Charting the similarities between 'Hyde Park on Hudson' and 'The King's Speech

Even the indie world can have copycats. The critical and, more importantly, box-office success of The King's Speech in 2010 has spawned at least one imitator: Hyde Park on Hudson. Keeping with the light, uplifting tone of The King's Speech, the project stars Bill Murray as FDR. The historical movie focuses on one weekend, during which the King of England made his first visit to America and stopped by FDR's country home, Hyde Park on Hudson.

The picture won't come out until December 7, but the trailer for the Focus release debuted yesterday. I took a look at the trailer and documented some of the similarities between the two films.

They both have King George. Americans will certainly love that in this picture, the King takes a back seat to FDR.

An outsider.  THe King's Speech had Geoffrey Rush as a speech teacher who treated the royals more casually than one might expect. Hyde Park has Laura Linney as FDR's distant cousin (and lover), who appears to do the opposite, giving a sense of reverence to the proceedings.

Gentle humor. Gentle romance. FDR tells the press not to take pictures of him and the King in their bathing suits. People think FDR and his cousin are having an affair and get caught spying out a window.

Candid moments with royals. "Can I call you Elizabeth?" A character says to the Queen, in what appears to be an uncomfortable breech of protocol.

War in the background. Same World War II, and right at the beginning of it too.

Rulers with disabilities. King George had a stutter. FDR can't walk.

Oscar bait.  The King's Speech won the four biggies: picture, director, actor, and screenplay. Bill Murray definitely wants a Best Actor statuette.

 

For all their similarities, and even because of them, I have Hyde Park on Hudson on my to-see list. Biopics are often sweeping, long, and drab, but The King's Speech showed that focusing on light-hearted historical snippets can create humanizing portraits of staid historical figures. The tourism industry in the Hudson Valley is already preparing for an upswing in visitors interested in checking out the area. I'll raise their bet.

'Ted' follows 'Beaver,' giving Hollywood a second stuffed animal movie

By Sarah Sluis

It's not unusual in Hollywood to see two films with similar ideas release within a year of each other. Scripts are passed around. People make pitches to multiple studios. Before you know it, someone who passed on a script sees it go into development�and worries they made the wrong decision. Quick! Let's make a movie about volcanoes (Dante's Peak/Volcano), animated insects (A Bug's Life/Antz), asteroids hitting the Earth (Armageddon/Deep Impact), or sea creatures (Shark Tale/Finding Nemo). And those are just the most egregious examples. Little bits of plot or characters or situations often appear in waves. It's one thing to riff on a successful part of a movie, but it's another thing to see studios developing a similar project concurrently. It feels a little bit like encroaching on someone else's intellectual property.

On Monday, it was announced that Universal is acquiring a hard-R comedy by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane called Ted, about a man and his teddy bear. This project sounds remarkably similar to a movie that just wrapped called The Beaver, which is about a man (Mel Gibson) who walks around with a beaver puppet on his hand that he treats like a living creature. The movie was at the top of the Black List of unproduced screenplays in 2008 (meaning everyone in Hollywood read it and liked it), and some time after pulled together its starry cast (Jodie Foster is directing and co-starring)

Some important differences: Ted will be a mixture of live action and CG, with MacFarlane voicing Ted. This means the audience will hear the voice of the stuffed animal, making it more real. As far as I know, the beaver in the other movie doesn't talk. Even if Ted the teddy bear is a delusion or an imaginary voice, the audience will have access to it and it will create a much different feel. A hard-R comedy is also quite different from a quieter black comedy with some drama in it, which is my impression of The Beaver.

Still, two movies about adults with stuffed animal companions? It's the kind of story idea that's so weird it takes a while to warm up to, but once you do, you kind of like it....and you're not the only one. While I hope it ends here, I will be on the lookout for the third stuffed animal-related project.

Will 3D technology be adopted like color, or like sound?

By Sarah Sluis

"3D is not like sound, but color," James Cameron recently pronounced. For those versed in film history, the statement is profound. If the 3D format is indeed like color, it could take decades for it to fully penetrate film production. It will first be used for event, fantasy, and animated films, before dramas, comedies, and Oscar contenders embrace the form. While the idea of 3D taking so long to become a default part of production seems like a strike against the format, it instead speaks to its longevity. 3D will not a passing gimmick, James Cameron is saying, but something that will contribute to a film's verisimilitude.

When sound was introduced, with The Jazz Singer, it took just a few years for all films to be produced using sound. Howard Hughes famously re-did much of his film Hell's Angels once it appeared that sound was essential for blockbuster success. Title cards, along with mouthed words, felt fake, while sound made everything real--the technology brought the form closer to the plays and vaudeville shows film so often emulated.

Color, on the other, hand, was viewed as unrealistic, expensive, or suitable only for event films. The saturated colors in The Wizard of Oz, for example, are used in the fantasy segment, not the Kansas part. While that film used the newer three-strip Technicolor process, its technological predecessors were clearly fake and gimmicky, much like 1950s 3D technology. Viewers were skeptical. In the early days of the nickelodeons, select frames (like a fire, or a

woman's dress) would be hand-painted for effect. However meticulously

done, they have an unfortunate pulsating effect

due to the difficulty of consistently drawing within the lines. The

two-tone Technicolor process that succeeded it likewise has an

inaccuracy that I find charming but contemporaneous audiences found

too stylized and unreal. Three-strip Technicolor was the breakthrough that finally made color look real, just like Real D and its ilk, but it still took decades before an average film would use the process.

As with color, Hollywood will probably begin to give out awards to its 3D films, but it won't be a condition for success. Gone with the Wind (1939) won the Best Picture Oscar, but black & white films continued to win the top prize through the 1960s (The Apartment, anyone?). As for sound? Wings, a wartime romance blockbuster, won the first Best Picture Oscar, and the only one for a silent film. If Cameron's argument is correct, we shouldn't worry that a minority of films are being made in 3D, but trust that the animated, concert, and action films using the format are setting the tone. Someday, awards biopics like Milk and indie dramedies like Squid & The Whale will be made in 3D.

Films like Up, which use 3D as an accent, not for in-your-face gimmicks, speak to the future of the format. Pixar's film is the frontrunner for Best Animated Feature at the 2010 Oscars. If Cameron's right, his 3D adventure Avatar may be joining it at the podium, slowly ushering in an age where 3D isn't a selling point, but a prerequisite.