The American President

It was pretty amazing how much this felt like an alternate universe's version of The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin wrote it, in much the same style as the show, with lots of intelligent back-and-forth dialogue and well-timed dramatic speeches. It has a movie budget with a movie cast and a movie director in Rob Reiner, but it's filmed pretty plainly and on the same sets as the show. Most of the characters have pretty clear equivalents from the show. Michael Douglas' President Andrew Shepherd is not that different from Josiah Bartlet, and Martin Sheen even plays a chief of staff similar Leo from the show. It shares a couple other cast members like Joshua Malina, and the rest of the actors are a mostly recognizable bunch, playing roles they might have played on television had they not been more successful. Michael J. Fox is another member of the staff, and Richard Dreyfuss plays a Republican senator with designs on the presidency.

The focus is a bit different than The West Wing though - while it does get into some of the nuts and bolts of politics, particularly the wrangling it takes for controversial bills to get through, it's mostly in the service of a romantic plot that's the real core of the story. The President is a widower due to his wife's death before his election, and he hasn't been really looking to date while in office. Annette Bening plays a lobbyist who gets a job in Washington, but things quickly get weird when she and the President hit it off and they start seeing each other regularly. There's a lot about whether a President, even a very popular one, could ever have a non-marital relationship in office in this day and age.

Dreyfuss' character is cartoonishly evil and slimy, and uses the situation to smear the President, who doesn't stoop to defending his personal life despite falling approval ratings. His personal and professional lives though finally collide near the end, once the health of his political goals come into conflict. It's a bit more silly and outlandish than anything you'd normally see in a regular story of politics, but it's not a politics movie - it's a romantic comedy with a political setting. It does the job well enough, but I'm glad Sorkin didn't get it out of his system and went on to use a lot of his ideas to create one of the best TV dramas of the last decade.

Back to the Future Part III

So I guess it took me long enough to finish the trilogy. The original is a classic action comedy, and the second part feels like a dopey retread without an ending but still has enough fun moments to prevent it from being too bad. Part three is of similar quality, though it does have the nice bonus of wrapping up all the loose ends in the story that spans 130 years (We're only five years away from Marty's life in the future. I can't wait for flying cars that run on garbage!). The problem with this movie is sort of the setting, taking place mostly in the late 1800s. They do some interesting stuff with the western setting, but in general it just sort of justifies taking an entire two hours to return to the future and a lot of its best moments aren't its own. Like, it makes sense that they'd pay homage to Marty's new alias Clint Eastwood by redoing the ending of A Fistful of Dollars, but how many people are actually going to recognize that? I don't know.

In a lot of ways, it just sort of doesn't work as a time travel movie the way the first two do. In the first film, Marty and Doc Brown are constantly dealing with the ramifications of messing up the course of events, and in part two, they run all over the space-time continuum trying to undo their mistakes, but that's less of a concern here than just trying to survive long enough to get the time machine working. It's a decent steampunk western posing as science fiction. And I'm not sure it actually matters to me that the Doc got himself a lady. I don't begrudge him the happiness, but the movie would have been a whole lot simpler if he just listened to his own lectures on screwing with history. The epilogue where everything gets set right in the present and future is half satisfying and half too convenient, but the series spent its entire existence playing fast and loose with the laws of physics so it didn't bother me too much. I hate to say my enjoyment was affected by an unrelated film, but Primer just raised the time travel bar so much that a movie has to be somewhat outstandingly entertaining to get away with what Back to the Future does, and this one just wasn't really that good.