FROST/NIXON….Becks went to see Frost/Nixon and wasn’t impressed:
The movie is even worse than the play. I felt that it was total bullshit. I don’t want to get too spoileriffic, but my main problem was that the movie cultivates an air of a faux documentary, trying to convince the readers that it’s well-researched and based on actual events, and then completely invents a pivotal scene that is supposed to explain both Frost and Nixon’s motivations.
I was pissed enough that this went unmentioned in the movie (my recollection was that it’s admitted in the play) but really turned against it upon learning of even more insidious manipulation of events from my fellow moviegoers after the show.
I haven’t seen the film either, partly for this reason, and I’m beginning to wonder if Ron Howard is planning to make a habit of this. As I recall, he was praised for the accuracy of Apollo 13, but then he went and made A Beautiful Mind, which bore practically no resemblance to the book at all. Like all of us, I’m pretty used to movies taking dramatic liberties with the truth, but aside from the fact that it depicts a famous mathematician who later became mentally ill, the movie version of A Beautiful Mind might as well have been made on another planet from the one where the book was published. I’ve been suspicious of everything Howard has made since then, and it sounds like Frost/Nixon is more along the same lines.
Anybody else seen it? What did you think?
