Dedicated The King's Speech Thread

a thread dedicated to 'the king's speech'

Kings Reach Tower redevelopment | Southwark | 127m | 34 fl | On hold

From what's being said in the World Forum, it sounds like the building is being vacated in preparation for its redevelopment. There will be a 4-storey height increase and a complete reclad of the exterior, plus improvements to the entrance and surrounding buildings.

http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images/pics/1431KingsReachTowerRebuild_pic2.jpg

Champagne!

http://www.freeroms.com/roms_screenshot1/nes_kings_of_the_beach_1.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK_5sx2asXA

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfv3jy6wdT1qa2ylvo1_500.jpg

Porno version of The King's Speech called The King's Sex, where the King works with a hot female therapist to get over his fear of sex.

― hey boys, suppers on me, our video just went bacterial (Hurting 2), Sunday, January 9, 2011 11:08 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

YOU MUST LEAVE AN HEIR TO THE THRONE

― gr8080, Sunday, January 9, 2011 11:31 PM Bookmark

this probably wasnt as dull looking as it seemed from the not-very-good stream i had where the top fifth of the screen was dedicated every fifteen minutes to informing me that the movie was the property of the weinsteins and not to be duplicated but i had a bunch of problems w/ the story itself. like i guess every romantic comedy has the same sense of historical inevitability but the long stretches of the film where they were 'broken-up' were p boring & their reconcilliations were unearned & unfeeling. even king's decision to first begin therapy was just like 'this record is sorta tedious wonder what i sound like when i stutter'

stuff i liked:

- prissy nerd kid of rush's disdain every time rush opened his mouth
- battletoad playing churchill
- fams dogs
- est the bad prince by having him fly in late in an aeroplane

Kept waiting for the scene where Rush and Firth, dressed in matching white sports coats, step off an escalator into a casino.

Timothy Spall is Churchill, yah

- fams dogs

ya dope lil doggies imo

kinda agree w/lamp, but many of the struggles-with-stuttering scenes were good i thought... i always feel Real Bad for stutterers

annoying thing: did the movie seem underlit to anyone? i'm almost positive the theater i saw it in was using a dimmed projector bulb but im curious what it looked like for other people.

I enjoyed it and even teared up a bit at the end, probably because I am getting older and softer. Total bourgeois Oscar porn.

I watched it on a DLed screener, looked fine to me.

thought this movie was pretty bad and the audience i saw it with laughed at every corny joke they told

there were a couple of really good scenes btw the two of them particularly when rush was goading king tryna break through the stiff aristo formality & proding his inner rage that hinted @ what a good movie this coulda been. but except for the one tender scene where king goes to see him after his father has died & rush is sorta half working half consoling him there wasnt much payoff to the relaish imo

i mean if your movies central drama is over a man's ability to clearly read aloud mb focus more on the most interesting relationship in the movie, rather than on a bunch of boring history facts

also the speeches where the characters wld concisely outline their motivations were really corny

Historical facts are rarely boring -- filmmakers often are.

it's no INCEPTION

Both films had a significant lack of subtlety. I really only wanted subtlety from one of them tho.

there was no way you could possibly go into this not knowing exactly what you were going to get. it was ok. i like firth so

i had no idea what it was about when i went in to see it. i just heard it was getting some buzz and it was the only adult-person thing showing at the time

i meant more along the lines of aggressively middlebrow miramax oscarbait

http://i.imgur.com/UrKSC.gif

I'd ok with CF, just prancing around the room, cussing.
and tits.

I loved it, great story and thought it looked fantastic. The fog and the huge tattered wall in Logue's consulting room were such a pleasure to watch on the big screen. Only bits that jarred were the historical-context expository speeches, because most of those people seemed too self-obsessed to be motivated like that; and Churchill being so hammy and significant, because I don't think he'd've been such a prominent figure until much later. Britain up 'til we started winning is so much my thing though, I was welling up more than once.

We were listening to the actual king's speech last night too and woah, can you ever hear what a struggle it was to get through it.

"..and tits" made me proper laugh out loud. I liked the film a lot. Agree it is total Oscar-bait, and not sure I liked the Queen Mum being written as sassy witty banter-queen, but overall it looked v. grimy London vs posh reality, and Firth and Rush were excellent.

All the English actors in the world though, and the best they could find for bad caddish prince was Mike from Neighbours though? Really? Could have been worse, it could have been Hugh Grant, I guess.

Posh royalty, not posh reality. I don't live in a palace or anything.

and Churchill being so hammy and significant, because I don't think he'd've been such a prominent figure until much later

he was quite prominent, but... he was actually on the bad prince's side lol

i thought pearce was one of the best things about it

but then i think casting hugh grant would have been funny meta-casting so

Pearce was fine, except it was hard to believe he was supposed to be the older of the two.

Oh, I thought he was good, but I sort of just think "Mike from Neighbours" whenever I see him, and "you are Australian putting on a caddish posh voice" - which I will concede he did very well. I realise this is much more my fault than his.

There was a newspaper article praising it for being mostly accurate and/or a fair balance of 'reality' i.e. what really happened..

Except for, as they said:

1) Rush's character was not as 'indeferent' to the King as the film made out
2) Churchill was anti forcing Ed8 to abdicate
3) The final declaration of war was not greeted with cheering and congratulations and a balcony scene at Buck house with the crowd cheering and waving flags. Which was the only scene where I was thinking "FUCK OFF THAT NEVER HAPPENED YOU CAN'T TELL ME IT DID!!!"

Like I'm ever gonna watch this

It's like that Helen Mirren film. You will end up watching it.

frankly, there are hundreds of films I want to see that I'll probably never get round to.

Altho doesn't The Queen offer some vague critique of the institution of monarchy rather than just cuddlifying it and normalising it? Frankly if I wanna watch something about how great some cunt in a crown is, it better be set in Ruritania.

Frankly.

'the queen' is good imo, better than 'the king's speech', which i didn't hate, but im still thinking on

i wouldn't say 'the queen' is that critical though; basically the irl queen is no more helen mirren than the queen mum was helena bonham carter

No, the eventual outcome is people going "ahhh she's lovely after all"

A lot of people were going "lol Tony Blair gets DEALT" but actually, it couldn't have been more positive towards him if he'd written it himself.

do like watching Geoffrey Rush but he's not enough to get me over this hump. also feel this is gonna get mentioned by my disability rights friends down the line, but again, biopics are not my bag at the best of times. what wd you say are its virtues?

more i think about it the less i like it

basically it's like bridget jones, where firth is firth and the british people is bridget jones

British People less eye candy than Podgy Zellwegger tbh

Virtues are pleb-zinging HB-C, king-zinging Geoffrey Rush, and that's about it. Also corgis.

The Queen was really boring. There is nothing as terrible at "oh look, a stag, I must bond with my people now" in The King's Speech.

i LOVED this. I was expecting shitty uplifting patriotic tosh. In reality it was like an hour of 'our friends the nazi' references, the Firth never really learning to speak properly, quite obviously showing that he was only in charge because his other two brothers were so fucked that he was the least-worst choice. Hell, even for the uplifting end moment all his feedback (even from his kid, cant remember which one) is "eh you cocked it up but i dont think anyone will notice". And the swearing is terrific, "fornication?" had me rolling.

Blimey, does every 'Brit' film have a lol swearing bit?

Or am I just thinking of 4Wed&Fun too much?

I also loved the look of it, all the thrown in graphic design elements etc.

Yeh, the look was great, loved the London fog.

The film goes to great lengths to make this about some dude with a speech impediment having to talk on the radio rather than CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS - all the shots of CF wedged into the corner of the screen while the background looms over him. Even with the whole E8 thing it was portrayed more as how it affects him, rather than how it affects the monarchy.

As much as the finale was criticised for being too oscar-baity (it is) he manages to not become a hero. He's as much a failure at the end as he is at the start, but he'll just about get by.

Yeah it is terrific in that you come away going 'well he's not as bad as the one imbred to a literal epilectic death and the one who is one of many people incl. parts of the nazi party shagging this woman who has him wrapped around his finger' as opposed to 'yay the amazing king lets sing rule britannia'

this film was mad boring.

actual footage of him rocking on his heels and struggling with his r's at ~3:00 here: http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=50494

Altho doesn't The Queen offer some vague critique of the institution of monarchy rather than just cuddlifying it and normalising it? Frankly if I wanna watch something about how great some cunt in a crown is, it better be set in Ruritania.

― Y Kant Torres Red (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 2, 2011 10:02 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

He's a normal guy with normal inadequacies and failings in a crown though, that's the point. And that is also a vague critique of the monarchy in itself, both in the sense of 'this is the guy appointed by God to rule us?', and in the sense of feeling sorry that he's been put under such enormous pressure by being forced into the role.

As much as the finale was criticised for being too oscar-baity (it is) he manages to not become a hero. He's as much a failure at the end as he is at the start, but he'll just about get by.

― 전승 Complete Victory (in Battle) (NotEnough), Wednesday, February 2, 2011 8:00 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm - this is exactly what i liked about it

I care little about historical accuracy, but when the film whitewashes the British royal family's complicity in the events after 1935 I object to the sentimental conclusion, to say nothing about how pedestrian the film looks and how unsurprising Firth, Bonham Carter, and Rush's performances are.

maybe facile to say but this reminded me a lot of billy elliott -- i knew it was lying to me the whole time but i enjoyed myself

You and your wife need to do more movie reviews immediately.

Yeah, what's with the King of England, can't he speak proper friggin' English or what?

I nominate Tom D. for last monarch of the UK. (In that I presume your first and last act as monarch would be to abolish the monarchy and turn Buckingham into a car boot sale zone.)

I'd put myself up against the wall and shoot myself

please

Seems rather extreme.

What exactly is your problem DG?

^^^ohoh internet persona failure

Mortally wounded here

america has car boot sales?

We call them 'swap meets' here in our local barbarous tongue.

oh is THAT what a Swap Meet is....

I thought it was some sort of Barter market.

You and your wife need to do more movie reviews immediately.

I always tease her about this; in Mexico the movie theaters are so much better than they are here, for about the same price (or less!) you get recliners, your own table, a much more well-maintained theater, and instead of previews you get to chill out and eat reasonably priced food while listening to stuff like Underworld and The Orb. As a result she falls asleep 15-20 minutes into every movie; I thought it would be awesome if she did a review column where she just reviews the first 15 minutes of every movie.

She woke up at the end and was wondering if Lionel and Albert were going to make out.

Rule 34 is not to be tempted...but I have been waiting to see if the usual group of slash fangirls take up this movie.

ha, and The Queen Mum walks in and goes oh no not AGAIN!!

then gets it on w/monster of glamis

I would rather have thought the Queen Mum walks in and feels a strange compulsion to touch herself.

I have no desire for another entity on this planet
When I cogitate on your person
I apply pressure to my corpus

moderately interesting response by stephen 'the queen' frears to a question from popular news blog gawker.com:

Let's talk this year's Oscars. Have you seen The King's Speech, which, like the Queen is about a British royal?

What else?

frears was lined up to do 'the damned united' before fish-eye hooper jumped on

The rumour doing the rounds at the recent Berlin film festival was that Weinstein is plotting a sequel to The King's Speech called The Windsors at War. Harvey and his cohorts are keeping mum about that right now as they focus on this year's movies, which include Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in the Oscar hopeful My Week With Marilyn.

ho joy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/01/the-kings-speech-oscars-independent-financing

http://i.imgur.com/sXDGK.jpg

worst poster ever
good lord

that's so ridiculous....nobody under 21 is going to want to see this.

Maybe "family event" is code for "naptime guarantee"

saw this a couple weeks ago. firth/rush were both v good, but couldn't shake the feeling that this was a period-piece bad news bears about talking good

Is that really the picture? Are they cashing in on presence of "that precocious kid from Outnumbered" even though she's barely in it?

that's so ridiculous....nobody under 21 is going to want to see this.

― frogbs, Wednesday, March 30, 2011 9:23 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

man, way to overlook the target market miramax!

i took my teenage sister and her friends to see this movie, since they couldn't get in by themselves, and they all loved it. however i think a big part of why they loved it WAS the cursing, so.

to them i think the movie functioned as sort of a "masterpiece theater-lite" -- they've all watched nu-doctor who and a few of the BBC jane austen adaptations, for example, so this ended up hitting some of those same buttons: anglophile-friendly, simplistic morality, likable characters, awesome clothes and top hots, etc.

hats, rather, although some of them were already swooning over colin firth so i guess "hots" applies

I was kinda hoping this movie would inspire a Top Hat revival.

top hots, etc.

they watched The King's Breach instead

The King's Peach

Post-Oscar web ad I saw yesterday: "Some movies you see, some movies you FEEL." Bleurgh.

have thought about this a lot and now hate it. i didn't want to. hating blatant oscarbait movies is pretty boring.

― history mayne, Friday, February 4, 2011 12:06 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark

OTM

Wait a sec, this was rated R at first? Does the rating guild even watch the movies or do they just do a "fuck" count?

That's actually literally what they do. There's a set number of 'fucks' they allow before slapping an R on the movie.

haven't seen it yet but this david mitchell article is great:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/02/david-mitchell-stammering-kings-speech/

"Some movies you see, some movies you FEEL."

And all movies about the British royals you feel in your bowels.

but Brits are constipated, right? Years of repression, poor dental hygiene, and tea.

This 'poor dental hygiene' thing, where did it begin? I mean I'm not gainsaying it, I just think it's an odd characteristic to use to define this country.

Poor dental hygiene is a consequence of living in a communist society.

klata, it's a scurvy thing

i mean, i don't know, it may have been true prior to the founding of the NHS. also i get the feeling the american upper middle classes place way, way too high a value on aesthetic dental work. i don't know that either, though.

morbius has the right attitude to movies about british royals, fyi

I saw this movie with my wife. We are old folks. Old.

For my part, I thought it was perfectly lovely that Helena Bonham Carter finally got the chance to play the Queen Mum, and to be approachable and charming and all those endearing traits. The Corgis were another lovely touch. Colin Firth knew how to lift his chin at all the right moments. And I could almost believe Geoffrey Rush was an Aussie, if I closed one of my ears and was momentarily distracted.

I left that theater feeling proud to speak the King's English and I've been brushing up on it, so I can do it more often!

Geoffrey Rush is an Aussie, isn't he?

yep

haha yeah

Yup.