Has there been a more idiotic decision in recent cinema than Harvey Weinstein’s choice to re-release The King’s Speech as a PG-13 movie? I mean, surely The King’s Speech has been successful enough, winning Oscars galore and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Apparently not - now it must appeal to the kids.

And how is Harvey Scissorhands going to achieve this new rating? He’s going to achieve it by cutting out some of the swearing. Now I guess quite a few people could formulate an argument about foul language not being essential to any movie. Never mind that it provides authenticity and mirrors the way that people actually speak (have you ever tried to watch the cleaned-up version of Goodfellas on AMC - it’s fucking weird; especially when the swearing is censored but the bone-shattering violence is left intact). But here the language is also essential to the plot.

One key scene has Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the King’s speech therapist, proving that the King doesn’t stammer when he swears. The King then goes on to prove the point by swearing beautifully and fluently. It’s the first time in the film that Logue manages to make a dent in the King’s armour - it’s the first time that he begins to get to the core of him. So what justification can there be for altering this? Are they going to have the King say ‘Frick’ and ‘Poop’? That would be fucking ridiculous. And really, is making the film a PG-13 really going to make it any more money? It’s already made a bucketload of dosh on a very meagre budget; I don’t think that castrating it is going to attract floods of kids and teenagers. I think it’s done as well as it’s going to do.

So how do I feel about The King’s Speech winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards? Well, I feel far better now than when I hadn’t seen it. I was highly aggrieved that The Social Network didn’t win and was disappointed to see yet another film about someone overcoming adversity clearing up at the awards. But now that I’ve seen the film, I no longer have any animosity towards it. Yeah I still think that The Social Network got shafted, but The King’s Speech is a fine film.

One of my main fears at school and university was getting up in front of my class and speaking. I would literally worry about it for weeks beforehand and build the event up to colossal proportions in my mind. But I only had to speak to a few kids and a teacher. I didn’t have to get up in front of thousands. Plus I didn’t have a speech impediment. Sure my voice might have wavered as I spoke, but I didn’t have a stammer to contend with.

Another memory from school is having to listen to children with stammers perform presentations. It was always a painful experience. I’d try and be supportive but I have to admit that frustration would always creep into my mind - I’d often be thinking ‘just spit it out’ or ‘how much longer is this going to go on for?’. These aren’t particularly empathetic emotions, but they’re natural ones. So to have a King with a stammer, you’re taking this and blowing it up to a grand scale.

There’s a scene near the beginning where Prince Albert (Colin Firth), the future King, has to give a speech at the British Empire Exhibition. As you see him preparing, you can’t help but feel anxious on his behalf. You know that this is going to be a tortuous experience. And then there are all the people who offer their stupid advice - ‘make the microphone do the work’. Yeah, that’ll cure my stammer, numbnuts. But it’s the little details that help sell the terror. We’re told that the speech is going to be transmitted across the world and that when a little red light next to the microphone stops flashing, the Prince will be speaking live to the world. My sphincter tightened a little bit on his behalf when the blinking light finally turned into a solid red.

The disaster of this experience has the future King seeking help from the best doctors in England. None of them are worth a damn and they make the Prince do humiliating things like stuff marbles in his mouth. Plus they say that smoking is good for a stammer - apparently it relaxes the throat.

When the Prince and his wife end up at the door of Lionel Logue, it’s a completely different experience. His offices are almost falling apart and he doesn’t have any staff. He seems to run a ramshackle operation. But unlike the other therapists, Logue doesn’t offer crazy solutions. He tries to go deeper into the problem - he doesn’t want to just solve the mechanics.

A lot of the enjoyment of the film is watching the battle between Logue and the Prince. Angry and obstinate, the future King doesn’t want to get to the root of his problem; he just wants his affliction gone. But Logue knows that the best way to help the Prince’s problem is to treat more than the surface issue. Of course, this doesn’t always go down well. The Prince doubtlessly sees Logue as an inferior. He shouldn’t have to open himself up to him - it’s silly and undignified.

The efforts to ease the stammer sometimes resemble a battle. However, it’s a battle that’s difficult to win as the Prince’s insecurity often gets in the way. For a long time he refuses to put himself entirely in Logue’s hands. The difference in their social standing is perhaps an easy get-out clause for the King. When things get too painful or too personal he can bring the walls smashing down without lifting a finger.

The Prince illustrates this in a scene where Logue and Albert go for a walk. Logue insists that one day Albert could be King. Logue then makes the mistake of touching the Prince’s arm. Angered by this treasonous talk and this over-familiarity, not to mention the horrifying prospect of him being King, the Prince lashes out by mocking Logue’s acting aspirations and taking the piss out of his poor, working class, colonial origins. The way that the scene is filmed is quite marvelous. As the future King storms off you see Logue in the background, rooted to the spot. As the Prince walks, Logue gets smaller and smaller. His spirits are crushed and with just a few words he’s been reduced to a speck. Just when he thought he was getting close to the Prince, he’s put back in his place.

There are some things about the film that don’t work as well as they could have. King Edward (Guy Pearce) and Wallis Simpson are pretty one-dimensional. They’re shallow party fiends that don’t really seem to have a brain cell between them. It also feels that Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall) has been shoe-horned into the story because he’s a figure that everyone will recognise. Indeed, watching the film, it would be easy to miss the fact that he wasn’t the Prime Minister during the outbreak of World War Two. There has definitely been some simplification.

But simplification is often necessary in a biopic - there’s often too much detail to cram into a two hour film. The important thing is how good the core of the film is. And the core of The King’s Speech is definitely the friendship between the Prince and Logue.

There’s another great scene that occurs during the preparations for the coronation. The soon to be King confronts Logue with the fact that Logue is not a qualified doctor. Logue then points out that he never pretended to be - that the sign on his office lists him as Mister. He then points out all the soldiers that he treated for shell shock after the First World War. He speaks calmly and knowledgeably and with a complete lack of bullshit. He’s a man of experience and integrity - he’s the complete opposite of the Harvey Street quacks the King had dealt with previously. Logue will never lie or humiliate the King. He wants to meet the King on equal terms and help him solve his problem. It’s only near the end that that plea for equality is returned; that the men truly operate at the same level.

Watching this movie, you’d think the King’s first wartime speech was one of the most important events in World War Two. I say bullshit to that. If the King had stammered, little old England would have been fine. But such is the strength of the film, that the speech does indeed feel like a make or break situation. It feels like the fate of a nation is hanging on the King’s ability not to stammer. Again, like the beginning of the film, the tension is enormous.

I’d be lying if I said that the final speech wasn’t incredibly rousing. With anxious close-ups of the King and cutaways to civilians and troops, it feels like you’re walking a tightrope. If the King doesn’t stammer, we’ll have the strength to fight these Nazi bastards. If he does we’re probably going to capitulate. It’s a nonsense feeling but it’s still grimly effective. And when the King gets through the speech unscathed, it doesn’t matter that this event has been blown up into crazy proportions or that in reality the King had been speaking well since 1927 (with the help of Logue of course). You get swept up in the emotion of the piece. And of course, being an Englishman living abroad, I’m even more susceptible to the brand of patriotism contained in the film. I don’t believe in the monarchy but during this film I believed in the King.

You might as well just give up trying to see another decent Terminator film. It just isn’t going to happen now. With Rise of the Machines, Jonathan Mostow made a jokey parody of the first two films and now with Salvation McG has made Transformers. The straight-ahead, gritty, blue collar, white-knuckle thrills of the first two films have given way to tedious, humourless, colourless robot mash-ups. All the life has been drained from the series.

The film opens with a prisoner on death row called Marcus Wright talking to a bald Helena Bonham Carter. She has terminal cancer and wants him to donate his body to science after his execution. He resists a little but eventually gives in. And then if you haven’t already figured out that he’s going to become a robot when Helena gives him a form with a Cyberdyne Systems logo on it (a name familiar to fans of the franchise), it’s really rammed down your throat with a gratuitous crucifixion pose – when he’s given a lethal injection, he’s briefly raised, while strapped down, just in case he has any final words.

So this guy is going to be resurrected, right? And is he going to suffer and have to give his life so that he can save mankind? You betcha.

He even has to suffer another crucifixion pose just in case people didn’t get the subtle symbolism at the beginning. See, Marcus doesn’t know that he’s a robot and eventually hooks up with a resistance pilot. She leads him back to the resistance base and he steps on a mine. But it doesn’t kill him. You know, which on the one hand is nice, but on the other hand it’s pretty bad because humans don’t like robots much. So poor Marcus gets strung up in another crucifix pose and people shoot guns at him. But because he’s flesh with a gnarly robot skeleton, it doesn’t hurt him. It just makes his skin look bad.

Marcus is different from other characters in the Terminator series because while he has a robot skeleton, he has a human brain and a human heart. Arnie in the other films was just a robot with skin over it – the brain and everything else was mechanical. But making Marcus part human seems like terrible thinking on Skynet’s part (Skynet being the evil supercomputer made by Cyberdyne Systems that nuked the world and decided to kill every human). Why give Marcus free-will? Apparently it’s so that he can be a mole and gather information on the resistance for Skynet, but wouldn’t it be easier to have him kill John Connor? Or maybe you could have a bomb implanted in him and the second he sees John Connor, it activates. But that would make too much sense. A super-intelligent, super-ruthless supercomputer would never think of that.

So what ends up happening is that Marcus meets the resistance, gets found out to be a robot, escapes and then helps John Connor find Skynet’s head quarters – John wants to go into the lion’s den because his daddy Kyle Reese is being held prisoner there along with loads of other people. And when Marcus goes to Skynet he wanders into a room with a big screen. All of a sudden Helena Bonham Carter’s face turns up. She then tells him he’s a mole and lets him in on Skynet’s retarded masterplan to have Marcus lead John Connor to them. Fucking hell, just have Marcus turn into a giant cheese grater when he meets John Connor and have him grate Connor to the bone. It would make more sense.

Something else that would make sense is for Skynet to kill Kyle Reese when it spots him. You kill John Connor’s daddy and then John Connor can’t exist. Right? But no, even though Skynet identifies Kyle Reese, it decides to put Reese in a plastic cube cell rather than rip his head off. The poor guy has to sit there as a T-800 watches him through the glass – the shot of it watching him is filmed in such a way that it looks like the robot is peeping at him; if the robot had a cock it would be jacking off like crazy and squirting white oil all over the cell.

But anyway, how the hell does Skynet know who Kyle Reese is? How did it find out that he was John’s daddy? It doesn’t make any sense. Are the robots psychic? Did John get drunk one night and tell Skynet? Did he phone them up?

But back to Helena Bonham Carter’s face turning up on a computer screen. The filmmakers have completely missed the point about Skynet. It’s a faceless intelligence. There’s no personality to it. Once you plop Helena Bonham Carter’s face on it, you completely eliminate the dread of a faceless, unstoppable foe that you can’t speak to or reason with. And Bonham Carter’s acting is atrocious in this scene. She mugs and overacts like crazy. And to make it even more risible, her face even morphs into other characters. Even the scene in Matrix Reloaded with the Architect wasn’t this bad. Well, actually, thinking about it, maybe it was. But it’s close.

One of the most remarkable things about this scene, though, is Marcus’ reaction to the news that he’s a mole for Skynet. He reaches into his head and removes a chip and then goes and helps John Connor fight a CGI Arnie. What the fuck? How stupid is Skynet? It’s going to make it that easy for Marcus to disobey them? It would be like someone putting a sock on me and saying, ‘Now while you’re wearing this, you’re not allowed to do anything naughty.’ And then I’d just take the sock off and go mug some old grannies.

Arnie’s appearance is pretty pointless and once again demonstrates the limitations of computer graphics. As good as it looks, it doesn’t look very good. The skin looks plastic. And before you can get used to it, Arnie’s face and skin are burnt off and he’s just a metal skeleton. It’s a pointless homage to the previous films.

Speaking of pointless homages, there’s a bit where John Connor captures a robot motorcycle by using a Guns ‘n’ Roses song (‘You Could Be Mine’ from T2). It’s kind of amusing but only serves as a reminder of how much better the first two instalments are.

Other pointless homages include the use of the lines, ‘I’ll be back’ and ‘come with me if you want to live’. Again, it didn’t make me want to cheer. It just reminded me of the first two films.

I also want to know why Skynet would create massive walking robots. What’s the point of that? You have aircraft that can hover. Why do you need the Iron Giant?

Another gripe is how fucking loud the film is. The film started and then towards the end of the first scene the projectionist turned it up to eleven. I swear I thought my ears were going to start bleeding. I mean, my brother and I talk about an action sequence in Die Another Day (the hovercraft scene) that had the cinema vibrating and shaking it was so loud. Well, Terminator Salvation is like that throughout the whole of the movie. Maybe McG thinks he can bludgeon us into submission with sound effects and make us overlook the fact that his film is a colossal piece of shite. Unfortunately for him his ploy doesn’t work.