Nixon

Rating:
Summary: One of the great bio-pics of our time, but technically weak
Review: Very simply put, "Nixon" was for me the best film of the '90s. Robert Richardson's post-modern, cut-and-paste cinematographic style reached its pinnacle in this work, and Oliver Stone suspended his fullest didacticism by giving us an unmonitored portrait of the ex-President. You could call the filmmaking style nearly avant-garde, with rapid-fire jump cuts that are not even close to MTV-style flash, but rather in tune with psychological action. There hasn't been a movie since "Nixon" that looked and behaved so virtuosically, nor that conveyed emotions so reservedly unto climax.

However, on to the big looming problem with this release: like its non-collector's edition predecessor, it is a non-anamorphic, matted widescreen DVD. What this means, pain and simple, is that it will NEVER play correctly on a widescreen television. For those of us who have widescreen televisions, the DVD is totally useless (unless we should prefer either of: (a) distorted, horizontally-challenged (e.g., fat) images; or (b) a tiny matted windowpane inside a matted box). For those who do not have widescreen televisions, they eventually will, and the investment in this DVD will become worthless.

To get this wrong on the second try is scandalous. We should pray for a proper DVD release of this '90s masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Too long and not historically accurate anyway. Boring.
Review: I wanted to see this 1995 Oliver Stone film because I'm interested in politics. However, there's a disclaimer at the beginning which informs the viewer that the film is not not historically accurate. That ruined it for me right from the beginning.

There's a great cast of actors and all of them are excellent. There's Joan Allen, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, E.G. Marshall, Mary Steenburgen, Paul Sovino and James Woods. Anthony Hopkins is cast as Nixon. But he doesn't look like Nixon at all. And I still have memories of what the real person looked like.

The screenplay is good too, and resembles a Greek drama as a fatal flaw destroys the ruler. There's good use of newsreel footage, flashbacks and montage too. It could have been a fine film.

At 190 minutes it's much too long though. And there are too many characters that were part of the Nixon White House and the writer assumed I was supposed to have instant recognition of. This just made me confused. There were no surprises in the story either. I knew that Nixon eventually resigned rather than face impeachment. There was nothing to anchor my attention. I actually fell asleep.

Some day there might be a book or a film that is based on historical fact that I can sink my teeth into. But as for this version of Nixon, I just didn't like it.

Rating:
Summary: After 'Platoon', probably Stone's best film
Review: Regardless of your opinion of Oliver Stone or Richard Nixon, this is an entertaining film to say the very least. Joan Allen deserved an Oscar for her portrayal of Pat Nixon - she was wonderful. And John Williams' score was perfect.

If you never saw this film when it was released in theatres (and, more importantly, if you DID see it in the theatre), you must see this edition. Probably the best scene of the entire film, which was cut from the theatre version, is featured in this DVD version. The long scene, featuring a meeting between Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) and CIA Director Richard Helms (Sam Waterston), adds more flesh to the sinister, conspiratorial undertone of the film and is the needle prick that first innoculates Nixon with the fatal realization that he is a doomed man. Waterston's smooth portrayal of the patrician Helms as Nixon's personal vision of evil incarnate was a real treat, probably the best performance in the film along with Joan Allen's.

Rating:
Summary: **
Review: I heard Oliver Stone promoting this film on NPR. He said, "I share certain traits of Nixon's." When the interviewer asked Stone to name one of those traits, Stone said, "Paranoia." That admission kind of sums up everything that's wrong with this and all of Oliver Stone's films. They are filled with paranoia. Reality-marring paranoia. Well, at least he admits to his paranoia. But too bad he has to splash it up on movie screens.

Rating:
Summary: a brilliant piece of work
Review: Oliver stone is brilliant. Once again he challenges us to "think" for ourselves instead of following the mainstream mindset. There is so much truth hidden within the shadows if we would but see. I look forward to a work on "election 2000" or perhaps the hidden shadows of 9/11 by Mr. Stone.

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Have in Any Nixon Library
Review: Oliver Stone deftly redeems himself from the debacle of "JFK" and serves up an intellectual and complicated portrait of the man that was Richard Nixon. The disclaimer at the start of the film posits an "incomplete record" to account for the still-unfilled gaps in the whole Nixon story. But the "historical record" also referenced is faithful to other published materials, making this film an important study piece in trying to understand the dynamics (functional and dysfunctional) that collided to carry the ex-President to the abyss of self-destruction. Anthony Hopkins convincingly plays Nixon as both a pillage-and-burn politician and sympathetic loner who sees but cannot escape his own pathos. Refreshingly, Watergate is retold as but one part of the entire Nixon persona and does not define the man in whole. But it is Joan Allen's portrayal of Pat Nixon that is a must-see. Despite the criticism of the pro-Nixonites when the film was first released, it is a valuable historical source.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious mess
Review: I found "Nixon" to be hugely entertaining, though not the way it was meant to be. Personally I think this is a brilliant comedy. Anthony Hopkins is a fine actor, but he knows he can't quite get inside Nixon - I doubt anyone can - so he spends a lot of time hamming it up and having a great time playing Nixon as a sweaty, awkward, boozing weirdo. (Maybe he was some of these things, but the film never makes it clear why anyone elected him in the first place.) The gothic thunder and lightning that hang over the white house in the opening shots set the melodramatic tone for his fun performance. Meanwhile, the movie is cutting all over the place (featuring flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, I kid you not) in Nixon's life, from his apparently tormented black-and-white childhood to his apparently tormented adulthood (which cuts mysteriously between black and white and color for no apparent reason) to his tormented final days listening to his Watergate tapes in his office while having yet another scotch with ice. Director Oliver Stone has taken on an ambitious task for himself; in the process he ends up throwing in newsreel footage of nearly every historical event of the period, then flailing over to jerky shots of clouds and traffic moving at lightning speed over Washington, then odd scenes of Nixon trading Cuba conspiracy theories with good actors like E.G. Marshall and Larry Hagman. In short, this long, strange film left me in guffaws of laughter at times ("do ya want some pansy like George McGovern?") and for that I give it an extra star. It is nothing if not entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Complex Portrait
Review: Oliver Stone's NIXON is a surprisingly sympathetic film about President Richard Nixon (Played by Sir Anthony Hopkins).The movie traces his childhood, through his resignation as President, after the Watergate scandal. Like JFK before it, the movie offers historical facts mixed with conjecture about certain events using public record as its basis. The end result is facinating. At first Hopkins's portrayal is a bit jarring and may not seem like it's not going to work, but as the film rolls along, you can accept him, and he delivers a top notch performance. The rest of the cast is also very good. Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, Powers Boothe as Alexander Haig, David Hyde-Pierce as John Dean, Mary Steenbergen as Hannah Nixon, and Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover (the list is endless) all help make NIXON memorable Cinematographer Robert Richardson and Composer John Williams return from JFK with Stone to help make this a fine companion to that film. The viewer is left to make up his or her own mind about the more controversial aspects of the events. I may not agree with everything that the filmmakers have to say, but I admire them for taking on this muti-layered man and what made him tick.

The "Collector's Series" 2 disc DVD set has an additional 28 minutes incorporated in to the film. The Director's Cut is Stone's original version the one that he wanted released theatrically. There are 2 different commentary tracks from Stone?? I haven't quite figured out why there are 2 tracks from the same person, but hey whatever. Disc 2 has even more footage from the film, an interview by Charlie Rose with Stone about the movie, and the theatrical trailer. I Highly Recommend the film and its extras with **** 1/2 stars.

I also recommend JFK-The Director's Cut 2 disc DVD as well.

Rating:
Summary: another fantasy
Review: BEWARE this is not a biographical film. It is a fiction based on a real person. This movie actually portrays Nixon as being involved in the deaths of JFK and Robert Kennedy,
It's shallow. Lacking understanding of this deep man, the writers decided to go for sleeze and innuendo. I am surprised they did not stoop to a car chase.

Rating:
Summary: A Dark and Bloody Ground...
Review: This is the "sequel" to Stone's other masterpiece, "JFK," a brilliant and unrelenting deconstruction of not only the Warren Report but also of the Cold War myth of heroic American altruism versus those who, supposedly, "hate us because we are free."

In "JFK," Stone explains how the Vietnam War began; in "Nixon," he shows the results of its crude brutalities. "JFK" posits a John F. Kennedy who started his presidency as a conventional anti-communist, but who, after the double traumas of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis (the latter, literally, the closest humankind has ever come to "ending the world"), became a convert to a humane rationality: he saw that the Cold War had become an "endless war," the victims of which were, primarily, the poor, the ignorant, and the wretched of the earth. Kennedy died for his change of heart and mind, a death which overlays "Nixon" like a pall.

Stone's Nixon (Anthony Hopkins is even more physically unattractive in the part than the real-life version) is an opportunist twisted by his mother's cold and exacting religiosity, his father's harsh fatalism, the deaths of two of his beloved brothers, and his intense ambition to prove himself worthy of his mother's demands and his brothers' deaths. His poisonous resentment of his defeat by Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election and his ruthless determination to vindicate himself by finally winning the presidency, lead Nixon into a devil's alliance with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (played with an icy puckishness by Bob Hoskins), sinister corporate rightists (aptly represented by Larry Hagman as a fictional oil man who is a yet ghastlier version of J. R. Ewing), and a mysterious, dark, "shadow government" of CIA, FBI, the Mafia and military "special operatives" who run an ultra-secret "assassination bureau" under the bland title, "Track II."

Nixon's faustian bargain for the presidency has two aspects: first, his betrayal of Kennedy, as he comes to understand that JFK -- a man he loved as a "brother" when they served together in Congress -- was indeed murdered in a Track II operation because of that opposition to continuing the Vietnam War; second, his own support for that war (while realizing that he must, somehow, end it at last, or see U. S. society "come apart") and his concurrent (and unconstitutional) persecution of the youth "counterculture," the New Left, and the "Black Power" movement, which lead the fight against the war and for a humane, generous-hearted America.

The confrontation with youthful demonstrators (against Nixon's brutal expansion of the war into Cambodia) in the early morning at the Lincoln Memorial is a chilling yet moving representation of Nixon's dilemma -- as is the cynical colloquy between Nixon and Mao Zedong (Ric Young in a remarkably creepy performance), in which Mao chortles that "the real war is in us," i.e., in ambitious men who have killed their consciences.

I recommend the "Director's Cut" of "Nixon," by the way, for its inclusion (after the credits roll at the end) of the scene between Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms, played with a precise and coolly insouciant sophistication by Sam Waterston. In this dark film (both thematically and visually), this particular sequence is set in Helm's brightly lit office, which is also filled with ominously large exotic orchids. In one slinky motion, Waterson's eyes suddenly appear pitch-black among the shelves filled with plants and along which Waterson's Helms seems to slide like a snake. Like the sudden appearance of the Track II "horrible" (Nixon's characterization), E. Howard Hunt (portrayed with appropriate menace by the great Ed Harris) on a remote Washington bridge before a waiting John Dean notices him, this is a goose-pimply scene absolutely worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

Oliver Stone is a great director of disturbing, complex political thrillers for perceptive critics of American government policies. If he does not seem to be doing anything of note lately, it is because he needs to be working on a film about the ugly and corrupt Clinton administration, or about the duplicitous Bush administration conspiracy behind "9-11." Let him do those films and he may well equal the unrivalled genius shown in both "JFK" and "Nixon," the two best political movies of the last twenty years.