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.

Movie Update 12

At this point I'm starting to see the finish line on the list of classic movies I compiled last year (and have repeatedly expanded on since), about in time for Netflix' two disc plan with streaming to increase in price. I might just watch regular old crap for a while after that, though there's plenty of lists I haven't gone through yet, mostly consisting of winners of various awards. Anyway, movies.

American Graffiti


This is the first non-Star Wars film directed by George Lucas that I've seen... not very surprising, since only one other such film exists. It's an entertaining and charming nostalgia-laden film about mid-century cruising culture, which consisted of teenagers in California hooking up and aimlessly driving their cars around town while listening to music. It's obvious Lucas has a history with this sort of thing, and it comes through in the movie, which is too light on plot to really be a sex comedy or anything like that, but tells a simple and interesting story about two high school graduates struggling with whether to go to college at the other side of the country while summer comes to a close. The young cast is pretty good, it's funny, and it's shot well enough to make you forget for a little while what Lucas' career has turned into. Nothing too incredible, but a good film.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


I liked this more than I expected, but it's still pretty far from the best work by David Fincher. Despite the apparent grab for awards with the sentimental, broadly-reaching script and big name cast, you can still definitely tell it's a Fincher movie from the specific color scheme and interesting using of CGI (the effects to create young/old Benjamin are far from real looking, but they're definitely interesting) among other things. And I liked most of the performances, especially surprising ones like Mad Men's Jared Harris as a salty, drunken sea captain. It's just much too long of a movie for how much story it has. It's like screenwriter Eric Roth couldn't think of anything beyond combining an intriguing short story concept with an earlier-set version of Forrest Gump. Some cool ideas, but the experience is kind of a drag.

La Dolce Vita


This is the third film by Federico Fellini that I've seen, and I was again impressed by some things he did without being really drawn in or terribly entertained by the work itself. It's very much a 60s European art film, and is very identifiably good at that. I was somewhat intrigued by the episodic nature of the story, as it progresses through various mostly unrelated events, examining the mindset of the central character. Really though, the part that grabbed my interest the most was when Anita Ekberg was just sort of walking and dancing around on screen, so maybe I'm not quite the target audience. This is another film that was quite long, and I got through it fine but wouldn't want to watch it again.

Nashville


Robert Altman is definitely known for those ensemble casts, and this is a premiere example of that. Nashville is about the coming together of many people, lots of them musicians, at a political rally for a candidate that is never actually seen. Much time is dedicated to the musical performances, and it's quite a long movie, giving fair shake to a lot of different stories. It's a well put together film, and while I'm not familiar with a lot of the cast, they all tend to do good jobs. I didn't like a lot of the movie though, which I found to be incredibly uncomfortable and hard to watch. It's the product of a very dark sense of humor, some real proto-cringe type stuff. I understand what they were going for, but too much of it was too far on the painful side of the spectrum without being that funny. It's just personal taste, and I respect the movie, but I had trouble with it.

Sullivan's Travels


Sullivan's Travels is about a comedy director who thinks people don't know enough about the real suffering going on in the world, and tries after a few false starts to discover real trouble so he can honestly make a movie about it. I tend to like movies that hold up mirrors to Hollywood, and Travels does it about as well as any. It's a nice snappy 40s road comedy, which happens to take a strange, dark, and surprising turn near the end. It's a little off-putting, but not enough to really damage a film that's otherwise got a pretty good point to make about what people really want to get out of cinema, and is honestly just entertaining on its own. The biggest issue is perhaps the movie trying to get me to believe a girl who looked like Veronica Lake would have trouble getting a break in Hollywood, but that's pretty much how movies work. Somehow not as famous as other movies of similar type and quality from the period, but deserving of a watch.

Stand By Me

Stand By Me is another one of those movies I've seen chunks of but never sat down and watched until now. And it's good! Rob Reiner knew how to direct mature movies that would be interesting to people of many different ages. It takes place mostly at the end of the 50s, but it still has a timeless quality that should remind anyone of summer vacations spending time with friends, especially if they lived in a rural area. The main character is Gordie, played by Wil Wheaton as a kid a couple years before Star Trek: The Next Generation and Richard Dreyfuss as an adult and the narrator. After learning that his childhood friend was killed in a restaurant, he decides to write down the story of a watershed moment from his youth, where he and his buddies walked through miles and miles of countryside to find the body of a local boy who's been missing.

The other three friends are played by River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell, and while they tend to be more famous for why they don't have careers than the careers themselves, it's remarkable how they're all still recognizable names 24 years later. I don't think that usually happens with kid actors. The older teenager characters are occasionally recognizable too, with Kiefer Sutherland playing the biggest jerk in town and antagonist and John Cusack in flashbacks as Gordie's deceased older brother, and the only one in his family who seems to care about him. Everybody does a pretty good job, and it's noteworthy how the kids all manage to act like real twelve-year-olds without getting annoying.

So it's sort of like a small-scale road movie as they wander along train tracks, over bridges, and through forests looking for where one of them heard his older brother describe the body's location. Their relationships are as realistic as you'll see when it comes to adolescent American males, always poking fun at each other and sometimes getting violent, but obviously still affectionate and understanding. O'Connell doesn't really get an opportunity to be dramatic, but the other three all have moments of vulnerability that bring them closer together as they use the body as a goal to get through their troubles. The movie is often funny and touching when it wants to be, and while the story sort of sweeps some of the difficulties under the rug by the end, it's still a good story and a definite piece of Americana. Apparently the Stephen King story that this was based on was quite a bit harsher, but the movie didn't need to be to work.

Jaws

If nothing else, Jaws deserves credit for creating the summer blockbuster, a kind of film that maybe isn't always as good as it could be but which has become increasingly important to the movie industry. And while many such blockbusters are derided by critics, Jaws itself is certainly a fine piece of filmmaking by Steven Spielberg. There's nothing too complex at work here (it's also cited for the rise of "high concept" stories that don't take a lot of explanation), it's a mix of horror and adventure elements as a gigantic shark terrorizes the shores of an island town that relies on summer tourism to stay afloat and gets pursued by a ragtag crew of men from different walks of life. This was back when PG films were allowed to be scary and bloody, and there's some nicely gruesome and occasionally frightening scenes setting up the danger before the more interesting second half, which after a certain point takes place entirely in the middle of the ocean.

To me the highlight of the movie is the performances of the three main characters. Roy Scheider is the chief of police on the island, and is wracked with guilt after town officials prevent him from closing the beaches after the first attack and more people get killed. Richard Dreyfuss is an oceanographer from a rich family convinced that the town doesn't know what it's doing. And Robert Shaw is an old grizzled war veteran and sea captain convinced of his own ability to stop the shark. The supporting cast is just less interesting, and once they finally leave shore to kill the beast, the film really starts to shine. Their personalities clash and an odd sort of camaraderie forms as they slowly realize the true size and danger of their target. The film is infamous for how poorly the mechanical sharks they had worked and how Spielberg had to basically work around it the whole time to great effect, and it's funny how things like screw-ups in filming could even save characters from death. But the scenes of the three guys trying to bring the shark in are still incredibly exciting and tense 35 years later, all the way up to the dubious but thrilling conclusion. A simple movie elevated by the creativity of those behind the camera and the great character work by those in front of it.