The King's Speech

Director: Tom Hooper
Year Released: 2010
Rating: 2.0

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, and bait for Oscar's grace always plays the same. George VI (Colin Firth) of England has a real problem: he has a horrendous stutter (oh, cruel parenting!) and struggles with speaking to his people via that new contraption, the radio (oh, cruel technology!), so his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) finds him a 'speech therapist' (Geoffrey Rush) to help fix his tongue. It's a dressed up, drawn out buddy movie, and not terribly spirited: Firth laboriously stumbles over his consonants and Rush's 'enry 'iggins (of Australia!) counsels and consoles him. The two leads are fine and act their way to some kind of workable rapport, but the script is achingly dry and mechanical. Off-handed question: if listening to music helped ol' George speak, why didn't he just listen to some Mozart when delivering all of his addresses?