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Every well-made film that connects always does two things. It tells a compelling story and delivers a basic this-is-how-life-is theme that any moviegoer over the age of 10 can make sense of and recognize as truthful. I’m saying this because as much as I liked Ron Howard ‘s Frost/Nixon after seeing it a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the theme until now. This was due to laziness or a form of temporary blockage on my part. Because it’s as obvious as the ski-nose on Richard Nixon‘s face.

Peter Morgan‘s screenplay, based on his stage play, is about a contest of wills and wits between British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) and resigned U.S. president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) over the course of a four-part televised interview that was taped in 1977. Some have wondered if under-30s will appreciate the historically dramatic importance of the interview or feel the anti-Nixon rooting interest to any degree. I don’t think you need to have lived through the Nixon years to enjoy the Frost/Nixon tension. I feel that Howard’s disciplined hand allows the story to work on its own terms.

The under-theme, for me, comes at the climax when Nixon admits to grave error in his handling of the Watergate crisis, saying he “let the American people down,” etc. But only after a good amount of dodging, tap-dancing, posturing, smoke-blowing, side-stepping and plain old evasion. Which is how most of us, I think, come to the truth about ourselves. We never admit to it early on, always looking to put off the moment of reckoning. Frost/Nixon is a metaphor for this process, for the path that we all travel on the way to facing facts about who we are and what we’ve done.

“I was down with Frost/Nixon from start to finish,” I wrote on 10.28. “It’s very well done, very full and expert for what it is. It’s more satisfying, more underlined (but in a subtle way) and more clearly wrought than the play, frankly. It’s not Kubrick, Bresson, Kazan, Eisenstein, Welles, the Coen brothers or Lubitsch. It is what it is, and that’s in no way a problem. And it significantly improves upon what it was on the New York stage.

“And Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon is naturally and necessarily more toned down than it was on-stage, and that makes it a fascinating, moving (as in genuinely sad), award-level effort.”

“There’s never a doubt that the losers-at-love of British writer-director Joel Hopkins‘ Last Chance Harvey are on intersecting arcs, that they’ll meet cute and stroll off into a sooty London sunset. But stars Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson (reunited after 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction) are so disarmingly charming that even the most treacly moments work an emotional magic.

“Auds may skew a bit older for the Overture Films release, but the hardest cases will be moved and tell their friends. Some couples just look good together. Thompson and Hoffman look like an exclamation point walking a hedgehog. The physical incompatibility gives them added personality, but it also emphasizes the innate awkwardness that has found their characters alone at middle age.” — from John Anderson‘s 9.11 Variety review.

In the beginning of his New York article called “Obamaism,” Kurt Andersen writes that “for those of us born since World War II, never in our adult lifetimes has any single event made us prouder of our country — and for those of us who live in this city, never have we felt more completely in sync with it.

“We’re all Dorothy, stunned at having just stepped out — tripped out, one might even say — from a half-wrecked black-and-white reality into a strange and glorious new Technicolor world.

“Up till now, our country’s big, official civil-rights milestones had consisted of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. But compared to all of those rungs up the ladder, electing Barack Obama was by far more democratic. It was done not by presidential or judicial edict, nor by some hundreds of worthies voting in their legislative chambers, but by means of a secret ballot in a popular national referendum with a historically huge voter turnout.

“Paradoxically, he was elected both because he was black and in spite of being black. A hypothetical 100 percent white Obama certainly wouldn’t have generated the same excitement among his white supporters (let alone the black ones), and probably wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination. Yet it was precisely because Obama’s blackness came to seem so secondary to his being and his candidacy that he was able to attract a sufficient number of voters to elect him. He’s black! But he also just happens to be black. We need a new phrase for this happy converse of Catch-22.

“Even before he takes office, there is one large, low-hanging fruit that Obama is harvesting already: The rebranding of America in the rest of the world is under way. Intolerant, ignorant, bellicose cowboy-America is suddenly…not. And thanks to overwhelmingly white America, as Tunku Varadarajan wrote on Forbes.com, ‘a black man will be the most powerful person on earth’ and ‘the most powerful black man in the history of mankind.’ Also? His father was actually African. Foreigners are even more astonished than we are.

“But the election happily overturned another set of conventional wisdoms that were not specifically racial: Reason and intelligence made a comeback against the heretofore ascendant forces of the idiocracy. For the moment, America is reality-based once again.”

The first half of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che — formerly known as The Argentine — will be released by IFC theatrically on New Year’s Day, 1.1.09, and the second half — once known as Guerilla — will open on 2.20.09, according to a press release. The full boat four-hour-plus version will open in Manhattan and Los Angeles on 12.12 for one week. Or so I recall reading. There’s no official website that I can find.

In a just-released USA Today/Gallup poll based on data accumulated last weekend, President-elect Barack Obama now enjoys a post-Election Day rating of 68% favorable, and President Bush has a 68% unfavorable — which is actually a slight improvement from just before Election Day, when 70% said they disapproved of the job he’s doing.

I’m three or four hours late on this one, but I found it charmingly human that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said “fuck you” this morning during a discussion about the manner and personality of Obama vs. McCain campaigns. (New York‘s “Daily Intel” says he was “referencing a story guest Jay Carney had recently told him off the air.”) Minor blurt, no big deal, should have said “eff you,” forget it. The best part of the clip comes when co-host Mika Brzezinski says, “Uhm, honey?”

In Pixar’s Up (Disney, 5.29.09), a grumpy old guy (voiced by Ed Asner) leaves home and visits the far-away jungle (the Amazon, I’m guessing — Africa is too scary and political) by tying several hundred balloons to his house and floating off into the wild blue yonder. Her accidentally takes a lovable obese kid (a relation of one of the WALL*E teletubbies) along for the ride. Christopher Plumber will also voice a role. The HD stereo version of the teaser went up on 11.8.

Up is being co-directed by Pete Docter and pic’s screenwriter Bob Peterson.

So what’s with Us magazine critic Thelma Adams not choosing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as a likely Best Picture contender in Tom O’Neil‘s latest Gold Derby/Envelope survey? Film critics in Afghanistan know that Button is at least one of the likely five. You could deduce that Adams didn’t spitball it because she hasn’t seen it — fine. But she’s got Revolutionary Road in there as her #5 pick and nobody’s seen that one, to the best of my knowledge. Help me out here.

Here‘s a nicely-written N.Y. Times profile of fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver, posted yesterday and written by Stephanie Clifford. Silver’s largely accurate poll readings and projections, which began last March with the launch of his site, gave me Obama comfort all through the campaign.

The great Miriam Makeba, 76, collapsed and died of a heart attack last night — technically early this morning — during an on-stage performance near the southern Italian city of Naples. She collapsed “after singing one of her most famous hits Pata Pata,” her family said in a statement.

When the moment comes I want to be at work also. I want them to find me slumped over my computer. That or collapsed on some busy sidewalk in New York, Paris, London, Prague or Marrakech. Or on a hillside overlooking the sea.

I went to YouTube this morning and saw a “500 Internal Server Error” message with the following information: “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Please report this incident to customer service.” Something tells me that clicking on the customer service link will expose me to a virus.

“Why did I like Che so much? Because it seemed to me that Steven Soderbergh and his crew had somehow jumped into a time machine and emerged to plunk their cameras down and capture the life of Ernesto Guevera on film for this generation. Benicio Del Toro, in a performance of enormous beauty and restraint, slips under the skin of the character and simply inhabits him for four-and-a-half hours. No grandstanding, no huge emotional scenes — he simply is.” — In Contention‘s John Foote in an 11.9 posting.

“It is a performance done largely with the eyes, and one must be paying attention to fully appreciate the weight and purity of the work. Ever watchful, Che takes in his surroundings in and stock of his men at all times. It may seem that there is not a lot going on with the portrayal. But he is capturing the essence of a man to utter perfection.

“Soderbergh makes no apology for his film. We have a sort of mainstream director who has also been a major force in the world of independent filmmaking. He makes a massive film, in Spanish no less, about one of the most iconic people of the 20th century. For me this is among the most daring achievements in film since…well, MIchael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Soderbergh has given his film an urgency, an immediacy that’s breathtaking to be a part of.

“Che is a film destined to be discovered, I think, by future generations. While it is a historical film, which the Academy usually embraces, it is also a demanding film, asking that the viewer read subtitles, that they sit for a long time, and that they patiently explore the life of this man, with very few large emotional moments.”