A Story For Humanity: why The King's Speech has this actor's Oscar vote

Rating: 10/10 (21 January 2011)

I know The Social Network is likely to win the Oscar for best picture, but my best picture vote is for The King's Speech. It's not as culturally relevant at this point, but there is certainly something to be said about the film. It grips (and holds on tightly) despite a very mundane subject matter. Yet, TKS's truest strength is in the beautiful humanness. Here is Bertie: a poorly spoken, shy, angry man who doesn't want power, but his country desperately needs him. That alone could cause the film could lose itself in all of the political/power comparisons but it decides instead to simply focus on this crippling defect. To make it front and center, to humanize it, to demand that we feel it as if it is our own, and bear this man's burdens with him...and, finally, celebrate his triumph with him. That's a journey that I would wager many a filmmaker could not so brilliantly see to completion given the topic at hand. Oh yes, this film is something special. It showed the best of us and the worst of us-how any brave, ordinary soul can overcome a multitude of inner and outer demons and be the perfect remedy for the biggest problems.