To put it bluntly, if there was no call from Nixon to Foster, "Talk to Nixon" would only get 3.5 points at most. Although I am a small fan of Ron Howard, I feel that he is not an ambitious guy. Compared with his good friend Cameron, his movies are pretty stable, like a good student who didn’t smoke and fight since he was a child. Meng Sao.
For example, they are all about conquering space. Michael Bay’s "Peerless Tribulation" can make Bruce Willis detonate a nuclear bomb over 10,000 feet and call for love. Howard’s "Apollo 13" is better than anyone else. The introverted, the most HIGH climax is to let Tom Hanks use socks to make a carbon dioxide filter in the space capsule. For another example, it's all about schizophrenia. David Fincher's "Fight Club" can completely blow up the ugly and hypocritical reinforced concrete forest by Edward Norton, while Howard's "Beautiful Mind" allows Russell Crowe to accept it obediently. Electric shock therapy did not fire any ugly forces. However, the so-called "sorrowful sorrow" means both sorrow and sorrow. Long Howard's skill is not in fierce explosive power, but in "listening to thunder in a silent place", pushing the plot forward a little bit, and then breaking out at a certain point. First, it is called sensationalism. Therefore, even if it is not shocking the world, the box office is basically guaranteed, and sometimes it happens to touch the heartstrings of the academy, and it is okay to steal the music.
"Dialogue Nixon" is like this. When I saw two thirds of it, I basically thought it was a movie that used topics for speculation: inserting completely redundant "Easter Egg Interviews" at every turn-the so-called "Easter Egg Interviews" was a word I coined, namely " "Dialogue Nixon" suddenly stopped on the way to tell the story, inserting the party's post-event interview (of course it was also acting), and talked about nonsense about what he was thinking at the time, like the "Easter Egg" in the DVD. Whenever I see such an interview coming out, I just think, oh my god, clumsy! If it is meaningless to the story, then this innovation itself is meaningless. And the story is nothing more than a confrontation between two teams: one is Nixon, a politician who is at the end of the crossbow but is still surviving; Come to the second spring of your career. Everyone knows that Nixon lost in the end, so when I saw that Foster was overwhelmed by Nixon for a while, I think everyone was looking forward to a turning point. This turning point will not only inspire Foster’s small universe as expected, And let this old and tedious contest end sooner.
Sure enough, the turning point came as expected. But what I didn't expect was that this turning point turned out to be a magical touch, a superb finishing touch to this seemingly empty movie.
The stroke of magic is a call from Nixon to Foster, starting with "I want a cheeseburger" and ending with "Good night, Mr. President". There are two diametrically opposite explanations for this call: one explanation is that Nixon was drunk and confided in his own heart; the other explanation is that there was no such call at all, and Foster was under heavy pressure. I imagined it myself. Later, the film has twice passed Nixon’s face-to-face questions to guide us to doubt the authenticity of the call, but for the story, it doesn’t matter whether the call is true or not. What’s important is that it accomplished three tasks beautifully. :
1. Promote the development of the plot to a key climax. The call gave Foster a great excitement, slapped him up like a slap, and prompted him to realize that he had no retreat and must defeat Nixon in the last interview, otherwise he would be the eternal laughingstock of the press. So Foster prepared the final dialogue with an unprecedented diligent, active, and proactive attitude, laying the groundwork for subsequent success.
Second, the protagonist of the film is subtly changed. Before the call, the protagonist followed by the audience was Foster, and Nixon was just the Nixon in Foster's eyes. After the phone call, Foster has nothing to arouse the audience's sense of curiosity and sense of substitution. The film's perspective began to tilt towards Nixon, turning to his loneliness and loneliness, his contradictory regret.
Third, it has reversed the audience's perception of the theme of the film. Before the phone call, the film just showed the audience a farce where you rip and bite me, a boxing match where both sides bluffed; after the phone call, Nixon’s slightly drunken and generous speech made the audience realize that what happened next was not about rights. It's not about interests, it's just about the glory of the past that a warrior of twilight misses, and it's just about the mutual sympathy of the two "cheeseburgers" who climbed up from the bottom desperately. Seeing this, I feel that "Dialogue Nixon" is no longer about Foster vs. Nixon, but about all of us who are watching movies-whether young or old, noble or lowly. , Is it prevailing or frustrated-the inevitable destiny of man: to be knocked down, or to be knocked down next time. And the person you knocked down before may be your true soulmate.
The so-called "the back wave of the Yangtze River pushes the front wave, and the front wave dies on the beach"-"Talking with Nixon" through that unnecessarily phone call, coupled with the lonely back of Nixon in the end, is actually talking about such a simple and sad truth. Anyone who plays the game "Warcraft" should have an experience: When a hero drinks an invincible potion, he is often not prepared to charge, but to escape. Of course it feels good to be in the invincible aura, not afraid of the sky, but what is really terrifying is the moment the invincible aura disappears—at that moment, the space is empty. This is the lesson of Nixon who broke out in the Watergate Incident, and it is also a warning to all those in power, winners, and high positions. I will never forget the ending of "The Last Steak" written by Jack London: the old boxer lost the last game, just like the veteran he defeated, laughed at and disdained when he was young, sitting alone under the dark night sky. On the bench by the side of the street, he started to cry.
Going back to the film itself, we can find that if the director is just satisfied with straightforward narratives, then it’s okay not to write about the phone scene. Foster was a last resort in the end, and it is a logical thing to do adequate responses and eventually turn over. But to watch that kind of movie, it is better to watch the five saints break into the zodiac. This also proves that movies cannot tell stories for the sake of storytelling, and must do everything possible to add motivation to the characters. Without Vegeta's death, can Monkey King become a Super Saiyan? Without fifteen years of imprisonment, can Wu Daxiu become a vengeful demon? Nixon’s unnecessarily call is like a little salt in a stir-fry. It seems dispensable, but the taste is quite different. In the end, Long Howard's warm water finally offered us a delicious five-star meal. Although the "Da Vinci Code" the year before last had the same taste as chewing wax, it made people look forward to his next dish "Angels and Demons".
Rating: 4.5
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