Colin Firth won an Oscar playing Britain's King George VI in the 2010 historical drama The King's Speech. And Dame Helen Mirren won her Academy Award playing the current U.K. monarch Queen Elizabeth II back in 2006 for her role in The Queen. Now both are set to wear their crowns again in two separate projects.
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And now, from the brilliant (and perhaps insomniac) mind that brought you that supercut of Kickboxer featuring nothing but the kicking, wind down your week with The King's Speech — featuring nothing but the stuttering. Or as they call it in Oscar-history circles, "156 seconds of infirmity that earned Colin Firth an Academy Award for Best Actor." You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll squirm, etc. Happy Friday!
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He's played cops, a count, Houdini, a time traveler, a king, and even a drag queen, but in this week's Lockout, Guy Pearce treads new ground as an all-out action hero -- not that he necessarily sees things that way. "People used to say that about L.A. Confidential," he recalled to Movieline recently in Los Angeles. "They’d go, ‘Wow, so you’re an action hero!’ I’d be like, action hero? It’s a ‘50s film noir!" Even still, after 20+ years of acting, most recently in a string of acclaimed supporting turns (see: The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker, Animal Kingdom, Mildred Pierce), it's only now that Pearce is laying claim to the title, guns blazing.
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So did all that MPAA ratings nonsense and media outcry pay off for Bully? What do you think? Lee Hirsch's film achieved the year's best documentary opening to date with $115,000 on five screens in New York and Los Angeles — a $23,000-per-theater average that amounted to the best of the week by nearly $10,000 over The Hunger Games. But now that The Weinstein Company has to take its unrated baby out of the doc-friendly megamarkets and into the mainstream wilds, a new report suggests that Harvey Weinstein may be preparing to make the cuts required for a PG-13. Surprise!
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The King's Speech -- the cutest Best Picture winner about compelling speech patterns since Rain Man -- is rumored to be ticketed for Broadway in Fall 2012. Yep, real actors will be stuttering live, onstage, in an epic epiglottal drama for the ages. That should be adorable -- and family friendly -- but are you worried that other Best Picture nominees from 2010 are better suited for a stage adaptation? Good! Ahead, some better options.
Now that everyone's seen the opening six minute sequence, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is poised to empower its way to a box office comeback in its second week of release. Just kidding; April Fools came early this year! Oh, laughs. (Sadface, Sucker Punch.) There's plenty more where that came from as we head into this week's candy coated weekend forecast. Monday morning prediction: Cadbury eggs and jelly beans for everyone at Universal!
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Tom Hooper's Best Picture winner The King's Speech got its own XXX parody, but who could have anticipated such... quality?
The folks at Rotten Tomatoes have tabulated their annual Best of the Best list, inserting Tom Hooper's 2011 Best Picture winner The King's Speech into the annals of Oscar history. But comparing great films to other great films has always been something of an apples to oranges situation; how can you measure, say, The Godfather Part II against An American in Paris -- two very different films that occupy adjoining slots on the list and have the same Tomatometer ranking (98 percent)? With a carefully calculated algorithm, that's how! Still... why does The King's Speech not quite feel right sitting so high above other bona fide classics?
Yes, yes. The King's Speech will win, and no matter how hard we try to tell ourselves any other film has a chance in hell, its abiding safeness will triumph Sunday night. But I'd like to think the Academy will spread the love around -- a win for The Social Network here, a Natalie Portman winner's guffaw there, and some gold for Hailee Steinfeld. Hope she brings her blingitude for the big night.
Earlier today we were tickled by tales of Bob and Harvey Weinstein's genius early '80s sexifying shenanigans, but this afternoon brings allegations of shady accounting and legal chicanery lobbied by none other than former collaborator Michael Moore, who claims the Weinsteins deceived him out of millions in profits from his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Naturally, we wonder: What's this mean for the Oscar race?
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