Pages tagged “frank langella”

Release Date: Dec. 5 (limited)

Director: Ron Howard

Writer: Peter Morgan

Cinematographer: Salvatore Totino

Starring: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen

Studio/Run Time: Universal Studios, 122 mins.

There’s a pivotal moment in Frost/Nixon when ex-president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) drunkenly calls talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) on a night preceding their final interview, unwittingly inspiring Frost to go into battle mode and more rigorously prepare for the biggest assignment of his career. It makes for wonderful drama, and is possibly the most engrossing scene in the film. The only problem is that it never happened. Brilliant lie that it is, it provides the film with a climactic punctuation that might otherwise have been missing.

There's a surprisingly gargantuan Internet faction dedicated to predicting who will be up for film's most coveted prize, the Academy Award. Publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and New York Times all have Oscar blogs that obsessively trail the fluctuations in buzz amongst the year's top films. That's not to mention stand-alone sites like Awards Daily and In Contention, or well-known bloggers like Jeff Wells, Dave Poland and Anne Thompson. Even Roger Ebert has devoted a wealth of recent ink on the subject. But, the truth is, no matter how much someone knows, it's still just a wild guessing game.