Heads up, Harvey! Incoming fire at 10 o'clock! Don't let the Academy get anywhere near this hot potato: A writer at Big Hollywood has finally said what needed to be said about the vexed stutterer whose dramatic, heart-wrenching travails have touched the hearts of awards voters everywhere: Who the hell feels sorry for the King of England?
Take it away, Ned Rice:
My main problem with The King's Speech is that the character we're supposed to identify with, the down-trodden-schmuck-who-can't-catch-a-break-but-we-root-for-him-anyway-because-for-all-his-faults-he's-got-a-heart-of-gold just happens to be...THE KING OF ENGLAND! That's right: in order to enjoy this film I'm supposed to feel sympathy for a man who, almost by definition, is an unsympathetic character. Like a Frank Capra film about the riches-to-mega-riches life of Donald Trump, this movie simply doesn't make any sense to me despite fine performances by Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter.
I had the same problem with The Queen, which, you'll recall, was about the trials and tribulations of a woman- oh, let's call her THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND!--whose big life crisis was being criticized for not grieving enough after the death of Princess Diana. Well, ain't life a bitch? I'll bet you after those nasty British tabloids had their say about her Queen Elizabeth cried all the way home to her...ENORMOUS CASTLE. [...] Call me heartless, but I just can't feel sorry for anyone who has their own moat.
My antipathy towards the royalty genre in movies goes beyond the absurdity of being asked to identify with bejeweled billionaires seated on solid gold chairs. I frankly find it appalling, in this progressive, politically correct, anti-Establishment age, that supposedly civilized people like us continue to tolerate, and even celebrate, royalty. Slavery, as we're reminded by the mainstream media on almost a daily basis, was a terrible, evil institution. So was Nazism. So was, and is, communism. So, I would argue, was disco. But you know what was a really, really bad institution? Royalty, the notion that God considered some men more valuable than others, that one's class is an unchangeable accident of birth, and that the lower class should be, in effect, the slaves and property of the nobility. Does anybody not grasp the evil of this? Who could not be enraged by the fact that by law one man should bow down before another simply because the two men's ancestries were different- and that refusing to do so could cost the commoner his life?
Scott Rudin and Team TSN couldn't have said it better themselves! Not that Mark Zuckerberg is much more sympathetic, I guess. What about borderline schizophrenic bisexual prima ballerinas? Bingo.
ยท Off With the Heads of Hollywood's Misguided 'Royalty Genre' [Big Hollywood]