Beautiful Helena Bonham Carter from a King’s Speech Promo.
I was watching this week’s Sunday Morning and they had a feature of handwriting. Was it an antiquated activity? they asked.
I asked the same thing, but back in 1998. I wrote an essay “The Handwriting on the Wall” for a magazine. My son was in the third grade and getting poor marks for his handwriting. I wondered if that mattered, anymore.
Technology has advanced some since 1998, well advanced SOME, and an expert said the jury is in: kids learn to compose English faster on keyboards. There’s still a place for handwriting, he said, the old technology of pencil on paper.
Weird. Oh, during the show they played a long promo for the King’s Speech, showcasing the ‘acting royalty’ in the British movie, Derek Jacobi and Claire Bloom,etc.
(I must say, I, Claudius and Brideshead Revisited are two of my very top television experiences.)
I also saw a live (or close to live) interview with Colin Firth on NBC. He seemed very happy about the Academy Award nominations for his film and he never seems happy in interviews.
I hope all the hoopla doesn’t make him too big for his wet clingy britches. (I had to get that in.)
(Now he’s been in other highly-praised Best Pictures of the Year, Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient, but he had been one of the players and here he’s the title character.)
Meredith Vieira was fawing all over him. I don’t know how these celebrities do it. I once spent two days being treated like a queen at a conference where I was a prominent speaker and it went to my head. I didn’t like it, actually. Seemed unnatural. (Reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Liz Lemon has the handsome boyfriend, the guy from Madmen, John Hamm is it?)
When I worked in TV I met many celebrities, minor and major, on a professional level, and frankly, they all seemed, how can I say, a little fragile. Scared.
Or I could sense they were scared, behind whatever facade they were presenting.
Colin Firth was described as ‘delicate’ (I think) by the Director of the English Patient, Anthony Minghella.
And once I met a world famous celebrity, an icon, in odd circumstances. He had walked into a telethon and no one had been there to greet him. (Everything was so disorganized.)
So I tried to smooth out things. But the famous man was very calm about it: he didn’t mind being treated like a nobody, for half an hour anyway. His manager was a little frazzled, but even he was nice, considering how unready everyone was for him. He told me. “It’s always like this in TV.”
Anyway, I had mentioned to my husband that I thought the Social Network was ‘sexist’ and he had replied “What are you talking about?” But I now see that I am not the only one who thought this: it’s a major criticism of the film. Aaron Sorkin has had to spend time defending his script to the media.
Film is a male medium. That’s not news. And deconstructing ‘sexism’ in one film (as opposed to the entire industry) is a complex business. I personally didn’t buy Sorkin’s excuse, that he was portraying an angry and sexist environment and really had no choice. Where was the omnicient eye? Harvard women, all high-achieving women, deserved better.
Even the female characters in the King’s Speech are kind of cliche, good wife and whore. If you think about it. But then this Good Wife wore the pants in the relationship, as Helena Bonham Carter said in a BBC interview. ( If you deconstruct the story-line of the abdication, it’s about two women, really. The men are sort of pawns. But the King’s Speech movie is really about ‘an ordinary man’ overcoming a fear. I think actors like playing aristocrats because aristocrats are ‘actors’ – ordinary people playing extraordinary ones.)
But then there is the Kids are All Right. And the Black Swan. Films about women. Oh well, oh well. And I haven’t seen True Grit, but the critic in salon.com said it is a ‘chick flick.’
So now I must see it.
