Posted on 11/05/2018 7:36:30 AM PST by C19fan
I was transfixed by the Gary Hart movie The Front Runner: It has a lot of levels, and it’s a failure on every one of them. Mistake gets piled atop error atop cliché atop banality. It’s a skyscraper of wrong, an hour-and-53-minute lesson in how not to make a movie.
Vigorously borrowing from The Candidate, Nashville, and The West Wing, The Front Runner covers the three weeks of Colorado Senator Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, which ended in humiliation shortly after reporters staking out his D.C. apartment discovered a mistress, who turned out to be Donna Rice. Watching the co-writer and director Jason Reitman repeatedly frame reporters as intrusive, presumptuous, and cynical as they take down an arrogant, philandering politician by uncovering true information about him, I marveled at the maladroitness of Reitman’s timing This movie wishes it had been made in 1999. It would have raked in the accolades if it had served as an oblique commentary on the investigation into Bill Clinton’s White House affair. Alas, today is a different era.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
I forgot about Gary Hart, but I was a little kid when he ran for president.
Oh wow, a movie about a candidate having an affair? Sex with a woman, not his wife? And they expect us to BUY that wild plot??
Ah yes. Back from a time when every single Dem was desperately trying to be the “new John Kennedy” — in every single way.
My favorite headline from that era was: Rice Causes Hart Troubles
I get the impression from this review that the gist of the movie is that Hart really was “the next Kennedy” if only he had not been so “unfairly” scrutinized. How is this a theatrical release? It sounds like it should have been a made for HBO movie.
Lol!
I saw the trailer and they left out an important part of Hart’s story: I recall there was a point early in the process where he dared the journalists to look into him closely because, of course, he’s clean as a whistle with nothing to hide.
Hubris, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Nemesis.
He was a very smart guy, ran McGovern’s campaign up through the primaries. He hired young guys like pollster Pat Cadell who was just out of college. During the primaries McGovern was loved by the educated liberals and also by blue collar workers, great job by Hart in keeping McGovern as a maverick outsider.
After the Dem convention, the political hacks took over and McGovern tanked. He wouldn’t have won anyway but he just looked like another babbling liberal pol in the last few months. Hunter Thompson, who admired McGovern at the start, would later comment that when the bell rang, McGovern was just another Democrat (versus the straight talking outsider that Hart had managed).
Yes, you seem to be right about this - if Maureen Dowd’s tearful “review” of it yesterday is anything to go by.
Two of the sisters from Last Man Standing are in the movie, Kaitlyn Dever (Eve) and Molly Ephraim (Mandy). But I still won’t see the movie.
Really? You don’t think they still are?. What about John F Kerry and Robert o’Rourke?
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Sneaker.
Sneaker who?
Sneaker out the back door, Gary, the press is at the front.
So was he.
Oh wow, a movie about a candidate having an affair? Sex with a woman, not his husband? And they expect us to BUY that wild plot??
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