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so lemme get this straight: a tedious, predictable little art film about a privileged, unsympathetic, neurotic anachronism from a bygone era whose big climactic accomplishment is managing to torturously string together a few lines in front of a microphone as the music swells and everybody reacts like his dimwitted inbred ass just singlehandedly won the goddam war or something stole the oscar from the infinitely superior the social network because . . . why?because passing over the american TV hack for the guys with accents proves how classy and sophisticated the academy and its members are, i suppose.
3 comments:
I was also underwhelmed by The King's Speech but it was still better than The Social Network.
TKS was a good movie about a man who, thrust into a job he never wanted, did the best he could. Yes, it butchered history somewhat (Churchill was a defender of the divorce and not much of a fan of the new king) but it was a decent movie. It was a decent movie about decent people---which did not make it Oscar material, but which made it a movie I wouldn't mind seeing again.
TSN, by contrast, was chockablock of unlikable characters behaving badly. It's possible to make a movie with no really nice characters that's fun to watch (like Clue or even The Lion in Winter) so long as the characters have the self-awareness to know that they're not good people. TSN was a cinematic root canal precisely because these unlikable fools were all annoyingly convinced of their own virtue, which justified (to them if not the audience) their atrocious behavior. From what I know, TSN played as loosely with history as TKS, but TSN wasn't a particularly good movie.
Since I did not see "The King's Speech," I cannot comment upon it with any authority. I will say that the storyline did not seem to be something I would want to see, so perhaps I was self-selecting. If, like you, I watched it out of some sense of obligation or the opinions of others I would probably have the same reaction as you did.
Instead of comparing "The King's Speech" to just "The Social Network," I prefer to look at it this way: There were approximately 400 films released last year and this was the best one of them all? Doubt it.
But, as everyone should know, the Oscar was not for best picture, but best picture according to 4000 or so folks who bothered to vote and are members of motion picture trade group.
hubbard: obviously we evaluate movies on different terms, you and i--me, i'll take a sharp, well-scripted movie about interesting bad people over a predictable attempt at glorifying mediocre good people any day of the week.
noblesavage: i love ya, but sometimes you're too literal for your (and my) own good.
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