Frost / Nixon

I've been meaning to catch up with this for a while, and I'm very happy to say that this has proved well worth the wait. In some ways it's a bit of a powder-puff piece, and if you're looking for an in-depth look at Watergate, you've come to the wrong place. But as a dissection of the power of the interview, and the power of the close-up, the movie has much to offer. And when it comes to the final, crucial "confession" of guilt by Tricky Dicky (though it's not quite that), I was totally gripped. All good stuff, though it's maybe a shame that so many of the key moments are in the trailer, which seems to have been around for ages.

Michael Sheen deserves more credit than he seems to be getting in award land (nary a nomination) for bringing David Frost to life, and at first I thought that Frank Langella's performance was in fact the lesser of the two - I mean, all he has to do is look presidential, and you can argue he looks far better than Nixon ever did. But towards the end Langella delivers a masterclass in close-up acting: a slight twitch here, a lowering of the eyes there... none of which can be in the script, if you think about it. So, praise all round, even for director Ron "Ritchie Cunningham" Howard.

How is the maths?
Not much here - lots of numbers flying around, in terms of how many days/hours of interviews were recorded... what percentage made it to the final interview? Of more interest to me is the title, with it's forward-slash ever so slightly suggestive of the division/fraction symbol in maths. Is this a subtle suggestion that Frost gets one "over" Nixon? Is Nixon, in some weird, sense, the "denominator" of the movie? Would a mathematcian read the title as "Frost divided by Nixon", or "Frost over Nixon"? Would anyone else care?

Oh, and one final word of advice: if you want to sound knowledgeable about the movie, for goodness' sake don't do as I seem to be doing, and start talking about "David Nixon" (who was, as any fule no, a reasonably famous children's magician & entertainer of the same period).