"I have a voice!"

     Do you prefer to watch new movies or movies you've already seen?
     It might seem an odd question. Who doesn't want to see a new movie? But given how many films are garbage, the question can be seen as: is it better to take a risk, or go for the sure thing?
     Sometimes I prefer the safety of the familiar. I know I'm going to enjoy "Master and Commander" for the characters, the dialogue, the action. Some other film? Who knows, except it probably won't be as good.
      Or "The King's Speech." I can't tell you how many times I've watched the 2010 film about Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome his stutter in the years before World War II.
     Why that movie? A trio of fabulous actors. Colin Firth plays the stuttering monarch. Firth has a presence that somehow far surpasses his bland handsomeness. Viewers have to like him, even when he is playing an aloof king, or, in "Bridget Jones Diary," a jerk barrister. He's also the cuckold Lord Wessex in "Shakespeare in Love," which put him in the same movie with his star here, Geoffrey Rush, who plays Logue with an unshakable dignity, going toe-to-toe with royalty. "My castle, my rules."
     The third is Helen Bonham Carter, as Queen Elizabeth, who is something of an emissary between the royal world and the grungy environs of an Australian self-taught audiologist. Her face is an essay of pained concern as her husband blubbers that he's a naval officer, not a king. The pivotal moment of the movie is hers as she pops up unexpectedly in the Logue apartment and encounters his wife Myrtle, who learns what her husband's been up to by finding the Queen sitting at her dining room table.

      "It's "Your Majesty" the first time," the royal consort explains, a bit wearily. "After that, it's 'ma'am.' As in 'ham.' Not 'mum' as in 'palm.'"

    The writing is just top notch — the royal couple, his brother, the short-reigning King Edward VIII and the woman he loves, Wallis Simpson, plus the Logues at home, the way their children gather around the radio as war is declared, stand-ins for all those young people about to be swept up and perhaps killed.
    What I didn't know was the story of the film, laid out in the obituary of screenwriter David Seidler, who died last week while fly-fishing in New Zealand at age 86. A thoroughly unexceptional Hollywood journeyman, "The King's Speech" reflected his own experience with stuttering, and shows how important first-hand knowledge is to creativity. His other films — "Tucker" and "Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story" are uniformly ordinary. Only "The Kings Speech," labored on over decades, stands out as extraordinary. He won the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

    If you haven't seen it, well, you know what to do — you can watch the trailer here. Honestly, I'd rather watch one great movie a dozen times than a dozen so-so movies one time each.