King's Speech doesn't strike me as unique as Black Swan or The Social Network in terms of cinematic storytelling. It's still a very compelling film, but it definitely caters to audences who will prefer a more conventional kind of story for this year's Academy Awards. I will confess though, the strongest scene in the film, the one that had me staring at the screen, slack-jawed in awe of it's beauty was when Bertie gives his ultimate speech. Oddly enough, it's set to Beethoven's "Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92, II. Allegretto" (a German funeral march), but the scene is a wonderful example of how music can amplify and complement the action of a scene. Absolutely stunning!

8/10

Peace,
- Jon

MOVIE REVIEW: The Patriot (2000)

2000 was a good year for movies, or at least what I remember of it. Among them, we had Gladiator, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Almost Famous, and Traffic at our disposal. And then there was The Patriot, an underrated historical-drama/war picture directed by disaster-film cheesemeister Roland Emmerich and starring Mel Gibson; in the days before he went "Four Loko" on us. Like most films of it's kind, to call The Patriot 100% historically accurate is questionable, but does it manage to entertain in some way, shape, or form? Certainly.

The story concerns a widowed farmer, who takes a pacifist stance on the eve of the American Revolution when tensions have risen at their highest. After one of his sons is killed trying to save another from persecution by the gallows, the farmer has a change of heart and joins the militia with his eldest son as they fight to protect Charleston, South Carolina. The Patriot grapples with many themes of honor in war, and revenge versus compassion, this is where I felt the film's strongest points were. It also helps when you have a strong, symphonic score by John Williams and some incredible set design. There were times because of the meticulous attention to these details, the melancholy score, and the plot that I felt things were very reminiscent to Braveheart. Obviously, Mel's presence doesn't help things much, but I don't think it would have mattered either way. It was a welcome sense of familiarity that kept my interest throughout the film's two-and-a-half hour length.

Emmerich's presence as a director made me nervous at first, but now I consider this to be one of, if not, his best film. He brings the right level of tension and alacrity to the action scenes, yet he does do a few things that bothered me. One of them was giving Mel Gibson near-superhuman strength in a sequence where he takes down a caravan of 20 redcoats along with his miraculously crackshot juvenile sons. Another was Mel's final showdown, where he makes the beaten hero pull a last-minute-hat-trick-in-order-to-kill-the-bad-guy cliche. It's done well, but it's still a cliche (and amusingly bears uncanny resemblance to the Maximus/Commodus fight in Gladiator). What bothers me the most, probably is the artistic liberties taken with history - there were a few glaring ones that I don't really feel like going into detail, but that's something unavoidable with these films.

I still enjoyed The Patriot because of how it portrayed the ire of many Americans of the time through a select few fictional characters as a representative sample. Most obviously is the one of Gibson, who resolves to fight in order to justify his son's sacrifice. It hits a little closer to home when my country is still in the midst of a war right now, but all historical innacuracies aside, thank goodness historical fiction at least allows us to think.

8/10

Peace,
- Jon