The Screengrab : richard nixon

Thursday Poll for December 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, to coincide with the release of Ron Howard’s big-screen take on Frost/Nixon, we asked you to choose your favorite big-screen version of our 37th President. According to you, the Trickiest Dick of all was the future Lt. Bookman and Jimmy Gator himself, Philip Baker Hall, in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. Hall brought in 45% of the vote, all the more impressive when you consider that his competition was somewhat stiffer than Nixon’s was in 1972. Coming in second place was Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, followed by the ever-popular “Other” (although readers neglected to specify precisely which Other they meant) and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, whose poor showing might be attributable to the fact that his film hasn’t yet been widely released. Sadly, Dan Hedaya’s comedic take on the disgraced Commander in Chief couldn’t manage a single vote, although for my part I would’ve ranked him second behind Hall.

This week, we look at the career of perennial Oscar favorite (and eternal Screengrab crush) Kate Winslet. With two new films on the verge of release, Winslet once again finds herself in the awards hunt for one or possibly even both of these performances. But before she can add yet another nomination to her already impressive five (at the age of 33, no less), let’s compare the relative merits of her already-nominated performances. Which is your favorite?

Which of Kate Winslet's nominated performances is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

I predict this will be a landslide, although lord knows I’ve been wrong before. As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Review: "Frost/Nixon"

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

I’ve been spending the waning days of the George W. Bush era immersed in Nixonland. Rick Perlstein’s massive, compulsively readable tome makes a convincing case that Richard Nixon capitalized on the divisions in ‘60s America so successfully that he defined the political landscape for decades to come. I’m only halfway through the book – early 1969, to be specific – so please don’t ruin the ending for me. My guess is that Nixon is elected to three more terms and his face is carved on Mt. Rushmore.

But I kid. I’m actually aware that Mr. Nixon had something of an ignominious downfall, and that some years later he sat down to discuss the matter with British chat show host David Frost. I never would have guessed that the backstage finagling behind this momentous meeting would serve as the basis for a critically-acclaimed Broadway play, let alone a Ron Howard movie. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. But while I have my doubts that this is a story that needed to be told, Frost/Nixon tells it in such a brisk, engaging way, it’s easy to forgive a few notable missteps.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I’m convinced what has ended up on the screen here bears much resemblance to the actual behind-the-scenes intrigue of the Frost/Nixon interviews. The play by Peter Morgan (who has adapted it for the screen) is probably at least 50% speculative nonsense, but you could say the same for Robert Altman’s 1984 foray into Nixonia, Secret Honor, and that film would be no less riveting for it. Howard isn’t on Altman’s level (please, don’t stop the presses), but for the most part he stays out of the way and lets the two lead actors do their thing.

They’ve been doing that thing for a while now. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella originated the roles of Frost and Nixon on London’s West End, and Langella won a Tony for his presidential portrayal when the production moved to Broadway. As the movie opens, Frost is hosting an Australian variety show, having lost his high-profile gig on American television, and he’s itching to get back to the big time. He sees his opening when President Nixon resigns in disgrace in 1974. Working on his memoirs, the ex-Prez wants a big payday for his first exclusive TV interview, and the U.S. networks are unwilling to pony up.

Enter the unlikely Frost, a man best known for chit-chatting with lightweights. (The real Frost disputes this, insisting he had interviewed many political giants before landing the big fish.) He gets Nixon to agree to four 90-minute specials, the last of which will focus exclusively on Watergate, then sets about cobbling together a syndicated network and sponsorship agreements with the likes of Weed-Wacker in order to meet Nixon’s seven-figure price. Frost brings aboard a team of Nixon experts to help him sharpen the knives for the grand inquisition, but as filming gets underway it is Nixon who has the upper hand, gassing on at length about his accomplishments and leaving Frost gasping for air.

Can Frost pull it together in time to nail Nixon to the wall once and for all in the climactic Watergate interview? As I recall, the general reaction to the actual Nixon/Frost interview has always been…eh, not really. (The real thing is now out on DVD, although I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.) Still, Howard and Morgan do a capable job of milking the drama out of this question, only occasionally overreaching, as in an imagined late-night drunken phone call from Nixon to Frost.

The supporting cast, including Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Toby Jones, is excellent, but I need to single out Rebecca Hall, mainly because I didn’t recognize her at all from Vicky Cristina Barcelona and so every time she appeared on screen I made a mental note to check IMDb as soon as I got home to find out where this wondrous being had been all my life. The ’70s style definitely works for her.

More importantly, Sheen and Langella expertly tango their way through the steps of this adversarial alliance between interviewer and subject. Sheen is equal parts showman and con man, revealing just enough vulnerability to earn our affections. Like Philip Baker Hall and to some extent Anthony Hopkins before him, Langella is a mythic, larger-than-life Nixon, but he leaves you with at least a smidgen of sympathy for the devil.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "W."
That Guy! Philip Baker Hall

Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

DC 9/11 was first broadcast four days short of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In other words, at a point (four months after the "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) when many Americans felt that the Iraq War was won and concluded, and just as the actual Bush was warming up his re-election campaign. It's a very pure propaganda movie, with Bottoms playing a resolute, on-top-of-things commander in chief who explicitly connects the case against Saddam Hussein to the need to protect the nation from terrorism and to avenge the lives lost on 9/11. It's a measure of the national mood at that time that the film didn't arouse much in the way of head-shaking or tongue-clucking in the mainstream media. But as it became clear that the war wasn't going to be one of those little problems that can be wrapped up in the course of one man's eight years in offices--not this man, anyway--and support for it began to plummet, it became less common to see Bush depicted onscreen as a one-man Mount Rushmore. But the funny thing is that, even as Bush began to be portrayed as stupid and inept and gutless, he continued to be portrayed as, well, kind of sympathetic. The original media cartoon of Bush, as captured in the campaign-diary documentary Journeys with George (co-directed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra), was that he was a dopey but lovable regular guy, who might as well be given the country to run, since everyone knew it wasn't that hard. Then, after a brief interlude in which Bush was portrayed in the media as a down-home cross between George Washington and Nick Fury, the earlier stereotype was reinstated, with the new fillip that being lovably dumb didn't qualify run to be leader of the free world--but how can you blame such a nice guy for that?

When the nice but dumb Bush made his comeback, it was in such movies as the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the sweetly dense president (Perry King), looking lost and frightened, politely asks his Cheneyesque vice president if there's anything he should do in response to the end of the world. The scene is a stand-in for the Bush administration's original answer to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, a scene that Oliver Stone declined to stage: what the hell happened between the time Bush set down that copy of The Pet Goat and the time he next showed his face on TV. (The Day After Tomorrow actually kills the Bush stand-in off quick, the better to shift the blame for everything that's gone wrong to the Cheney figure, played by Kenneth Welsh--to you Twin Peaks, the actor who played Windom Earle, the serial psychopath who tied Major Briggs to an archery target and failed to closely examine the fine print on his contract regarding his capacity to ask visitors to the Black Lodge for their souls.) For even softer treatment of Bush, you can turn to such "satires" as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which portray Dubya as a friendly middle-aged frat boy who is either ignorant of the effects of his own policies or too cowed by his own advisers to take a stand--at least until some righteous weed and male bonding has had its effect.

In W., Stone, too, treats him as basically a nice, well-meaning guy hobbled by his inability to overcome his daddy issues. (And for good measure, he has James Cromwell playing the dithering, unfeeling Bush, Senior as a noble, aristocratic Rudy Vallee type whose greatest crime is to tear up when Bill Clinton hands him his ass at the polls.) It will irritate many Bush haters to see him continue to evade responsibility like this. On the other hand, it may be a sign that however lingering the effects of his presidency will be, Bush's personal mark on history may be slight and transient. After all, the modern president who still looms largest in the national imagination may be Richard Nixon, who is also the one who has turned up in the most movies behaving like a cross between Dracula and a James Bond villain. For that matter, movies of the last eight years have done less to hold Bush responsible for the effects of his presidency than '90s movies like Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, and Absolute Power did to hold Bill Clinton to task just for his inability to keep it in his pants. As Elbert Ventura points out, the meanest version of Bush to turn up onscreen is probably the American president played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love, Actually, who bullies the British prime minister--Hugh Grant playing a fantasy of Tony Blair as a likable lonely guy--until the P.M. catches him hitting on his own object of romantic desire, at which point he hitches up his britches and marches to the nearest bank of microphones to stand up to the little toad. In other words, to get an unsympathetic version of George W. Bush into a movie, you have to jump to another continent and give him Bill Clinton's zipper problem.

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "W."

Trailer Review: W. Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ah, there’s the Oliver Stone we all know. When it was announced that Stone was making a movie about George W. Bush to be released on the eve of the Presidential election, many people scratched their heads. How would he take on our most prickly and controversial Commander in Chief since Nixon? But the more I see of W., the more interested I get. Sure, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser could very well make mincemeat of the historical record, but hell- that’s par for the course with Stone. Yet I like the chutzpah he shows here, using a strange cocktail of fact, conjecture and outright fabrication to attempt to figure out what makes Bush tick. Moreover, he’s actually done it in a context that looks like a rollicking entertainment instead of a muckraking screed. More and more, it’s looking like I’ll be there opening weekend.

Trailer Review: Frost/Nixon

Paul Clark — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Fans of Peter Morgan’s stage production of Frost/Nixon have extended this big-screen adaptation of the play a good amount of goodwill due to the Broadway stars (Frank Langella and Michael Sheen) being kept for the movie. But while I’m always in favor of character actors (especially talented veterans like Langella) getting their moments in the spotlight, judging by the trailer I’m not sure that retaining them for the movie was the right move. Part of the problem is Nixon himself, who was not merely one of the most recognizable political figures of the past half-century but also one of the most widely-imitated, making portraying the role on the big screen a challenge for any actor. And frankly, I’m not sure I like how Langella is approaching the role here- his vocal mannerisms and gestures might work onstage, but they become overbearing in the trailer, like a straight-up impersonation rather than an attempt to get under his skin. Of course, much of this no doubt has to do with the director, as “Academy Award Winning Director Ron Howard” (ugh) probably didn’t do much to discourage Langella from using the same approach to the character that he did onstage. But in a less-is-more medium like film, maybe Langella needed to ease up on the Tricky Dick stuff and just play the character, like Philip Baker Hall in Secret Honor.

Reviews By Request: The Atomic Cafe (1982, Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

One of the most fascinating aspects of American history during the 1950s was the way the image of wholesome innocence was juxtaposed with perhaps the greatest sustained wave of fear our country has ever felt- the fear of nuclear annihilation. Of course, the two were hardly mutually exclusive- it was partly the paranoia that was sweeping the country at the time that kept all “good law-abiding Americans” on the straight and narrow path, lest they draw undue attention. This contrast between the white-bread face of fifties America and the tangible threat of the Bomb is but one notable aspect of the documentary The Atomic Café, but it’s probably the one that registered with me most strongly.

When regular Screengrab reader Jason Alley recommended The Atomic Café for this week’s Reviews By Request, I was expecting something more kitschy. The film's poster and the synopsis on IMDb suggested something along the lines of the documentary Hell’s Highway, which took a wink-wink look back at those cheeseball highway safety movies many of us were made to suffer through in Driver’s Ed. But while some of the helpful hints offered by the atomic bomb-themed classroom films seen in The Atomic Café sound pretty risible in retrospect, the film is deadly serious not just about the horror of potential nuclear war, but about how little we really knew about it back then.

Rather than a haphazard montage of old educational films and newsreel footage, Atomic Café directors Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty structure the film as a chronological history of the building nuclear threat, told entirely through “found footage.” It’s this structure that’s key to the movie’s effect. A looser film might draw attention to the individual bits themselves, possibly drawing the same sort of knowing laughter that is often afforded misguided cautionary relics of yore (e.g. Reefer Madness). Instead, the chronology of the film allows the information to have a cumulative effect, as we approach the mindset of the shorts based on what the film has already shown us.

Consider how the film begins with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The footage that follows focuses largely on the American idea that these bombings brought about the end of World War II (there’s even a newsreel entitled ”Peace: Isn’t It Wonderful?”). But while this might have indeed been the case, the footage from Japan tells a different story- charred corpses, mangled bodies, buildings leveled to the ground. As we see an aerial view of a bombed city, the filmmakers play an old American radio show in the background, with the hosts joking that the city looks “like Ebbets Field after a Giants doubleheader.”

But it wasn’t a joke anymore when the Soviets got their own Bomb. Anti-Communist fervor consumed our government, the Rosenbergs were executed, and we began preparing for the worst. Yet strangely enough, American newsreels and educational films actually downplayed the potential destruction a Soviet attack could cause. Bert the Turtle tells children to “duck and cover,” grade schoolers stock up on canned goods, and families build fallout shelters in the basements. All the while, those in the know suggest that these preparations might not be nearly enough to protect us, and wouldn’t even function as a deterrent.

All the while, the Raffertys and Loader use nothing but pre-existing audio and film, but they nonetheless make their points in no uncertain terms. This is especially true of the film’s final montage, when the film intercuts declassified films of actual nuclear tests with shots of people reacting to hypothetic blasts in educational films. As we see children crawling under their desks and adults covering themselves with picnic blankets, it’s hard not to marvel at how ill-prepared we really were for the possibility of nuclear war. How lucky for everyone that we never got to that point.

Small touches linger in the mind. An Army film showing soldiers participating in radiation experiments. An announcer interrupting a monologue about the Communist threat to plug two local shopping centers as bastions of “glorious capitalism.” A single shot of a Japanese man used twice, once in the lead-in to the footage of the Hiroshima bombing, and again in the final montage- perhaps as a way of musing how little good ducking and covering would have done him. Newsreel footage of a Wisconsin town simulating a “Communist invasion.” Then-Vice President Nixon proclaiming mental health to be “the single most important issue facing Americans today.” A priest insistently preaching the need to keep extra people out of your fallout shelter, by using force if necessary.

Watching The Atomic Café, I thought back to Peter Watkins’ masterpiece The War Game, which imagined the aftermath of a nuclear blast on an ill-prepared society. But while The Atomic Café lacks the gut-punch terror of Watkins’ film, its specificity and comprehensive recreation of the mindset of the period makes it worthy of being mentioned in the same breath, and that’s no mean feat.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Forrest Gump a hit?: A number of factors that played a significant role in making Forrest Gump a success. To begin with, there was the storyline, which placed a Pilgrim’s Progress-style narrative in the context of the second half of the twentieth century. Forrest (played by Tom Hanks) meets many of the most significant people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, while bearing witness to or even playing a part in a number of important events from the same period, all the while acting like it’s no big deal. And not only does he survive the journey, but he becomes an unlikely success, armed with only the sage words of his Mama (Sally Field), his undying love for Jenny (Robin Wright), and his own good nature.

In his re-creation of recent historical events, director Robert Zemeckis combined cutting-edge effects with good old-fashioned nostalgia, giving the audience a chance to see a fictional character interact onscreen with such key figures as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and John Lennon, instead of having actors portray them. In addition, the storyline combined a sincere celebration of hearth-and-home values with the ironic touch of making its uncannily lucky protagonist a simpleton with an IQ of 75. Forrest Gump became a monster word-of-mouth hit due to these factors as well as the iconic performance of Hanks, a well-liked (and Oscar-winning) actor who cemented his status as Hollywood’s favorite Everyman with this film. It was the #1 hit of 1994 and took home six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, plus a second consecutive Best Actor statue for Hanks.

What happened?: As is often the case when a movie becomes a surprise smash, Hollywood took the Gump brand and rammed it down the throats of America. Soon after the film became a hit, Paramount commissioned a volume entitled Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump, which basically consisted of folksy quotations from the film. Other tie-ins soon followed- posters, cookbooks, even a chain of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants. Eventually, the majority of people were more or less Gump-ed out.

In addition, the fall of 1994 brought the year’s other big word-of-mouth hit, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s film was as cool and edgy as Gump was warm and fuzzy, and the two were quickly positioned as pop-culture polar opposites. While this assessment is somewhat unfair to both films- even Tarantino acknowledged as much- Pulp quickly came to symbolize the future of movies, while Gump was the establishment. Even today, Pulp’s critical rep remains intact, while Gump’s has fallen quite a bit- witness the former’s #1 status atop EW’s recent “New Classics” list, while the latter failed to crack the top 100.

Does Forrest Gump still work?: Sort of, although it’s not without its problems. The combination of sentiment and irony that Zemeckis tries to pull off here is a tricky one, and I don’t quite think he succeeds. There’s no small irony in Forrest’s situation- in a tricky time, he becomes a success largely because he doesn’t know any better than to live according to his nature. He doesn’t know better than to do as he’s told and be loyal to those closest to him, which helps him to become a star football player, a war hero, a table tennis champion, a successful shrimp boat captain, and a philanthropist, all with an intelligence level that wouldn’t have allowed him to enroll in public school without the (ahem) intervention of his Mama.

The trouble is that the irony of the situation only really works if we believe Forrest is slow-witted, and I never quite did. The trouble has less to do with Hanks’ performance as it does with the literal nature of film. On the page, Winston Groom sketched out the character of Forrest using only language, and despite the book’s numerous other flaws, we believed its hero was an idiot. Not so in the film. Hanks does a fine job with the role as written, but too much intelligence flickers behind his eyes for us to believe he’s as simple as the film says he is. In addition, screenwriter Eric Roth often falls back on impeccably written monologues to allow Forrest to express his deeper feelings, a tendency which runs contrary to the character’s nature. Such soliloquies would require no small amount of thought, and if there’s one thing Forrest Gump isn’t, it’s a thinker.

When viewing the film again recently, I also found the film’s treatment of Jenny to be fairly ugly. Forrest Gump uses Jenny as a counterpoint to Forrest, a woman whose background is considerably more unfortunate than Forrest’s. Unlike Forrest, Jenny is intelligent enough to think for herself, but the choices she makes for herself- posing for Playboy, shacking up with the leader of the SDS at Berkeley, getting into drugs- invariably get her into trouble, and time and again Forrest has to bail her out. This just doesn’t sit well with me- Forrest coasts on the tide of fate and is rewarded by meeting three presidents, seeing the world, and becoming independently wealthy, while Jenny uses her free will to get kicked out of college, abused by her revolutionary boyfriend, and turn into a junkie, before rebounding in time to die of a mysterious “virus”? I’m not sure whether this counts as misogynistic or simply anti-thought, but either way, I don’t like it much.

There are a few other elements that didn’t work for me. That extended sequence of Forrest running back and forth across the country serves little discernible purpose besides giving us picture-postcard shots of the American landscape, throwing a couple of nostalgia jokes into the story, and filling up a few years of Forrest’s life before Jenny calls again. And I became annoyed with the film’s tendency to use the most obvious soundtrack choices, especially during the scenes set in the late sixties. “Fortunate Son”? “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”? “Let’s Get Together”? Check, check, and check.

In spite of these flaws, much of Forrest Gump remains quite effective, beginning with Zemeckis’ use of special effects. Much was made at the time of the way the film placed Forrest into old newsreel footage, but while those effects have grown dated, other instances of CGI in the film are far more impressive. The most obvious example of this is the still-convincing removal of Lt. Dan’s legs, aided in no small part by Gary Sinise’s performance. But even in less obvious special effects scenes- the football games, the demonstration in Washington, D.C.- Forrest Gump remains a standard-bearer for photo-realistic CGI, which is a testament to Zemeckis and his effects teams’ attention to detail.

But in the end, it’s the human element that’s the heart of Forrest Gump. I’ve always been a fan of the way the film handles the complex dynamic between Forrest and Lt. Dan, as well as how their relationship between the two men evolves over time. I also found the simplicity of the friendship between Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) to be surprisingly touching. And on the occasions when the screenplay gives Forrest dialogue that actually sounds like it might come out of the mouth of a man with a 75 IQ (rather than a screenwriter who’s trying to “write dumb”), Hanks’ performance is deserving of the love that was bestowed on it at the time. I especially liked the following exchange between Jenny and Forrest, which does a better job of getting to the heart of Forrest’s character than any Oscar-friendly monologue ever could:

Jenny: Why are you always so good to me, Forrest?
Forrest: You’re my girl!

Not That Anyone Cares Now, but Rudy Giuliani Was the Tazmanian Devil

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Jeff Greenfield at Slate offers a timely new unified theory of American presidential politics based on the work of Chuck Jones. In a nutshell: American politicians are divided between those who remind voters of Bugs Bunny and those who remind them of Daffy Duck. "As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones — he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities — Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor." JFK was a Bugs, Nixon a Daffy; Ronald Reagan, a Bugs, Jimmy Carter a Daffy (who, as if in some Biblical prophecy, prepared for the 1980 contest by being attacked by a rabbit.) Some partisans may detect cracks in the argument. Greenfield identifies the current incumbent as a "Bugs Bunny", but do either Al Gore or John Kerry match up with Daffy Duck, as described by Greenfield: "He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury," responding to every setback with "a sibilant sneer"? (Personally, I always associated Kerry with Bullwinkle. But maybe dragging in characters from Jay Ward Productions would demand a whole other set of rules.) And while there may be something to the idea that George W. Bush seems more "at ease, laid back, secure, confident" than his adversaries, it will come as some news to the United Nations that "he never flails at his opponents or at the world" — and perhaps a bit of a belated shocker to everyone else that "he knows the way things work." (Me, I'd say that Bush was more like that manic little dog who used to follow Spike the bullddog around, looking like he was about to piss himself, babbling non-stop about how they were gonna find some cats and put the smackdown on them. Spike, of course, was Dick Cheney.)

In Greenfield's analysis — and he must be right, he does this for a living — Hillary Clinton is a Daffy, Barack Obama a Bugs. "When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply 'denounce' Louis Farrakhan but 'reject him,' Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don't really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination." So that should give Obama an edge in the general election when he faces John McCain, who is as Daffy as they come. But if Clinton should prevail, then come November, we will have the awesome, perhaps scary spectacle of two Daffys locked in a winner-take-all battle for supremacy. Worlds will collide in a way that Chuck Jones never dared to imagine.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SCARFACE (1983)

Here’s something funny about Oliver Stone: he seems to have a lot more fun when he’s writing movies than when he’s directing them. While the movies where he’s behind the camera have become self-important bores, the movies where he’s behind the typewriter are highly enjoyable, if completely demented. Conan the Barbarian may have been the purest distillation of his bloodthirstily goofy aesthetic, but it was the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface a year later where he really let his freak flag fly. A perfect example of a movie that’s compulsively watchable without actually being very good, Scarface also proves that the one thing more enjoyable than a movie with non-stop vulgarity is a movie with non-stop vulgarity in an incredibly over-the-top quasi-Cuban accent. (A chainsaw execution can’t hurt, either.) Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t an obscenity artist; he is but a humble craftsman, a busy businessman who relies on the word "fuck" because he hasn’t got the time to learn any other ones. For every cleverly crafted "Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass? See if it fits," there’s a workmanlike get-over like "You know what? Fuck you! How about that?" How about that, indeed. It’s hard to know if Scarface would have been the deranged, hyperactive masterpiece that it is without Pacino’s constant Hispanic-causing-panic vulgarisms, but it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun. If you don’t believe us, try to imagine Paul Muni saying "This town is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked." Now that’s comedy!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

David Mamet's ode to testosterone-soaked salesmen is a veritable symphony of profanity, with even legendary milquetoast Jack Lemmon attempting to wrap his mouth around words like "cocksucker." (Not to speak ill of the dead, but he's no Ian McShane.) Alec Baldwin is the soloist who takes home top honors, though his inspirational speech to the troops does not rely solely on foul language for its power. With his reptilian delivery, lines like "coffee is for closers" and "third prize is you're fired" sound nearly as venomous as the blunt rejoinder "Fuck you – that's my name!" Though he doesn't say it in so many words, Baldwin makes the point that the sales game is a dick-measuring contest and everybody but him is coming up short. Like all the best motivational speakers, he uses props. "It takes brass balls to sell real estate," he announces, brandishing a pair for effect. Don't try this in your own boardroom unless you have good lawyers.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

When the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes started to come out, what shocked a lot of people wasn't the president's amorality so much as the language with which he expressed it. His obscene ramblings suggested a potty-mouthed genie bubbling and rumbling and thrashing beneath the surface of his carefully fostered image as the last defender of Middle America, subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and Norman Rockwell illustrations. In Robert Altman's one-man show, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), sealed in the wood-paneled tranquility of his study like William Hurt set to de-evolve in his isolation tank in Altered States, runs through his whole life and political career in a spastic monologue punctuated by sputtered out "shit!"s and "fuck!"s. It all builds to the moment when Nixon, having considered blowing his brains out as penance for his sins, decides that this would give too much satisfaction to the real monsters, the ones who "elected me, not once, not twice, but all my goddamn life," and signs off with an endless, Tourette's-like chant of "Fuck em! Fuck 'em!!" As he bellows out the same two words, again and again, Altman frames his wild face in the screens of the TV monitors that line the room. The genie has been isolated.

POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

John Singleton's Poetic Justice actually played against Tupac's ever-growing reputation as an out-of-control thug and notorious player. His character Lucky is a postman who gets dissed in the very first scene and then has to endure a road trip with the same girl that made him the butt of the joke. This is every guy's worst nightmare – confined space with a girl who shot you down. Unless you're counting her role on Good Times or Rhythm Nation 1814, this was essentially Janet Jackson's film debut, and even though she may have told us she was nasty, most people still assumed, looking at that angelic face, that she was probably very nice. This scene is so memorable because all of that is blown to pieces as she trades fuck yous with Mr. Thug Life himself. Although the scene can certainly stand on its own in terms of pure firepower, you might want to brush up on the back story – outlined in our previous Top 10 Offscreen Feuds list – to help you understand the uncanny authenticity of the venom being spit here.

NIL BY MOUTH (1997)

When it comes to vulgar language in movies, there is quality, and then there is quantity. Whether or not Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, counts as a lodestone of quality obscenity, it is the all-time grand champion in terms of quantity. It’s actually a fine little film, and Oldman’s script about growing up in a dysfunctional working-class family in South London is quite compelling at times, but where it truly excels is in its non-stop barrage of obscenity. No less than the Guinness Book of World Records has certified it as the film containing the most iterations of "fuck": the word appears an astonishing 470 times, or almost four times a minute. It’s that sort of dedication that separates the pretenders from the true masters, and Oldman doesn’t stop there: he also favors us with the word "cunt" a whopping eighty-two times, or once every minute and a half. Most of the fucks and cunts issue from the lager-stained mouth of Ray Winstone, playing a character based on Oldman’s own father. (Oldman dedicates the film to his old man, which must have made him feel pretty good about himself.) Some films don’t even have as much punctuation as Nil By Mouth has "fuck"s; if its director grew up in an environment anything like the one portrayed here, it’s a wonder he can communicate at all. Other films may be more artful in their use of the f-word, and other films may save it for when it counts more instead of going for total sensory overload, but until someone manages to make a movie in which someone uses the word "fuck" in every frame, then Nil By Mouth will be the reigning king.

– Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Bryan Whitefield

Check out Part 1 here.

How the East Was Won: The Soviet Western

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"How," Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" You could chalk that up to the paradox of being French, but it turns out that even a Godless Russian Communist wasn't sure how to respond to the Duke's charms. According to documentarian Lucy Ash, writing in The New Statesman, "Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, according to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him." Some of the Soviet leaders who came to power during the post-Stalin thaw were puppies by comparison, reduced to puddles of fanboy mush by far lesser lights. Leonid Brezhnev, it seems, had a jowly man-crush on Chuck Connors. "At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series [The Rifleman] to be shown on Soviet TV."

But as in all things, the Kremlin really sought to demonstrate their cultural superiority by showing that anything the capitalist swine could do, they could do better. Thus was the Soviet "Western," or "Eastern," born. In these films, "the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons." The standard setter for the genre is the 1969 White Sun of the Desert, "set in Russian central Asia during the civil war. The hero, Fyodor Sukhov, is a Red Army soldier who has just been demobbed and is desperate to go home, but gets caught up in a showdown between a Bolshevik cavalry unit and some Basmachis (the Russian name for armed counter-revolutionaries) in the deep south of the USSR. These Islamic Turkic rebels are the bad guys, the equivalent of the Indians in an American western. The arch-villain is Abdulla, a Basmachi warlord fleeing the Reds. He kills a handful of his wives and abandons the remaining eight in the desert, and so the gallant Soviet hero is forced to come to their rescue. The film was originally called Save the Harem." As played by the blond, blue-eyed Anatoli Kuznetsov, Sukhov is "the embodiment of Russian macho cool. . . laconic and unruffled." Ash suggests that one key to the movie's enduring popularity is that it offers contemporary Russian viewers a heroic masculine image at a time when that sort of thing seems to be in short supply. In fact, Russian cosmonauts became so taken with it that they latched onto it and began to watch it as part of their ritual preparations for a space launch. When the Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi became a space tourist and contracted to spend ten days at the International Space Station, the Russians with whom he ferried out made him watch the damn thing first. His stoic verdict? "Not bad for a Soviet movie." — Phil Nugent

"Chuck Norris Doesn't Endorse, He Tells America How It's Gonna Be!"

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Iowa voters (and anyone with an Internet connection) have just begun seeing this campaign ad, in which Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reels off a few of the more family-friendly and less pretzel-twistingly surreal "Chuck Norris facts" while Norris sits beside him assuring potential voters that the Huckster will protect our Second Amendment rights and "put the IRS out of business." Taken strictly on an aesthetic level, and reminding everyone that any time we use that term in reference to political commercials we're grading on a curve, it's a smart piece of work. Discussing the ad in Slate, the site's "Trailhead" campaign blogger writes, "It's unclear to me why he would base his first Hawkeye State TV campaign on an outdated Internet meme that might not have trickled up to most caucus-goers," thus paradoxically implying that the "Norris facts" angle is all played-out, yet at the same time suggesting that it's too hip for the room. What may really matter is that in a contest where all the other Republican candidates have been concentrating on establishing their grim-manliness bona fides, Huckabee has unexpectedly demonstrated a sense of humor. What's more, he's dared to suggest there's something comical about macho icons, and maybe, by extension, something comical about a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys competing in a "Who Is Most Macho?" contest. Huckabee's delivery in the ad is pretty good, too; he doesn't ham it up, but unlike, say Richard Nixon, whose last words might well have been, "Explain to me again what I was doing on Laugh-In", he does make it clear that he gets the joke. If Huckabee gets anywhere in the primaries, it'll be because he manages to establish himself as the preferred candidate of religious conservatives, but if he builds on that base, it'll be because he manages, as George W. Bush did in 2000, to strike voters who might be inclined to see conservative holy-roller types as kind of scary as reassuringly normal. (How Bush ever pulled this off we still don't understand. Were we all drunk that year?) If nothing else, Huckabee has already pulled off a major comedy coup by inspiring the complaint, "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy," to pass the lips of his rival Fred Thompson, currently running for president on the basis of his record as New York City's pretend District Attorney. — Phil Nugent

That Guy!: Philip Baker Hall

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

It's no secret that the selection of a That Guy! is a highly personal thing. I play favorites in this space, and make no apologies. There's nothing objective about why I'll pick a Tom Atkins but eschew a Burt Young — it's as simple as one appealing to me on a certain level and the other leaving me as cold as a glass of raw eggs. Everyone has their preferences when it comes to character actors, and finding agreement on the subject is harder than getting a group of a dozen movie critics to agree on a Coen Brothers film. Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and if there's ever been anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Baker Hall, I've never met them (and they better hope I don't, particularly in a dark alley, and with a couple of boxes of Sno-Caps in me). It's astonishing to consider that Hall is seventy-six years old — not because he doesn't look it, with his worn, lined face, perpetually plastered-down hair and eyes that droop with a combination of sadness and intelligence — but because he's looked that way for at least twenty years. The common perception that he sprung into the world fully formed, like Athena, from the imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson, ignores a film career that goes back almost five decades — not that it wasn't largely worth ignoring before he crossed paths with Robert Altman, who gave him a role that would forever grant him one of the all-time great film performances in history even if he'd never made another movie. But until Anderson made him the patriarch of his own personal stock company of actors, the bleary, wise Ohioan's bread and butter was in television. Putting in competent, bill-paying performances in everything from M*A*S*H and The Jeffersons to Family Ties to L.A. Law, he reached his greatest heights on the small screen as the absurdly overblown Lt. Bookman on Seinfeld, a library cop ripped from the pages of Mike Hammer and put to work in service of chasing down delinquent fines. It showed off Hall's considerable comic — indeed, self-parodic — skills, but he's still at his best as a tragic figure who has seen just a little too much of the world and is always waiting for a final moment of grace that may never come.

Where to see Philip Baker Hall at his best:

SECRET HONOR (1984)

One of the towering performances not just in his career but in all of American cinema, Hall's turn as a fictionalized Richard Milhaus Nixon is gripping enough to carry the entire film — and it does: he's the only person on screen during the entire hour-and-a-half runtime. Director Robert Altman, who knew Hall from television work, had seen him perform as Nixon in the stage version of Secret Honor, and trusted that he was enough of an actor to carry it over to film; the gamble paid off in spades, as the audience is held spellbound during the entire stunning performance.

HARD EIGHT (1996)

Sixty-five is the age at which you're supposed to retire, not the age at which you have your first real breakout performance. But Paul Thomas Anderson, who'd selected Hall based largely on the strength of his work in Secret Honor, chose him to play the tormented professional gambler Sydney in his full-length directorial debut. Watching the aging Hall play off of promising young character actor (and friend of this program) John C. Reilly is like watching an aging gunslinger trade shots with an up-and-comer, a dynamic which perfectly plays into their respective characters.

DOGVILLE (2003)

Philip Baker Hall's performance as Tom Edison Sr. in Lars Von Trier's controversial and daring story of degradation and evil served not only to record another terrific performance in his portfolio, but to put the critical establishment on notice that he wasn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Paul Thomas Anderson, Inc. Hall brings entirely new dimensions and depths to his performance as Dogville's patriarch, while never sacrificing his greatest asset: the ability to convey the weight of a man whose eyes have seen more than they should.

— Leonard Pierce

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Christopher Jones as President Max Frost, WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

This A.I.P. exploitation classic from the hippie era predates the lowering of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Here, a presidential candidate played by Hal Holbrook courts the youth vote by promising to lower the mandatory voting age and turns to rock star Max Frost (née Max Jacob Flatow, Jr.), the voice of his generation, to help him with his campaign. Max startles everyone by publicly demanding that fourteen-year-olds be given the right to vote, then, after Holbrook is elected, starting a national drive to lower the minimum age for election to public office to fourteen as well. Inevitably, Max runs for president himself, and after his youthful hordes propel him into the White House, he decrees that thirty is now the mandatory retirement age and has everyone over thirty-five bused to "re-education camps" to spend the rest of their days forcibly blitzed on LSD. But Max's reign may not last long; the movie ends with ominous shots of children giving the fish-eye to their teen-aged overlords and murmuring that they, too, will soon get theirs.

Biff McGuire as The President, THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON (1973)

This extremely low-budget film — long on under-lit sets and expository narration — stars Dean Stockwell as a presidential cabinet official who comes down with a bad case of lycanthropy and spends his full-moon nights rampaging around the nation's capitol in a furry Halloween mask. The Nixonian president and his advisers (including Michael Dunn as a dwarf named "Dr. Kiss") conspire to blame the werewolf's bloody killings on left-wing radicals. In the end, Stockwell is killed, but not before mauling the president, who, having thus been contaminated, is heard turning into a howling monster during a broadcast address to the nation.

John Ritter as President Chet Roosevelt, AMERICATHON (1979)

This busy, wilted satire, based on a play by Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor of the Firesign Theater but co-written and directed by Neil Israel, of Bachelor Party and the Police Academy movies, is set in a "future" 1998 when the United States has exhausted its energy reserves and is near bankruptcy, with a running-shoe cartel headed by Chief Dan George threatening to foreclose on the country. President Roosevelt, who operates out of a Marina Del Ray condo known as "the Western White House" and who permits his live-in girlfriend to sit in on cabinet meetings, decides to try to raise enough money to pay off the national debt by sponsoring a thirty-day telethon organized by Peter Riegert and hosted by Harvey Korman. Things get complicated when the president is kidnapped by terrorists while enjoying a tryst with a Vietnamese rock singer (Zane Busby), but in the end everything turns out all right: the telethon is a success, Riegert wins the faithless president's girlfriend, and the presidential hulking, dim-witted bodyguard, Jerry (Richard Schaal) is sworn in as chief executive.

HONORABLE MENTION: Two Real-Life Presidents Who Might As Well Have Been Fictional

Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, SECRET HONOR (1984)

Playing an iconic figure like Dick Nixon is hard enough, particularly when the script calls upon you to portray him both as a sympathetic figure and a self-deceiving monster. And when you're the only guy in the movie, it becomes next to impossible. But if anyone is up to the challenge, it's the always-outstanding Philip Baker Hall. In this little-seen but compellingly watchable Robert Altman film, Hall portrays a fictionalized, almost mythological Nixon, recording what are putatively notes for his next book but which, with the aid of alcohol and encroaching paranoia, become a confession to the American people and a titanic, defensive apologia, a referendum on a man's entire life. As an impression of Nixon, it's only partially successful, but as an evocation of him, it's perfect — truly a titanic performance, alternating between enraged ranting, deceptive resentment, touching memories of childhood, and total re-invention; as Hall's Nixon raves, spews, laughs, bellows and accuses for an hour and a half, we get a sense of both his mammoth ego and his homely humanity, often in the same speech. The final scene, where a defiant Nixon screams "Fuck ‘em!" to everyone who ever crossed him — his enemies, his allies, the American people — seems both outrageous and inevitable.

Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt, THE WIND AND THE LION (1975)

John Milius has always has a soft spot in his heart for Teddy Roosevelt, who in his eyes was the ultimate hard-living American man's man. Milius re-created Teddy's famous charge up San Juan Hill in his 1997 made-for-TV movie The Rough Riders, and in 1975's The Wind and the Lion he shows us Roosevelt (played by Brian Keith) after his rough ridin' days were over. President Roosevelt, more than a little weary of politics and diplomacy, suddenly springs into action after the abduction of American heiress Eden Pedicaris (Candice Bergen) by the Berber prince Raisuli (Sean Connery). Proclaiming the need for "respect for human life and respect for American property," he mobilizes the Army to find Eden, questionable ethics be damned. In Teddy's words, "Why spoil the beauty of the thing with legality?" Sure, the fact that it's an election year may partly explain his motivation, but it's more likely that Roosevelt relishes another chance to embark on a ballsy mission in an exotic, especially one against a worthy opponent like Raisuli. But Roosevelt's finest moment in the film comes when he states: "The American grizzly is a symbol of the American character: strength, intelligence, ferocity. Maybe a little blind and reckless at times. . . but courageous beyond all doubt. And one other trait that goes with all previous — loneliness. The American grizzly lives out his life alone. Indomitable, unconquered — but always alone. He has no real allies, only enemies, but none of them as great as he." It's a rousing and eloquent tribute by Milius, both to the man he so idolizes and to the country they both love.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov