Chris Sullivan’s journey through the London Film Festival and the fringes of nightlife in the city’s West End end continues with a trip to see the King, a knight, a dame and a lady with a peculiar secret.
Another early start and another reward in the form of The King’s Speech, directed by Tom ‘Damned United’ Hopper and starring the great Colin Firth as K-K-King George VI, who ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom after his rather effeminate brother, Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), abdicated in order to marry the hatchet-faced Wallis Simpson.
The problem was old Georgie (Bertie to his pals) stammers like an 80s hip hop tune and can’t even order his butler to wipe his bottom let alone command the attention of a large crowd.
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And that’s where the film begins as Bertie, still the Duke of York at this juncture, attempts to address the masses at Wembley and fails miserably, almost causing his Mrs (later to be the Queen Mother – beautifully rendered by Helen Bonham Carter) to shed a tear.
She finds a speech therapist – the Aussie Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) – who refuses to address the future King as ‘sir’ (“My Castle, my rules,” he says). Logue soon gets to the bottom of the stutter: Bertie was a neglected child.
But the tension mounts as Bertie suddenly gains the throne in 1936 and – in the face of the considerbale oratorical talents of Hitler and Mussolini he has no chance, unless he can lay his hands on a good drum machine.
The picture’s excellence lies in the captivating central performances of Firth and Rush. ”I’ve noticed that maybe because of my age the roles I am offered a getting more complex and the stories are getting more interesting for me,” Firth told me. “I’m now 50 and things are getting better for me.”
I backed Firth to win the Oscar last year for a Single Man and he narrowly lost to Jeff Bridges but if he doesn’t get the statue for this I’ll… I’ll… I’ll… never mind. The film was chosen for the LFF American Express gala and Firth and Bonham Carter hit the red carpet and looked the bollocks.
She in a tartan Dame Viv Westwood bodiced dress with a black silk full skirt, he in a simple black suit were joined by Sir Ben Kingsley, Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Bonham Carter’s hubbie Tim Burton and almost every movie big wig in the land.
I had to miss the after party because I was DJing at another bash at Maison De Chien in West London. I followed a burlesque dancer who peed in a glass on stage, a gynaecologist who sang about defecating in a bidet (to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Beat It) and a lady who produced a chicken’s egg out of her – well, I’ll leave it to your imagination. I started my set with Out Come The Freaks by Was Not Was…
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