Hyde Park on HudsonAnother free ticket for Cinema City and another viewing: ‘Hyde Park on Hudson.’ We were enticed by the promising trailer, but I’m afraid the trailer contained all the best bits. Given the context – the first official visit of a British monarch to the USA, desperately trying to drum up American support on the eve of World War Two – and the salacious depiction of President Roosevelt as a serial philanderer with a First Lady who liked to lick the lettuce, the movie was disappointingly flat. The narrative was plodding and the dialogue lacked depth. Laura Linney put in a fine performance as ‘Daisy,’ the President’s distant cousin and reluctant paramour, Bill Murray as Roosevelt did his best with an average script and Samuel West made a suitably terrified King George VI. But ‘The King’s Speech,’ this ain’t.

Watch the trailer and skip the film.

Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as an indie publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

14 thoughts on “Hyde Park on Hudson”

  3. I so dislike when the best parts are chosen for the trailer and then a big letdown when you go to see the movie. What a disappointment here. I haven’t seen this one and guess I don’t want to now. Thanks for the review.

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  4. I agree it was a disappointment and I was hard pressed to get Ahmet to understand what was going on. I had to real through a History lesson and it got complicated but still think there was some entertainment factor in it.

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