The King's Speech in 300 Words or Less

.

I keep vacillating between the words "mediocre" and "adequate." Mediquate? I don't so much get the praise it's getting - besides some truly gorgeous Mise-en-scène the film's pretty middle-of-the-road. I loved Colin Firth in A Single Man but found him hampered with an overwrought symbol of a character here and led far down the path unto hamminess on occasion. (And if you're performance is being called hammy when you star in a movie opposite Geoffrey Rush then you know something's off.) And poor wonderful Helena Bonham Carter just had nothing to do.


But back to that Mise-en-scène - in a movie I liked more I'd post a couple dozen screen-caps from it and holler for y'all to glare at the loveliness, so it does have that going for it. The off-center placement of a single character against a backdrop of fetishistically stylized wallpaper hit my happy place every time...


Oh how I love that shit. And there's a scene shot in a park in the middle of the day where the sun's obscured by smoke that's strange and eye-poppingly beautiful.


And I'd say the entire center of the film, where Guy Pearce struts in with a distractingly perfect haircut and throws off Firth's balance, is very strong.


So it's not that I hated the movie - there were just entire passages so ham-fisted I felt my eyeballs struggling against their sockets, wanting to roll right out of the room. But hey, the audience seemed to be lapping it up. Of course these were MoMA patrons that knew The Brothers Weinstein were in the house and were probably gauging their coos and guffaws with how likely the volume would be to get them an invitation to Harvey's house in the Hamptons.

It just struck me as entirely... mediquate. That's all.
.