We caught up last night with The King’s Speech on DVD. Geoffrey Rush is one of those actors, like Gene Hackman, who makes anything he appears in watchable, and this was no exception, though like The Artist it wasn’t the weightiest of Oscar winners. Movies about modern royalty can all too easily seem like the ultimate case of First World Problems.
But perhaps that’s unfair: public speaking is purportedly most people’s number one fear, beating even death, which could make this the first public-speaking horror movie. And it has a great ratings warning on the DVD box: “contains strong language in a speech therapy context”. So specific! You can imagine them at the ratings board saying, “At last we can use that speech therapy warning.” Or that they have a whole book of them: “pea-souper scenes may induce psychosomatic asthma”; “extreme forelock-tugging”; “contains scenes of abdication and death”.
10 March 2012