The King's Speech (2009)

I resisted watching this film for the longest time. A period piece about a monarch's speech impediment? After I watched it, though, I agreed that it fully deserved the four Oscars it won, including Best Picture and Best Actor (by Colin Firth). What makes this film so interesting is the collision of the deeply personal, the explicitly political, and the necessarily technological. When his brother abdicates the throne to pursue an older divorced woman (gasp!), the younger "Bertie" reluctantly assumes the throne as King George VI, despite a horrible stutter. A renegade speech "therapist" named Lionel Logue, who became a close confidant of King George for the remainder of his life, helped George to give the speech of his life when England declared war on Hitler. A few years later the speech could have been pre-recorded, but at the time the state of technology required that it be made live to the British empire's fifty-eight subject nations around the world. For a BBC recording of the actual speech, click here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7918.shtml