All The President's Men
Work was pretty cool today. I made good progress on a little project I started yesterday, and I conducted a call with a client who wanted some information on doing reporting from our system. Considering that I didn't have a good feel for what they wanted out of the call, and considering that it had the potential to get political on me, it ended up being very close to my best-case scenario.
Nonetheless, stuff like that is always tiring and I ended up taking a walk around the building afterwards to decompress.
I'll have more of this next week: We have a sales prospect who wants to go over part of our system in great detail when they're visiting next week. Very political stuff, it sounds like. One guy said that since I know that module best, that basically nothing less would do than for one of them to sit down with me one-on-one for a couple of hours.
It's nice to be wanted, but do I have to be wanted so much? (I'm kidding, actually.)
I also talked to my boss about the direction our application is likely to go in the next year, and it sounds like I'll be part of the triumvirate involved in doing a lot of the basic design work. That should be fun. I've been with this application since the beginning, four-plus years ago, and it'll be interesting to see it head into a new phase.
Work has been pretty good this week, actually.
I should probably warn you that I do spoil some elements of the film here, if you haven't seen it before.
Robert Redford does a typical strong, confident Robert Redford job of playing Woodward, while Dustin Hoffman does a grittier, more realistic-feeling job as Bernstein. Redford has always struck me as being a lot like Clint Eastwood in his general bearing, except without the dark brooding ambiguity that makes Eastwood so interesting. Redford is the all-American boy. So naturally Hoffman's scenes are a little more interesting, a little more intense, than Redford's.
Also, Jason Robards does a terrific turn as Ben Bradlee, Woodward & Bernstein's boss. I've only ever seen Robards in supporting roles like this, and I always think he's great. But I don't offhand know of any great starring roles he's had. Presumably an example of my limited movie knowledge... isn't it?
I haven't read the book on which the film was based, and I can't testify as to the film's accuracy. As is usually the case in classic films, the script crackles, and the actors carry off the script flawlessly. So it's quite entertaining. But at its core the film has a problem in that it's not about its subject matter (Watergate), or its characters (Woodward & Bernstein); it's about the investigative reporting process that our heroes go through to ferret out the details of the case.
And the ending is disappointing: Our heroes gather some tenuous evidence fingering some important people in the Watergate incident and the surrounding spying and cover-up, but the film ends with President Nixon's swearing-in in early 1973. The remainder of the events leading up to Nixon's resignation is told in abbreviated summary (including the famous unearthing of the White House Tapes). Since the film focuses on the reporters, I suppose this makes sense, but dramatically it is quite a let-down. Their evidence as presented seems less-than-airtight, and the leap from there to the various legal proceedings, convictions, and bringing down of a President is not shown.
Still, it's a good film, entertaining and genuine. There's something about real life that fiction rarely matches up to.
It's been interesting watching these two '70s films. I grew up in the 70s, and it's strange to realize that had I seen this and Dog Day Afternoon when they came out that they would have seemed thoroughly modern to me. But of course the style of dress, the hairstyles, the cars, and (especially) the film quality seem almost alien now. Somehow the '70s just haven't become "classic" in the same way that the '20s, '40s, '50s, and even the 1960s have. It's as if the whole country went strange for ten years, and woke up at the end and said, "What were we thinking?"
Which is funny, since that's pretty much how I feel about the '80s! (I mean, come on! Ronald Reagan? Michael Jackson? Sylvester Stallone? Get real!)
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