As the newly sanitized, PG-13 version of "The King's Speech" hits the theaters, its 12 F-words reduced to an MPAA-approved single F-word and 11 S-words, Richard Corliss transcribes the offending scene and prints it under the heading "The Naughty Bits." His celebration of those bits calls the passage "the film's signal moment of triumph" and compares King George's VI's profanity to Eliza Doolittle's mastering of "the rain in Spain" in "My Fair Lady": "by uttering the ultimate vulgarism, Bertie begins to understand that a volley of obscenity can blow away the cobwebs of euphemism and misdirection that have accumulated around the royal rhetoric he's been schooled in." (Time)
By the way, that PG-13 rating may have expanded the film's potential audience, but it didn't result in higher grosses. Amy Kaufman runs the numbers: the PG-13-rated version grossed $1.2 million in theaters last weekend, while the original, R-rated version made $1.6 million (in just about the same number of theaters) the previous weekend. So no, it doesn't appear as if lots of 14-year-olds were dying to see the Best Picture winner, though at this point the film has done so well at the boxoffice that it hardly matters. (Company Town)
With HBO premiering a movie about his life and career, producer Jerry Weintraub offers "five failsafe producing tips" to S.T. Van Airsdale, beginning with one that I don't think actually qualifies as a producing tip: "Go into another business." But if you ignore that one, his actual tips begin with "Never hear 'no,'" and also include "listen to your audience," "slow down!" and "keep your talent grounded." In his case that talent included Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and George Clooney – so if Jerry could do it with those guys, it ought to be easy for all the other aspiring producers out there. (Movieline)
Did winning the Best Foreign-Language Film at the Oscars hurt "In a Better World" in the eyes of the critics? Anne Thompson suggests that it might have, using a passage from A.O. Scott's New York Times review as a case study: after all, he goes out of his way to mention that Oscar win before he slams it for "cheap manipulation." She also figures that reviews like that one (and another pan in New York magazine, though to be fair it was counterbalanced by raves in the L.A. Times and EW) may well have hurt the film at the boxoffice, where she thinks that its $35,000 take (less, she points out, than the 2009 Oscar winner "Departures") suggests that distributors might be better off to open foreign-language candidates before the awards rather than after. (Thompson on Hollywood)
