
Politics Schmolitics, Being a Lady is Hard!
WOOF, what a dog of an assignment. I try to go into movies with an open mind, but let’s be honest, that was impossible here. The Iron Lady. I felt stupid just saying the title. Try it. Go to your local theater and tell the cashier, “I’m here to see The Iron Lady.” You’ll feel like an asshole, I promise. It sounds like a torture device, and it was.
Basically, I expected a cut-rate The King’s Speech, which was already the same boring biopic we’ve all seen umpteen times before. A COURAGEOUS OUTSIDER AND BLAH BLAH BLAH UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP WAR SPEECH THE END.
Imagine my surprise when I found that it wasn’t a biopic about Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister at all, but rather a biopic about Margaret Thatcher: Senile Old Lady, grieving over her husband (Jim Broadbent) who died eight years ago. You know that shitty flashback structure they use in every biopic where the decrepit old protagonist stares wistfully at a picture of himself on a horse before it flashes back and turns into a period piece? Well imagine if that pointless flashback justification wasn’t just five minutes at the beginning and end of the movie, but A RECURRING THEME THAT TAKES UP HALF THE RUNNING TIME. Hate boring, conventional political biopics? Well hey, here’s that, intercut with 40 minutes of an old lady hallucinating conversations with her dead husband about tea! MY GOD, IT’S ALL WORTH IT TO HEAR MERYL STREEP DO AN ACCENT!
Read the rest of this entry »