The Osterman Weekend

Definitely the worst Sam Peckinpah film I've seen, The Osterman Weekend pretentiously delivers a straightforward thriller in a tawdry fashion. Many of the lines possess merit but it's hard to believe they weren't rewritten to improve upon their catchy yet stark foundation.

Yeah yeah.

So a CIA agent's wife is murdered and afterwards he seeks revenge. He's eventually tasked with convincing television host John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) that three of his closest friends are working for the KGB. The plan: gain Tanner's trust and help him to persuade one of his friends to return to team America and recast himself as a double agent. The setting: a weekend vacation at Tanner's house. The giveaway: the CIA agent (John Hurt as Lawrence Fassett) has actually fabricated the story because he suspects that CIA director Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) is responsible for murdering his wife. He hopes to expose Danforth's murderous ways on national television in an interview conducted by Tanner. Danforth agrees to the interview after Tanner agrees to betray his friends. Tanner agrees to set Danforth up after Fassett kidnaps his wife and son and murders four of his friends. There's one of the worst car chase scenes I've ever scene. And does shattering glass really need several slow moving close-ups?

The smooth jazz soundtrack doesn't help things. Innovative directors use the ways in which their credits are presented to express meaning. I was fearful that The Osterman Weekend's opening credits were forecasting a predictable bourgeois sickly sentimental swan song, and unfortunately they were. If you're ever wondering where Trey Parker and Matt Stone find a lot of their material, The Osterman Weekend is worth checking out. Otherwise, unless you're a devoted Peckinpah fan or like watching bad movies with exceptional casts, steer clear of The Osterman Weekend ad nauseam.

Frost/Nixon

Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon closely follows the footsteps of Robert Altman's Secret Honor insofar as it presents a puzzlingly polite picture of the dastardly Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Set up in a centrist style (whose mitigating factor is represented by the naive, dedicated and opportunistic David Frost [Michael Sheen]), Frost/Nixon chronicles a series of interviews conducted by Frost in the wake of Richard Nixon's unprecedented Presidential resignation. Sensationalized for sentiments sake, the right is represented by Nixon acolyte and Vietnam Vet Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) and the left by a solid team of researchers including James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt). Shot linearly but intercut with reality t.v. style reflections upon the events as they unravel, the film kaleidoscopically presents a variety of passionately opposing viewpoints regarding commitment, exposition, desire, and dogma, all the way to an intoxicating interrogation of one Richard Nixon.

Each performer is given their chance to shine: Platt humoursly delivers an intricate Nixon impersonation, Rockwell zealously critiques Frost for not leveling the same degree of ideological rigour, Bacon demonstrates unyielding support for his mentor, and Sheen gesticulates and genuflects his way through several different frenetic facial expressions. But they're all left in Langella's domineering dust as he stoically commands his realization of the role. The performance is strong, potentially best actor strong (although the competition's stellar). While he generally steals each scene, at one point, after delivering a semi-commercial speech at a relatively unimportant function, he particularly lets go of his characteristic resolve and enthusiastically laments his post-Presidential predicament, thereby unleashing a substantial degree of split-second emotion that elevates his performance to another level.

There's a lot more to Frost/Nixon than an interview between a struggling talk show host and an ex-President. It complicates and coruscates the Nixon phenomenon in a wizened well-rounded manner, all the while demonstrating the cultural pressures competently pursuing each combatant. The subtly ambiguous ending supports its centrist technique as well inasmuch as Frost clearly wins, thereby saluting the left, but his victory is set up in a black or white either/or opposition, thereby clearly saluting the right. Does this ending represent Howard's elevation of clandestine contradictions and the ways in which they convolute any attempts to uniformly delineate a point of view, and, by doing so, does the ending, like Nixon's thoughts regarding the responsibilities of the President, situate the film beyond good and evil?

I really don't know.