Category: movies

MOVIE REVIEW: Frost/Nixon


Because Richard Nixon was the first President for whom I could have voted for – I didn’t – he has long held a special role in my life and my heart. In the day, it was nothing but anger and revulsion; since then, a more nuanced view. At the time, I thought he was destined to be one of the United States’ worst Presidents; in hindsight, merely one that was fatally flawed.

I saw the Oliver Stone-directed movie Nixon (1995), starring Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen, when it came out, with its warts and all. I enjoyed it well enough, but its quirky narrative style sometimes got in the way.

So last weekend, the wife and I did one of those “split date” things, with me going to the movies on Saturday and her on Sunday to see the more “conventional” filmmaker Ron Howard’s take on an event that took place after the Nixon Presidency, but which was necessarily all about it, Frost/Nixon.

I’ve found that a great number of people no longer remember David Frost, the “British satirist, writer, journalist and television presenter” who interviewed Nixon in 1977. There’s no current comparison who fully encapsulates it, but it’d be like Jay Leno or Larry King doing a hard-hitting interview of George W. Bush.

Most people who disliked Nixon wanted the interviews to be the mea culpa that Nixon never gave after the resignation, but felt that Frost was a lightweight who was was not up to the task. So it was that each participant had something to prove. Frost/Nixon turns out to be an intriguing film, not just the one-on-one, but the whole backstory leading up to the main event, including the need to secure the $600,000 for the interview, the slams of “checkbook journalism” and the desire to get the interview right.

Frost/Nixon is another play that was made into a movie. But unlike Doubt, it didn’t feel as stagy. One would not expect a historically-based movie about two guys talking to be so tense and yet so revealing of both men. Frank Langella, who is rightly nominated for best actor, “does” Nixon without being a caricature. In fact, the most revealing scene has Langella saying nothing. But look at his eyes! They spoke volumes about what was going on in Nixon’s mind. But the movie would collapse if Michael Sheen as Frost was not up to the task. Sheen, who played Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen, ends up being as worthy an acting partner for Langella as Frost was an adversary for Nixon.

Some critics inevitably kvetched about historic inaccuracies here and there, which almost always happens. I wondered if the last scene – which is REALLY funny – actually happened; it matters not. I was entertaned and I learned a few things.

Recommended.

Frost, who has interviewed the last seven U.S. Presidents and six British Prime Ministers (excluding, so far, the current ones) now works for Al Jazeera English.

See part of the Frost/Nixon interviews here (97 minutes) and here (10 minutes).

ROG

ROG

VIDEO REVIEW: WALL*E


I really needed to see the new Pixar film WALL*E because the first two people I know who saw it really disliked it. Given its otherwise high critical praise, this was a real motivator. I also decided to see if I could, for the first time, have my daughter watch a full-length movie; we’ve failed with Enchanted, Stuart Little and a couple others.

So, for that first 20 minutes, I was a bit distracted. I was taken in by the charms of the cleaning and collecting robot but would the child be like-minded? Actually, she was OK until EVE came and started blasting all over the place. And when she started blowing things up in the vicinity of our hero, that was the end of that. For her.

For me, it’s when it really started getting interesting. Sure it has those somewhat heavy-handed apocalyptic imagery. Ultimately, though it was a story of heroism, changing from a state of inertia to a state of action. And of course, it was a love story.

In this economic climate, the fact that we ARE producing so much garbage, and that we should think about consuming and producing less of it, is a timely lesson that I got without feeling as though I’d been ho=it over the head with it.

I “get” the less than enthusiastic early reviewers, though. Perhaps too intense for some younger kids, though other kids really like it. On the other hand, animation is not just for kids, and perhaps never was.

ROG

ROG

The Day The Music Died

I feel as though I “knew” Buddy Holly. I’ve owned and listened to his songs by him and the Crickets


LINK
and also through the cover versions by the Beatles (Words of Love), Linda Ronstadt and lots of others. Little wonder that Paul McCartney snatched up the rights to Buddy’s songs. I also saw the The Buddy Holly Story with Gary Busey in the lead.

I felt as though I was familiar with Richie Valens,


LINK

between the Los Lobos cover of La Bamba and the movie La Bamba with Lou Diamond Phillips.

I have little feel, though, for The Big Bopper. I know that his son had him exhumed under some bizarre paranoid theory that the Big Bopper survived the plane crash but was shot and killed going for help. But other than the one slightly randy hit Chantilly Lace, he’s a mystery.

Of course today mars the 50th anniversary of the deaths of these three musicians in an Iowa plane crash. I was alive but too young to remember the event first hand.

At the end of my 35-year high school reunion, someone had everyone stand around to sing. I had no idea what it’d be. Turned out to be American Pie, which I thought was kind of weird, in as much as it came out after we all graduated. Some people knew some parts, misremembered others. Here are the lyrics, along with one interpretation of same, not all of which I ascribe to. And here’s Don McLean singing it. I saw him in the late 1970s – I’m thinking in Dutchess County, NY, around Poughkeepsie – and of course he HAD to perform it. I wonder if he ever tires of it?
LINK.

ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: Doubt


For the second weekend in a row, I saw a movie at the Spectrum Theatre, this time alone. The wife and I developed a system whereby one of us goes to the movies on Saturday and the other on Sunday. I went Saturday; unfortunately, Carol fell ill on Sunday, so she won’t see it until Super Bowl Sunday.

Doubt is set in New York City in 1964, the year after JFK. Just the visage of the Catholic school’s old-line principal, Sister Beauvier (Meryl Streep), will bring fear into the hearts of some of the lapsed Catholics of a certain age that I know. She seems to have developed some suspicions about the trying-to-be-modern parish priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and she ends up in a power struggle with him.

This a very well-acted movie, as one would expect with actors of this caliber. This movie represents Streep’s 15th Oscar nomination, though she hasn’t won since 1982. Hoffman was nominated twice before, winning once. This is Amy Adams’ second nomination and Viola Davis’ first. Adams in particular is the sweetest nun since Sally Field played Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun.

As it is based on award-winning stage play, there is some great dialogue. I particularly liked the sermons offered as not so subtle messages.

And yet…there was something about it that is at arm’s length. Perhaps it was too stagy, that the adaptation did not fully take in the differences that cinema requires. Though I never saw the play, I can imagine this same scene-chewing dialogue produced on stage, quite possibly to greater effect. There were powerful themes and yet I never quite got caught up in them. It’s not unlike abstract art or avant-garde jazz you believe has been well crafted but just does not engage you.

I do recommend Doubt. Maybe it will take you away in a manner that I did not experience.
ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: Milk


Considering the paucity of my movie going behavior lately, nevertheless I knew that I would have to see the new Gus van Sant film, Milk, starring Sean Penn as the guy who goes from a closeted gay in New York City to the first openly gay politician in San Francisco within a decade. Part of the appeal of going for me was my love for the Bay Area. Moreover, and I did not know this until fairly recently, Harvey went to school at what is now UAlbany, the same institution where I attended library school, and got into a little trouble.

So, go I did with my wife this past Sunday to Albany’s Spectrum Theatre after having lunch at Justin’s. Date night afternoon! Initially, my rather deep knowledge of some of the events portrayed in the movie was a bit of a hindrance to my enjoyment. It was as though I’m watching Sean Penn in a biopic. Oh, look, there’s James Franco as his lover! But there’s a point for me – a specific moment having to do with an election – where Penn stopped being the actor and became Harvey Milk.

I’m finding it difficult to describe the film more fully. I recall that Roger Ebert got chastised in some quarters for revealing information that, I would agree, was public knowledge. The headline facts are established early via archival footage of Diane Feinstein, now a U.S. Senator. That information made me appreciate more the structure of the movie, with Milk dictating notes on a recording device amidst flashbacks.

This was a well-reviewed film (92% on the Tomatometer, 91% among top critics.) One review in particular irritated me: “The exceptional The Times of Harvey Milk won the Oscar for Best Documentary 24 years ago…. Yet, all this time later… Hollywood wants us to applaud its courage for finally–finally–telling this story?” Perhaps true, but the review of the film itself was actually rather positive, yet listed as “rotten”.

There was quite a bit of archival footage, and I did something at this film I don’t recall ever doing before; I hissed when someone appeared on the screen as though it were Snidely Whiplash. Anita Bryant was spewing her hate in the name of “Christian love”; I boycotted orange juice for years because of her.

But this is no historical relic. Indeed, the fight over California’s Prop 6 in the mid-1970s, which would have banned gay teachers, and 2008’s Prop 8, which would ban gay marriage, made the film seem more relevant than it might have. Jimmy Carter and even Ronald Reagan opposed Prop 6, BTW.

I should note a couple of the many fine performances. Emile Hirsch, who was directed by Sean Penn in the Penn-penned Into the Wild plays organizer Cleve Jones. Josh Brolin, who recently played Bush 43 in W, is Milk’s more conservative colleague Dan White.

It was a movie with a message, but I did not find it preachy. At the end of this film, some people, including me, applauded it. In some ways, I/they were applauding the remarkable evolution and life of Harvey Milk.
ROG

ROG
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial