I’ll bet this wiener of a movie critic didn’t care much for Eastwood’s production of The Empty Chair, either.
Oh, well.
SARA STEWART
January 19, 2018
Veterans deserve better than Army biopic ‘12 Strong’
https://nypost.com/2018/01/19/veterans-deserve-better-than-army-biopic-12-strong/
“12 Strong” should find an audience in anyone who wants to cheer on the life-and-death stakes of military revenge missions, but it’s pretty narrow-minded about which lives matter.
‘The Post’ is the new great American movie
By Sara Stewart December 20, 2017
https://nypost.com/2017/12/20/the-post-is-the-new-great-american-movie/
...Streep submerges herself in fabulous wrap dresses and owlish glasses to play Katharine “Kay” Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, faced with the question of whether to run classified, government-damning Vietnam War documents. As usual — especially in biopic territory — she knocks it out of the freaking park. Hanks, as Post editor Ben Bradlee, is more or less playing Tom Hanks, newspaperman. And that’s just fine.
In a 1970s-set plot that will have younger viewers thinking of Edward Snowden, a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) goes rogue, stealing top secret documents — a Defense Department study on US involvement in Vietnam — and passing their content, initially, to the New York Times...
...(Yes, I’m aware that there is a teensy possibility that, as a journalist, I am predisposed to eat all this stuff up. And “The Post” is, admittedly, journalism porn of the highest order.) Meanwhile, occasional distant shots of Nixon, through the Oval Office windows, show a besieged and angry president desperately trying to shut down the news.
Graham’s feminist evolution is always at the fore, and there is a slight excess of Hollywood gloss on her self-actualization — but you know you want to see Streep smack down detractors in a couple of splashy speeches. And it’s worth noting that the screenplay for “The Post” was purchased in 2016, when it seemed there would be a different occupant in the White House.
But this film would have worked either way: It’s a celebration of a tough woman’s rise from her role as a powerful man’s spouse, and it’s a case for why reporting should never be beholden to the whims of the White House (as the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Times put it, the role of the press is to serve “the governed, not the governors”). “The Post” may have the burnished look of a ’70s thriller, but it’s right at home in the present day.