I involuntarily cringed

Do I read right

That this is a movie

That isn't too

Mayberry USA tinged?

They were positively Shakespearean.

SZ attributes Nixon's creepy question re: fornicating -- to his flat footed social clumsiness. What???!!!! That's like everyone writing Dubya off as an idiot. It gets them both off the hook. They are both egomanical meglamanics (maybe that's redundant but accurate, no less) with personality defects. Nixon thought he was smarter than the universe and all he had to do was find and punish the "traitors" who disagreed with him. That disdain is displayed in every tape released of his conversations. He smiled in ther faces and plotted their demise in the backrooms.

Whereas Dubya just thinks he's annointed and that "if you aren't with him you're against him" and thank God he's the REAL King of the World and can make sure we know about and deal with those that oppose his divine rule.

I read the Nixon comment totally different. I saw that question as part of Nixon's plan to throw Frost off balance ...which is what, I believe, was intended to be conveyed by Frost's reaction shot which followed. He did the same thing just before camera rolled in the second interview. I don't remember the question, or which came first but it was clearly a strategy on Dick's part to rattle Frost and put him off balance once the interview started much like trash talking on the scrimmage line in football.

This was a contest, a battle of wills. Who will control the message? He had no respect for Frost as an interviewer and that's why he took the chance. This was ultimately revealed in the late night drunken phone call that proceeded the last interview. When DICK makes note of their similar needs .. that they are both working class stiffs with something to prove Frost says, (and I paraphrase because I don't have a press DVD to refer to) "Yes, but only one of us can win." This is the point of the drama!! Nixon had an agenda, as did Frost. Frost just took longer to realize just how much of a dick Dick was.

By making Nixon out as just a unsophisticated buffoon who barely knew how to act (or speak) in polite company, SZ is letting him off the hook and diminishing the victory that Frost managed to accomplish AND (as has been so often seen before in her reviews) missing the whole point of the drama!!

I don't know how old Ms. Zacharek is, but I'm old enough to remember the run-up and reaction to the Nixon-Frost interviews. Harry Reasoner did a segment on the CBS Evening News wherein he demanded to know if the BBC had lost their minds. EVERYONE knew this was Nixon's ticket back at the time, and the outrage across the media was palpable. Prior to the Frost interviews Nixon had been a pathetic figure desperately trying to eek out a living giving half-assed "lectures" to like-minded corporate hacks. After the Frost interviews his book queries were suddenly being answered. His ascendancy as a "senior statesman" was insured. That Ms. Zacharek is unaware of these facts renders her review frankly ludicrous, because what Ron Howard (who voted for Nixon in '72!) has done is, in effect, spun the interviews as something they weren't. Bravo.

For Opie!

Ayyyyy! Ron Howard's new movie is good? Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Play Frost?

You may question why such a wordy film, mostly shot with the

principals sitting down through the good bits is worthy of

leaving the house. There is supreme craftsmanship in telling

this story. The acting, the all-telling close-ups, and the unmissable sense of a major sporting event with true wordsmiths is about

to unfold. This movie challenges us all to step up to

our highest revelations just to see who falls. If you're smart,

you'll eat this story up. If you don't recall much of the events as they happened go see this film to challenge yourself

as to what it must have been like to be...well, you decide.

Perhaps you see yourself as Frost, or you've decided who Nixon

was and now here's another version. Go, enjoy, and talk it over

afterwards with others...you will grow watching this film.

He did not walk away a broken man. But he did leave a legacy of corruption that lives on. Rick Groen of the Globe and Mail put it well:

However, before this telling exchange, Frost elicits from Nixon a blunt assertion that would prove far more prophetic: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Given a current administration that has governed on precisely that precept, the contemporary resonance is clear. But it's a resonance that the film doesn't actively pursue. Rather, it falls into a common and complacent trap, into the conventional wisdom that the legacy of Watergate represents the triumph of truth over lies, of justice served by hard-digging journalists and an eventually brave Congress.

But the competing view suggests that the actual lessons of Watergate, mastered by the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, are far less benign. In this interpretation, Nixon's failure was not in using lies and dirty tricks, but in misusing them, in not mastering the art of the lie. Over the next decades of campaigning, reaching its zenith in the Dubya White House, that art got refined to the point where the brazen falsehood (John Kerry was a Swift Boat coward, Saddam was behind 9/11) ceased to matter - all that counted, and all that the media discussed, was the spun lie's potential for political success. - Rick Groen, Globe and Mail

The Frost/Nixon interview -- really a skilled interrogation -- shows just how much a skilled questioner can get out of a hostile subject. Important point: no waterboarding was required.

Mister Marker was around to see the Frost-Nixon interviews.

From the pontificial old fart tone he takes, I'd believe he was around to see the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

All you have to do is say you're guilty on national television and we'll let you eat all the babies you want.