Can this be the same man?
Just watched Frost/Nixon, the movie of the making of those historic interviews. Good movie, well made and well worth the watching (although it did leave me with questions like, what's the girl's role in this? just in order to have one woman with a bigger speaking part than Pat Nixon?). And of course I've loved following Frank Langella ever since the old days of Williamstown Summer Theater.
Added: (Not that we would ever have dreamed, back in those days, that he would go on to play Nixon himself in a major movie.) And the movie got one thing dead right: after the money shot, everything else just dropped away. I watched the interviews (at GA's apartment in Gramercy Park) when they first broadcast, so I must have sat through a couple hours of domestic and foreign policy, but all I can remember is when he said "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal" and we looked at each other and said "Did he really just say that?" "I think he really just said that." And yep, that's all they wrote. [end Added]
But that's not why I'm writing this post.
I'm writing because of James Reston, Jr., the part played by Sam Rockwell in the movie (he's the crusading idealistic member of the team who's not Oliver Platt). At one point he has a line to the effect: You know, the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas. Is this the same James Reston, Jr., who took more than 300 pages to simplify and diminish mediæval history down to the soap opera, religious bigotry, and overall plain bad writing of The Last Apocalypse, reviewed viciously (though no more so than he deserves) elsewhere in these essays? Yes, apparently it is the same. My disappoint.
Added: (Not that we would ever have dreamed, back in those days, that he would go on to play Nixon himself in a major movie.) And the movie got one thing dead right: after the money shot, everything else just dropped away. I watched the interviews (at GA's apartment in Gramercy Park) when they first broadcast, so I must have sat through a couple hours of domestic and foreign policy, but all I can remember is when he said "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal" and we looked at each other and said "Did he really just say that?" "I think he really just said that." And yep, that's all they wrote. [end Added]
But that's not why I'm writing this post.
I'm writing because of James Reston, Jr., the part played by Sam Rockwell in the movie (he's the crusading idealistic member of the team who's not Oliver Platt). At one point he has a line to the effect: You know, the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas. Is this the same James Reston, Jr., who took more than 300 pages to simplify and diminish mediæval history down to the soap opera, religious bigotry, and overall plain bad writing of The Last Apocalypse, reviewed viciously (though no more so than he deserves) elsewhere in these essays? Yes, apparently it is the same. My disappoint.