massimilianofoschi

Somewhat well-made but soulless, "The King's Speech" ticks all the boxes of the perfect Oscar-bait movie and, indeed, the Academy took the bait, awarding it four Oscars out of a whopping twelve nominations, overshadowing far more creative endeavours, such as The Social Network and Inception. The recipe is simple enough: decent acting, decent directing, and "important" story (by whatever criteria the Academy has that particular year) and Bob's your uncle. Bafflingly, however, the film isn't particularly well-made, even from a strictly technical standpoint: Colin Firth is certainly excellent, but Hooper's direction is weak, with some rather questionable stylistic choices. Characters are often inexplicably confined to the far-left or far-right of the screen, engendering a sense of confusion in the viewer.

As an aside, please let me use this space to complain about the MPAA's rating system. Briefly, there are five ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17. The first two are essentially reserved for kid's movies. PG-13 is the rating for movies featuring virtually no sexual content, little to no obscenity and bloodless violence; examples include Interstellar, Forrest Gump and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The NC-17 rating is reserved for very explicit films, like Blue is the Warmest Color, Last Tango in Paris and A Serbian Film. Everything else (i.e. Most films) is rated R. This puts films like Good Will Hunting and Little Miss Sunshine in the same category of Seven and The Silence of The Lambs. Even The King's Speech is rated R for obscenity, due to repeated uses of certain words in a single scene, which is really nothing more than a mere exercise to cure George VI's stutter. What this means is that a sixteen-year-old (sic!) would not be able to watch this film in a theatre (not that they would want to anyway, probably) without a parent or legal guardian, so as not to be "corrupted" by such obscenity. American puritanism never fails to amaze me.

I can already imagine, in my mind, the average self-important middle school teacher who has to discuss environmental issues in class and, instead of preparing a lesson, decides to show the class this short movie and invites the students to debate on how profound it supposedly is.

I wouldn't mind too much an obvious message and a relatively superficial degree of understanding of the world, if at least the plot devices used to convey it were vaguely original. Instead, we get a plot essentially recycled from the beginning of Douglas Adams's "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (even though I wouldn't be surprised if it had been done earlier).

Stylistically well-done, though.