He’s a scenery-chomping, saliva-rattling, comedy-club Sean Connery imitator, an American actor doing an American president and somehow managing not to sound the least bit American, or, indeed, even human.
I have a theory that no self-respecting American actor dares approach Nixon at face value. He is too much The Other; any presentation of him as simply a paranoid ordinary guy from Southern California would be a slap in the face of decency, tantamount to showing Hitler enjoying a joke or petting a dog.
I recently watched **Before Sunset **on DVD and was shocked to see that it received an R rating as well. I guess it was because there was the one scene in the cafe where Julie Delpy said the term “suck cock”. Had she actually demonstrated said term, then I could probably justify the rating…
There’s a lot more to capturing a character than “looking like him”. The clips I’ve seen look great. Would you rather have a physical double or a great actor? (Nice if you could have both, but that doesn’t happen too often. They managed it for Hitler and Goebbels in the movie Downfall.)
ETA: My favorite screen Nixon so far is Philip Baker Hall.
Eh, this is off the topic, but the fact that Ron Howard directed it just gives me even more reason to see it. He is one of my favorite directors. I’m not going to challenge your opinion, I’ll just allow my mileage to vary from yours, but in my opinion, all of the films he’s directed that I have seen, I have considered to be very good.
Apollo 13 wasn’t any good? Splash wasn’t any good? Parenthood, Backdraft, A Beautiful Mind?
Ok, A Beautiful Mind was kind of overrated, and he’s done a few sucky movies too (I won’t even mention the one with the word “code” in it), but he’s done some passable movies too. He’s not Bergman, but he’s not Uwe Boll either.
Um . . . You’re gonna try to argue, like, a logical argument about the objective quality of Ron Howard’s work? Sorry, but it don’t work like that. I think he’s a vomitous hack; you feel differently. Not sure where there’s any room for argument.
My husband just told me he heard that smoking is reason for an R rating. I googled and found several sites, all discussing it, but no reference to MPAA adopting it.
Apples/oranges. American artists mostly live or die by PC principles. It’s a combination of market forces on the individual and the disproportionate influence of out-groups in the arts.
Did you actually click the link or are you replying only to my words? I was just amused by the easy ability to combine all the things you mentioned in your post, though in the form of well-known sketch comedy rather than historical biography.
If it makes you more inclined to see it, this is the least Ron Howardy movie that he has made. It’s really quite good and more about the actors than anything. It’s a very straightforward film in terms of directing, and the actors are recreating roles that they played on Broadway and in London, so there wasn’t a ton of directorial meddling.
“If you only see one Ron Howard movie…” and all that. I don’t consider myself a fan of Howard’s either, but this one is worth seeing.
A tale about the New York Times, known for not printing certain words, and the Nixon telephone tape transcripts:
The late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal exempted presidential swearing from the newspaper’s ban on shit during the Watergate era. Rosenthal’s obituary in the New York Observer (quoted by a Gawker commenter) tells the story:
When a Watergate tape revealed that Richard Nixon had said, “I don’t give a shit what happens, I want you all to stonewall it,” The Times printed shit for the first time, though only in the text of the tape, and not in the accompanying news story.
When a Newsweek reporter called Rosenthal to ask if this was a seismic change in the paper’s standards, he replied, “No. We’ll only take shit from the President.”
Nixon was quite anti-semitic, something Kissinger seemed to feed into. It’s quite amazing. I’m not imaging a shower scene, but something with ball gags and the Presidential riding crop.
(According to The Realist, Johnson had his way with the bullet hole in Kennedy’s neck. It’s just a part of the story of Oval Office history.)
