Frost/Nixon

So I lied in my last post, I haven't made it outside this weekend. It's been pitiful and, if I were to show you a 360 degree angle shot of my living room, you would call the CDC and have them quarantine my apartment. Yes, it really is that bad.

But! This has been a weekend of movies, for sure. And I've watched a whole wide range of flicks (just got done with Kung Fu Panda again..haha). But, last night I watched the movie Frost/Nixon. I've been trying to knock out a lot of the movies there were all the buzz at this year's Oscar's since I did a poor job of seeing them in the theaters. It may seem a little redundant to review a movie that probably has been reviewed and criticized into the ground already, but this movie made me want to be a camera man. I think the movie as a whole was just along that steady line of decency, but there were a couple of moments that redeemed the whole thing.

The movie, for the most part, made the reported David Frost look a little worse than the ex-President they were trying to publicly crucify. He looked his role: a talk show host. And his crew could tell and did not pull any punches when letting Frost know that Nixon was using him as his debate play-thing through the first 11 interviews. I'm not entirely sure what switched turned on in his head, but the final interview was one of the most intense dialogues that I can remember in cinema -- right up there with the A Few Good Men back and forth. I'm obviously far too young to have any frame of reference when it comes to the actual Frost/Nixon interviews, but I could only imagine that staring through the view finder on the camera, using it as a blinder to the contextual world around us, that scene between Frank Langella and Michael Sheen had to be genuinely moving to the point of chills down the spine.

As a movie maker, that has to be the kind of scene that you dream for. If you do not have chills shooting through your body when Frost corners Nixon, then God help you. I'm going to place this movie, along with Doubt, in my top 5 I've seen in 2009. I'm going to work on a list and put it all together.