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 7

Do I really have nothing significant to get off my chest about any of these movies, or am I just getting lazy? You decide.

À Nos Amours


Amours is another film in the Incredibly Painful to Watch Family Drama style, this time coming from France. It's about a girl who doesn't know what she wants out of life, and has a difficult relationship with her parents and brother, and the only way she knows how to cope with both is to spend time with a variety of men. She's not sure she's capable of loving anyone, while at the same time she gets guys to fall for her. It's not very pleasant to watch, but that's why it's a success. It's a very real seeming movie, and the reality it presents isn't pretty. The dad is the most interesting character, I wish he had more scenes.

The Cotton Club


The Cotton Club is sort of like a Boardwalk Empire movie with a lot of singing and dancing and not much else. Richard Gere stars as a New York musician who gets involved with gangsters, falls in love with one of their girlfriends, and then uh... the plot kind of trails off. There's also a plot about a pair of tap dancing brothers. The movie is more about the famous club itself than a real story, and I felt this hurt it quite a bit. It's not bad, there's just not much of an arc there. Things happen for a while and then they stop. A very young Diane Lane looks nice, Nick Cage gives a wacky early performance, and James Remar is pretty awful as the big bad gangster. Bob Hoskins is better as one of his business partners. Apparently Gere played his own trumpet for this movie, which is kinda cool. Bottom line, when your director made The Godfather, you kind of expect more from the other organized crime movies he makes than this.

Duck Soup


I've seen bits of Marx Brothers movies before, but this is the first time I watched one all the way through. It's pretty short, and packed to the brim with hysterical scenes. It's sort of the perfect blend of silent movie slapstick with modern witty dialogue. Groucho is appointed the leader of a country called Freedonia, and spends more time coming on to women and screwing around than directing policy. Chico and Harpo are spies for a conniving foreign ambassador, and also screw around a lot more than they do their jobs. Zeppo is the one who never developed a funny personality of his own, and he's basically just there, in his last film with his brothers. There's a lot of great lines and funny set-ups, though to be honest the hardest I laughed the whole time was at a couple scenes where Harpo was just being a douchebag to a street vendor. The fact that he never really got his comeuppance somehow makes the whole thing better. The mirror scene is a classic, too. I definitely want to see more of their movies together.

The Graduate


The first two films Mike Nichols ever directed were Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and this, which is pretty damn impressive. It features the great Dustin Hoffman's first big role as a college graduate who doesn't know what he want out of his life when he is seduced by the wife of his dad's business partner. From there, things get more complicated. The style of the film is really great, with every shot seeming to be carefully chosen, and I liked the unusual nature of the main performances. The integration of Simon and Garfunkel tunes into the film works well, too. It's too funny to be a drama and not really that terribly funny for a comedy, but it straddles the line well, and it's just a unique, memorably movie. Not much about it I didn't like.

Gran Torino

I think this is a movie that would have benefited if Clint Eastwood wasn't the only person from it you've heard of. Not that a movie needs stars to be good, or that there isn't a reason he went with an unknown cast. It's just the acting in general is pretty bad besides Eastwood itself, and when you're dealing with the delicate race issues the story addresses, bad actors sort of exacerbates the issue. Some scenes become downright laughable when they should be dramatic and tense. Eastwood's direction is good enough, and the story interesting enough, that the film is mostly able to overcome a lot of these flaws, I still found it to be more of a pretty interesting experiment than a truly good movie, though. I kind of liked that his character really is just a total racist who ends up mixed up in something where he can do some good, rather than it being something hokey like a misguided old man who eventually sees the error of his ways. A very simple movie that I think could have been better.

La Jetée


This is a short film composed entirely of still images. It was an inspiration for the film 12 Monkeys. If you know about 12 Monkeys, you can guess that this short film is about time travel, and you'd be right. The story is pretty intriguing if light on actual detail, and has a pretty haunting ending. Very cool experiment more than a real movie.

The Spirit of the Beehive


A Spanish film that is probably some sort of metaphor or allegory based on how it went. Shortly after their civil war, a child watches Frankenstein and becomes enchanted with the idea of spirits. It's a slow paced movie without a ton of dialogue or plot, but it does some interesting things with the classic tale and has a mood that enhances it greatly beyond the simple workings of the story. The direction, lighting, editing, and performances all combine to create a very chilling, dreamy atmosphere. It's the kind of movie that I recognize as good, but make me glad I decided to stop writing a full review for everything I see. I just don't have many words for it.

This Is Spinal Tap


The quintessential mockumentary. I was a bit surprised by the general flow of the movie, which didn't have as many wacky laugh-out-loud moments as I expected, and actually made sure to tell a real story about friendship and growing old with its silly fake hair metal band. The film follows around Spinal Tap when their star has faded, and they find themselves playing smaller venues than they're used to and struggling to put out a new album with their artistic vision intact. It's a funny movie, but it's also a very poignant one. And while the jokes aren't constant, they're still generally really good ones, especially whenever Christopher Guest is on the screen. Obviously "but this goes to 11" is the classic, but I also really loved him showing Rob Reiner the piano piece he'd been working on and especially his reaction to the album cover that was chosen for them. I should get around to checking out some of the movies he directed himself.

Werckmeister Harmonies


A film by Béla Tarr, the master of the long take. Harmonies is probably most famous for lasting over two hours yet being composed of only 39 individual shots, though the camera moves so much within a scene that if you saw several still images from one take you'd assume they were all different shots. Not that you don't feel the effect of the unique filming style, lots of time is spent showing characters perform mundane tasks for minutes on end, which helps create a mood that is unique to his work. The movie works because it has a haunting story and features a number of extremely striking images throughout, images which have their power enhanced by the way they're lingered on. Besides the style though, the rest of the movie didn't grab me that much. I just can't get interested in the stories themselves, despite the way Tarr presents them. I'd recommend it to someone before Satantango if they were interested in checking out his work, if only because it isn't seven hours long.

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.