February 26, 2011
The King's Speech Revisited
Christopher Hitchens in Slate:
Brush even a fingertip against the balloon of Hollywood ambition and prize-mania, and it can burst with gratifying speed, emitting huge gusts of narcissism and megalomania. Ever since I, and one or two others, published some criticisms of The King's Speech, there has been a lovely value-for-money response of outraged ego. Tinseltown reporters have e-mailed and telephoned me to report that Harvey Weinstein goes around saying that all who doubt the perfection of his latest offering are in sinister league with the makers of The Social Network. I had some difficulty in believing that this was really true, but it did cheer me up. Yet now the film's screenwriter, David Seidler, has given a foam-flecked interview to the Puffington Host, or whatever the hell it's called, in which he speaks darkly of a "smear campaign" against his baby, a campaign of which I constitute a "prong." So perhaps the termites of paranoia have been dining long and well on the Weinstein Co. cortex. A hitherto almost unpunctuated stream of praise and tribute is not enough—the chorus of adulation must be unanimous. This is what comes of immersing oneself in the cult of hereditary monarchy and of seeking to bask in its tawdry glare.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:06 PM | Permalink
Comments
This is just not a very good film, it ok as piece of filmed theater, but overlong and anticlimactic. I personally think the British Monarchy has played a significant role in establishing and preserving the British identity and the country's democratic system, but I don't think the Windsors make great cinema material. Edward VIII was a vain, nasty piece of work, and he had his brother, his niece and the rest of the establishment to thank for being remembered for the rest of his life as a romantic figure rather than the spoilt pro-Nazi, possible traitor that he was.
Posted by: aguy109 | Feb 27, 2011 10:00:38 AM
Hitchens: "A hitherto almost unpunctuated stream of praise and tribute is not enough—the chorus of adulation must be unanimous."
Oh, the irony, considering the source. Imagine, for a second, what Hitchens would try to do to anyone who said that the Iraq invasion was not justified, or even justifiable.
Right, he'd declare them a traitor, try to have them executed, and then, when that failed, he'd try to rip them a new one.
I really wish people would just ignore Hitchens, he's not that interesting either way.
Posted by: Foppe | Feb 27, 2011 10:16:10 AM
@Foppe - Right, I'm sure that Hitchens would "try to have them executed." You appear to know one thing about the man and that only crudely.
Posted by: Brandon | Feb 27, 2011 1:50:29 PM
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