Nixon (Special Edition)

The Film:Let me say right now by way of disclosure: I love Oliver Stone films. I don't think he's the "conspiracy nut" he's often painted as. I do think he is a biased historian. He has an ideological axe to grind, especially insofar as American politics are concerned. But it's easy enough to detect and set aside (if you want to), and nonetheless he is a stunningly talented filmmaker."Nixon" presents probably the best of Stone's "presidential" films (JFK, Nixon, W.). It contains a spectacular performance by its principal character (Anthony Hopkins), and a great set of supporting players, as per usual in Stone's films (particular standouts include Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover, James Woods as Bob Haldeman, Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger, and Joan Allen as Pat Nixon). Hopkins does something amazing - without directly aping every little thing about Nixon, he portrays the inner Nixon so well that he ends up replacing the original in the mind of the viewer, to the point that when at the end Stone shows us the real Nixon's farewell helicopter ride, it is phenomenally bizarre to see someone else as Nixon.Stone weaves a story of Nixon as a sympathetic, troubled, perennially downtrodden little guy who claws his way into power through tenacity, dirty tricks, perseverance, and canny manipulation of current events. Nixon is a man who has the highest aspirations of power, and is brought to the lowest possible point through his own frailties, paranoia, and personal demons. Stone at once makes him sympathetic and demonic.I think Stone is a humanist, and a person who is seeking the truth. His humanism puts him at odds with those who would use mass populations as pawns and destroy vast populations for policy objectives - but it also drives him to seek what is human in these sorts of manipulators. He seeks to tell the truth - the human truth - of the events and the times he focuses on. He uses different kinds of footage, and compresses times and conversations, creating montages, almost collages, of images and words that evoke the spirit of a time."Nixon" may well be Stone at his best in this art of collage film-making. It is utterly absorbing, despite its 3.5 hour heft, to anyone who enjoys deep character drama, and of course any political history aficionado.The Blu-Ray:At its best, this HD transfer presents images of amazing detail. Certain scenes show incredible facial detail, with pores, whiskers, fine lines, and the like shown in pristine clarity. But, as with many Stone film, detail is often obscured by intentional choices on his part - so many types of video sources are used, from 35mm to 8mm, TV broadcasts, all kinds of material with all different levels of inherent detail. This Blu-Ray displays them all probably as well as they'll ever be displayed. Whatever grain is inherent in the source image is always faithfully presented, never scrubbed away by excessive DNR. So, no, this is not a transfer you'll want to choose to really blow away a viewer with "HD" quality (try Stone's "Alexander" for that). But it's faithful, and as the film works on you for its 3.5 hours, I think most viewers will appreciate it.Audio is an uncompressed Dolby Digital 5.1ch mix. It does a fine job presenting the sometimes booming soundscape Stone employs with all of his complex cuts from dialogue scenes to documentary shots and pictures of war. Dialogue is never drowned out, and John Williams' score comes through very nicely.Stone has recorded two commentaries for the film, one dealing with the movie-making end of things, one dealing with the political backdrop of the age. Both are entertaining, as per usual with Stone commentaries. Sometimes there are gaps (heh heh), but when he is speaking he is always lucid and informative.The second disc has a wealth of extras. 58 minutes of deleted scenes (more like 30, when you cut out Stone's explanations and the contextual bits of the actual film) are presented in 480p. Most of them have been reintegrated into the director's cut on the main disc however. So this is more interesting for Stone's intro than anything else. A 35-minute HD documentary by Sean Stone is the new item here, collecting many big-wigs discussing the pros and cons of the film. An hour-long Charlie Rose interview with Stone presents a deep and occasionally tense conversation between a master interviewer and a master filmmaker. Overall, it's a pretty good slate of extras.**********If you're a fan of Stone and you have a Blu-Ray player, you need this disc, pure and simple. It's an essential part of any Oliver Stone collection.Fans of biopics should give this a hard look, too. This may not be a movie for those who dig Vin Diesel movies (not that there's anything wrong with that).For my part, it's something I watch every year or two. It rewards multiple viewings in the way that dense Oliver Stone films can. With this Blu-Ray edition, I now have the best possible video quality and a great set of extras.

I recommend buying a physical copy unless it's really really cheap because digital purchases can be removed according to terms of service at any time. And you can only watch them through Amazon's proprietary players. But now on to the movie...One thing about the Nixon administration is that We have so much of the tapes to rely on for dialogue that it's must be incredibly useful when writing a script, producing a movie, learning lines etc...Of course the vast majority of the Nixon tapes never made it public as the movie points out but there's still many many hours for which a filmmaker can lean on.Not to say Stone is always relying on factual events. There's definitely some speculation especially in the uncut version where there is a completely made up conversation with the CIA director. I mean this doesn't bother me too much, it was not nearly as egregious as the JFK movie (which I also like but there's definitely some questionable embellishments in the narrative I think).Anthony Hopkins is kind of an odd choice but it works well. He doesn't really look like Nixon and they don't try too hard to make them look like him which I think is appropriate. The clothing and the dialogue and the mannerisms are great, but the face it doesn't look the same and I don't think prosthetics would have been useful.But I don't think you pass up on casting Hopkins for that reason and he deserved awards for this. As did the person playing his wife. The makeup and costumes and sets are incredibly realistic. The casting is amazing in terms of looking like their counterparts (with the exception of Nixon which as I said I'm willing to live with).It's a shame when you buy the digital version there is no special features because there is a commentary from Oliver Stone out there.

Oliver Stone’s 1995 film, “Nixon,” tells the life story of Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States. The film stars Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon, Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, Annabeth Gish as Julie Nixon Eisenhower (Gish later appeared on “The West Wing”), Marley Shelton as Tricia Nixon Cox, James Woods as H.R. Haldeman, Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger, David Hyde Pierce as John Dean, Mary Steenburgen as Hannah Milhous Nixon, Ed Harris as E. Howard Hunt, Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover, Madeline Kahn as Martha Beall Mitchell, Sam Waterston as Richard Helms, and many more in this massive cast.The film uses the Nixon tapes as a storytelling device, with the main plot set during and after December 1973, but the tapes framing flashbacks to earlier in Nixon’s presidency, some of which set up further flashbacks to Nixon’s life prior to the White House. In this manner, Stone covers Nixon’s life from his childhood through his state funeral in Yorba Linda, CA. Stone fictionalized parts of Nixon’s life, implying that he was an alcoholic and that his efforts setting up the Bay of Pigs invasion may have led to the Kennedy Assassination.Stone has a thing for presidential biographies, with his 1991 film, “JFK,” touching on parts of President Kennedy’s life prior to the 1963 assassination and Stone’s 2008 film, “W.”, looking back on the life of then-president Bush’s life. He crafts complex political drama, building on history but fictionalizing for the sake of his narrative. As a film, Stone’s “Nixon” is a masterfully layered work, but those interested in history should read beyond the movie to learn about the only president to resign the office.

Awesome biography film with great actors !

Questo grande film non poteva che essere farina del sacco di colui che, da sempre, ci mostra il lato oscuro degli USA.stavolta lo fa raccontandoci la storia del più controverso presidente USA fino all'arrivo di Bush Junior e Trump.

Des longueurs, mais pour signifier l'esprit contrasté et torturé du personnage

Biopic of Richard Nixon, President of the United States who under the threat of Impeachment resigned the office after the Watergate scandal.Oliver Stone, director of JFK, Natural Born Killers, Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, W and Snowden is no stranger to political thrillers and in the magnificent Nixon he creates possibly his best work to date.With pitch perfect casting for all the principal players, a beautifully nuanced script that not only captures the underlying political zeitgeist of the time but also, and probably more importantly, Nixon's internal battles with his inferiority complex and possible feelings of self loathing, and a superbly balanced screenplay that keeps you watching, Stone uses his considerable talent for storytelling and plenty of inventive cinematic techniques to produce a film or real and lasting quality. Even with the now infamous Watergate scandal in the mix, which in itself was actually a rather dry affair, Nixon's internal battles with himself, his political failures, his difficult relationships with Congress, the press, his political opponents and his wife and family, his story could have proved just too difficult a task to encompass and convey the man and the time in an interesting way to an audience. Stone and his collaborators have done a magnificent job of exposing the man and the time with a small degree of genius in my opinion.Not an easy film to get going, the original finance seemed insufficient and when the money was finally secured, Stones choice of Hopkins over Hanks or Nicholson did not go down well with the studio. When Hopkins decided he may have bitten off more than he could chew he also nearly left the production. Luckily Stone was able to convince him to stay and give probably the best performance of an American President ever put to film. Hopkins also of course had a plethora of other fine British American and actors to bounce off, most notably, Joan Allen, James Woods and the late Bob Hoskins as FBI director J Edgar Hoover.Stone and his editors style of film-making could almost be called “Stonian” in that it is very distinctive and striking. Often filming scenes in crisp 35 mm colour and grainy 8 mm black and white at the same time and then mixing both stocks together when editing. Add this to purposely filmed mock stock footage, real poor quality shaky stock footage, and finely timed jump cuts, these techniques and many more give the film a semi documentary feel and makes you almost forget you are watching a film. This also gives the film an intimate and almost voyeuristic aspect, especially when we are watching Nixon begin to unravel after 18 months of the Watergate investigation gradually inching closer to the Whitehouse and eventually the president himself. His continued frustration at “not getting his story across” and why the press “hate me” is almost difficult to watch. It is not difficult to imagine yourself in a position where everyone remembers your mistakes but never your successes, and how that might feed into and exacerbate his already sensitive and knife edge relationship with his own psyche. One especially poignant line of dialogue stood out for me during one of his lonely introspective moments whilst looking at a famous painting of the assassinated JFK, “When the public look at you they see what they aspire to be, when they look at me they see who they are!” For me that one line captured the man.Stone was criticised by just about everyone about how Nixon was portrayed. He was either too generous or too mean, he either showed him drinking too much or too little, his regular low moods were either too low or not low enough. In the end the film makers have to make decisions on the information available and do the best they can. Nobody can really know what is in someone else's head, what they may have said or done in private, or how they really felt about someone or something. However artists can use some artistic licence and if used with acre and dignity it can flesh out a life that was partly hidden from the public gaze.Nixon isn't supposed to be a history lesson, if you want that go elsewhere. It's a work of art about a living breathing person who through dedication and quite a bit of luck became the most powerful man on earth. Nixon the film encapsulates the man and the times probably better than any single book could.There are three versions of the film. The original four hour cut never released, the theatrical release at 183 mins and the extended Blu Ray release at 213. I have seen both and the theatrical release is probably the better as a stand alone film. The extended version has two added scenes that add little to the film. His meeting with Richard Helms and an extended wedding scene. Both interesting but not really game changers.I doubt whether any other film-maker could have made Nixon the magnificent success it most certainly is. However unless you have at least some understanding of Watergate, American politics, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement etc, you may struggle a bit with some of the references during the many discussions regarding policy in the Oval Office. However the films main thrust is Nixon himself and his self destructive and often contradictory nature.The three and a half hours fly by.

Se trata de una versión que contiene escenas no incluidas en la edición original.La calidad de la imagen es estupenda.