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Dancing_P [ 6.0 ]
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If there's one thing for which I admire Oliver Stone, it'S for having the balls to make movies that are so obviously biased and quite often contain a lot of bullshit. Few filmmakers have the foolish, suicidal courage to go out and make a film that can be so obviously called out as complete balderdash. Nixon, I think, would've fared better as a fictional portrait of a fictional president ''heavily based'' on Nixon; as it stands, Stone's film is an incongruous mess, both pathetic and brilliant. Anthony Hopkins plays Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States who famously resigned after the Watergate scandal. The film follows Nixon from his childhood as the poor son of a grocer who sees his brothers fall to tuberculosis to his beginnings in politics, to his loss in his first election to JFK to his election and his demise. As a historical document, Nixon is pretty dodgy; Stone invents wild conspiracy theories linking Nixon to JFK's assassination and turns notable historical characters into questionable archetypes (Bob Hoskins' J. Edgar Hoover is a mincing homosexual who hits on Cuban cabana boys). As a character study, however, it's much more powerful, with Hopkins turning in a towering performance as the title character. Hopkins looks nothing like the real Nixon but digs deeper than rubber jowls ever could. There are flashes of brilliance here and there, often offset by ridiculous dialogue (Paul Sorvino, as an almost animatronic-like Kissinger, intones ''Just imagine what he could have been if he had been loved''). Like all of Stone's films, it's a technical marvel; it flows perfectly and makes the best out of what could've been three hours of talking heads. A stellar supporting cast supports Hopkins, with Joan Allen, James Woods, Powers Boothe and Madeline Kahn especially good. Nixon is an odd beast; it's so wildly uneven that no two viewers will see the same movie. As it stands, it displays much of the same traits as a film than it does when depicting the character: flashes of brilliance, beset by too much ambition and some questionable tactics.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.9 |
| No. Ratings | : 12 | |
| No. Reviews | : 3 | |
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