Entertainment For Lively Minds
Go on then, convince me..
Posted by ian s on 13 February 2011 - 9:02pm.
The BAFTAs tonight may as well be retitled The King's Speech Awards Show, such is the foregone conclusive nature of the results but personally it's one of those films that no matter how many people tell me it's incredible, heart warming, uplifting, human etc has me looking at it and going;
'd'you know what? I'm not interested'
I had exactly the same blind spot for Slumdog Millionaire, I'm just not interested and can't see a point when I would be.
Is it just me? Am I wrong or do others suffer from this condition with otherwise acknowledged art?
Not hatred or even dislike just utter apathy
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Sure...
There are countless films that have been raved about (Avatar, Inception) that I have absolutely no interest in. We plough our own furrows.
Err, is it really foregone?
It might well turn out to be as foregone as England winning the last World Cup.
Slight difference.
Were England 55/1 on with the bookies to win the World Cup? Did most of the other teams not bother turning up because the knew it wasn't worth the waste of time? Was The World Cup going to be replayed in the USA a couple of weeks later with a chance of a different outcome?
I wasn't interested either..
..but my wife dragged me along and I really enjoyed it. Not being one of life's natural enthusiasts I actively enjoy the idea of not liking stuff, revel in it in fact. It probably means I've missed out on some wonderfully entertaining art, but it's also got me out of going to see Slumdog Millionaire. Swings and roundabouts..
I'm not interested either.
I'll watch it on telly. Got now against Mr Firth - he's a good actor and I loved A Single Man. Sadly I've been massively put off Helena BC since it was revealed she was a mate of Camerons.
As for Slumdog, I thought I'd wait until that came on telly too. When it was on I didn't bother watching it.
Overkill
The King's Speech has been hyped to the max, so it's gone into that area where people will say, 'oh, do shut UP!' Personally, I liked the film, but I can see that the relentless bigging-up will get on a lot of peoples' tits, and even if it wins, there be a nationwide exhalation of 'Meh'
Kings Speech
Took my 9 and 10 year old daughters to see it tonight. We all thought it was incredible and music was terrific. Great thing about it is that almost all of it was true with little artistic licence. For once the lovies have created something special....a special film that evokes the old spirit of Great Britain. We should have had the national anthem playing at the end as in the old days. Chap who played Churchill was a bit odd though.....not at all convincing....kept thinking of him in another movie where he supplied drugs, boys and girls to a rock singer.
As for Slum Dog Millionaire......what a load of garbage
Christopher Hichens doesn't agree
about it only having a little artistic license. He says it, "perpetrates a gross falsification of history."
http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/
Does him and his brother ever
say anything nice?
For all his faults..
..and there were many..Churchill was a truly great man.
Hitchens (and I hope he gets well soon) is a mardy spoilsport who doesn't even have the courage of his convictions.
Stutter doesn't melt
Don't the countless cinematic fairy stories about fictitious royal families - from Snow White to Tangled - make it rather unnecessary to make stuff up wholesale about the real ones?
Even leaving aside the brushing over of the Windsor brothers' keenness for appeasement (a nice obfuscatory way of saying "sucking up to the Nazis"), the central proposition of The King's Speech turns out to be a huge porky. If George VI managed to come over all firm of voice and steely of resolve over the radio, dripping with nation-uniting gravitas, it wasn't due to a combination of the professional and personal dedication of a colourful colonial and his own I-shall- go-to-the-ball willpower. No, the problem of his stammer was actually overcome by rather more ignoble, if equally effective, means: ordering the BBC, through Churchill, to dupe his subjects by editing all his stuttering out.
And we moan about Auto-Tune?
Mr V..
You've not started believing the stuff printed in The Mail, have you?
It's a well-known fact that his stammer was triggered by a group of gypsies putting their caravans on the lawn at Windsor Castle. And it got much worse when that new mosque was built. I believe his premature death was triggered by news of asylum-seekers.
Have never been interested in seeing
Titanic, something to do with knowing in advance how it all ends up is what usually puts me off.
If, by "knowing in advance how it all ends up", you mean...
... that the ship sinks, well yes, but James Cameron's screenplay is clever enough to frame the story in modern-day bookends in order to tell us something we probably didn't know about the sinking (that the boat broke in half first), and giving the story a "time-lock" (screenplay-speak) for the drama to unfold in.
I'm not a fan of the film, which is way too long, and the dialogue is consistently some of the most banal ever uttered in a major movie, but its dramatic structure is immaculate - if "the ship sinks" factor is really the sole reason you've avoided it, give it a try next time it's on TV, you might be surprised...
Give Titanic a try Harry,
The Captain steers the ship around the iceburg at the last minute and everyone cheers. Honest.
Isn't Eva Green
GORGEOUS!
Yes
a thousand times yes.
Oh aye.
Oh very, very aye.
Lots of ayes.
Lots.
So many I don't really want to think of it.
The King's Speech: very good film
That's it really. It's a well written, very well acted piece of work; coincidentally, it features two actors who have both achieved a fairly unusual feat of starting out as gorgeous totty, and slowly but surely become Bloody Good Actors. Colin Firth, obviously; and Helena Bonham Carter, who was so wooden in A Room With A View that I had to check the credits at the end to make sure her wires hadn't been digitally removed.
On the subject of her possibly being friends with our PM: so what? That doesn't in itself tell us anything about her. I recently discovered that Johann Hari, one of the journalists I most admire, as good friends with that queen of the solipsistic and the inane, Liz Jones. It doesn't change my view of him. Nowt so queer as folk...
You can't be interested in everything
Indeed, why should you be. Just cos everyone else likes something doesn't mean you should. Plough your own furrow and be glad of it.
The King's Speech
Was laugh out loud funny in places.
I was genuinely not expecting that, thinking it would be The Queen Mk 2. All very worthy, but a bit tedious.
The King's Speech is not. Lots of swearing and genuinely eccentric behaviour by the characters(real people) make this an intriguing choice for all the acclaim its getting.
Kings Speech
Undoubtedlyt plays fast and loose with the facts and is a little too 'well-constructed' but it's not a bad film at all. Bored senseless by 'Slumdog Millionaire' though.
For what it's worth,
I thought Slumdog Millionaire was a delight, from start to finish.
King's Speech
and Slumdog Millionaire - both throughly entertaining and moving experiences in the cinema for me. Both could be faulted for credibility or authenticity but like all things entertainment/arts-wise, a lot depends on your attitude. If you approach with a sceptical, arms folded, go on impress me state of mind, you might well not be won over. Seems silly to avoid stuff because everyone's going about it - you might just miss out on a really good thing.
Well, all in all,
I'd rather see a dialogue heavy film like The King's Speech than a special effects fest like Avatar any day of the week. It was a hugely entertaining film and I speak as a sort of wishy-washy republican if you really pin me down.
It doesn't really matter if liberties were taken with the truth. Any film that depends more on plot and character than CGI is all right by me.
It does matter a bit, though, surely
If the central premise is that particular specialty of British cinema - the feelgood story of great difficulties overcome - then do it as fiction, preferably about one of the, ooh, 13 million or so British families who had rather more pressing difficuties to overcome in the 1930s than the Windsor family did.
Made-up period films masquerading as historical truth distort our view of history, and a distorted view of history distorts the present and the future. Surely that does matter, since most people don't read history books but they do watch Oscar-nominated movies. And when even Tom Cruise with an eye-patch manages to play fast and lose with wartime events somewhat less than this film does, isn't that a bit, well, embarrassing for all concerned?
I imagine that the American submariners
who captured that vital Enigma machine were embarrassed too.
I have to agree with Archie regarding films that purport to represent the truth; conflate a few characters for purposes of brevity and expositional simplicity, maybe telescope the timeline to facilitate dramatic flow, but don't twist the plot so far out of shape that the whole thing no longer bears much resemblance to the historical record.
One of the reasons
King's Speech did so well at the BAFTA's is that it is a British movie. The voters seem to try and back British if at all possible. After all, if the BAFTA's were simply a mini Oscars every year it would be utterly pointless.