The King’s Speech

After another rubbish day which contained more grumpiness and a wild goose chase to find a colour printer, I decided to accompany Jaz, Alice and Tiffany to the cinema to see The King’s Speech.

Unless you have just escaped from being in a deep hole for several months you will know that said film see Colin Firth play King George VI (Bertie), a king who struggled with a speech impediment and how to sought the help of Lionel Logue, a speech therapist, played by Geoffrey Rush. It’s very rare that I go to see a film based on a true story as most over dramatize an event or a person’s life. The King’s Speech doesn’t do this. It’s a simple film and actually focuses on a lesser story of the history at the time: the speech impediment rather than Edward VIII forced to abdicate in order to marry the woman he loved or the impending war coming from Hitler’s Germany.

Colin Firth has received all sorts of awards for his role in this film and has been nominated as Best Male Actor at the Oscars. And he properly deserves it. His part is so much more than an important man who stammers (though he does that very well) as he successfully portrays shyness, anger, relief as well as a bunch of other emotions incredibly believably. Geoffrey Rush plays the part of the speech therapist really well too, providing most of the comic bits of the film (there’s quite a few actually which I was surprised about). It was also nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter play a normal character (Bertie’s Wife).

I swear half the cast of Harry Potter were in the film. Obviously there was Bellatrix Le Strange (Bonham-Carter) but there was also Wormtail (Timothy Spall as Churchill) and Dumbledore (Michael Gambon as Bertie’s father). Also popping up were the Master (Derek Jacobi), Karen from TV sitcom Outnumbered (I don’t actually know her name) and of course Geoffrey Rush is Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean. What a brilliant cast! (Though my Doctor Who brain couldn’t quite cope with the Master (Jacobi) reading out a prayer to the dead Kazran Sardick (Gambon)).

All in all, amazing. I doubted that a film about a speech impediment could be that good but I was wrong. The cast is all superb, it’s pretty much historically accurate, the scenery looks very Edwardian, the camera angles are perfect and it’s just brilliant. I genuinely can’t think of any improvement I would want from the film and I can’t see how anyone could fail to like it. Go see it.

Scarily I have a 9AM lecture for the first time. The earliest I’ve been up for weeks is 9AM and the thought of actually being somewhere by then is quite daunting. Bed it is then. After all, tomorrow could be the best day of my life. It probably won’t be, but it could be.