Frost / Nixon

The Ms. and I rented this film last Wednesday. It tells the story of the famous interview between English talk show host David Frost and then-disgraced former President Richard Nixon. Having recently resigned the office of the Presidency as a result of the Watergate investigation, Richard Nixon agrees to the interview in the hopes of exonerating himself and allowing him to get back into public life. David Frost pursues the interview to boost his struggling career, so that he can rejoin the New York social elite life. Originally intended to merely provide ratings and entertainment, Frost's chosen advisers quickly convince him to give Tricky Dick the trial he never had as a result of Ford's pardon.

The best part about the film, to me, was the casting. Frank Langella made Nixon come alive in wonderful layers even for someone like myself who was not alive during Vietnam and never had the visceral connection to that era of American politics. Michael Sheen's David Frost made a wonderful transition from self-absorbed pretty boy to down on his luck scrappy entrepreneur and finally to serious investigative newsman. Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt's characters were wonderful foils, with Platt's easy likeability and gregariousness highlighting Bacon's stoicism and devotion.

My only gripe was the lack of character development of the women in the film. The character of Carolina Cushing played by the beautiful and talented Rebecca Hall was certainly a delight to watch, but we never really got to know her at all. We never found out how or why she was able to drop whatever it was she did for a living and come with David. We really never saw anything of her at all when Frost wasn't in the frame. She was the silent one dimensional support character, the lovely bird supporting her man. That seemed a little disingenuous. The same could be said for Nixon's wife. There were some wonderful moments where I could sense the resentment and frustration building inside of her at the choices her husband has made, but right when it seemed like time for her to have some good script time, it was cut to the next scene.

All in all, it's a film worth renting any day. I recommend it to anyone in their mid-twenties to try and get an insight into the boiling resentment and anger there was for President Nixon at the time. The film also serves to three-dimensionalize Nixon to a degree, in the sense that he becomes a tragic figure who is mastered by his inner demons as opposed to a mindless servant of greed and evil.

Why this page is here, and why you should read it.

Generally, I am not the biggest fan of the whole "launch post" thing. The truth is, there is almost always a lot of work, and a history of good work, behind any new launch. To mark it with one post that says "This is the start" seems a little disingenuous.

So why are we here now? Well, the truth is that one good thing a launch post is good for is letting folks know what you are all about and why they should care.

We at CinemaLink are all about the exhibition film industry. We love it. We love films. We love theaters. We love technicians. We love old equipment. We love new equipment. Simply put, we love Cinema.

We've been working in the vintage cinema equipment area for a long time, crawling into abandoned old buildings and through all manner of dust and vermin to rescue precious artifacts from the golden age of cinema growth. It's a rewarding area of the industry because it really brings home the personal connection that movie goers have to not just the films but the theaters and the people that make them a reality.

Everyone has a personal story of how that theater impacted their life, or a special time they had with a special person at a film. And they should, and we should encourage that feeling.

We believe that a healthy cinema industry is vital to the health of our shared culture.

We believe that as the cinema industry evolves, the tools to promote it must evolve as well.

This brings us to CinemaLink, and what precisely it is that we do. Essentially, we are leading the industry in modernizing the methods through which cinemas and cinema suppliers sell equipment and promote themselves. The days of word of mouth and newspaper clippings will never completely come to a close, and that's a good thing! The industry is built on personal relationships, and we are all better for it.

However, there is also an amazing opportunity to modernize and update the cinema industry, bringing it inline with today's digital marketplace.

If you have new or used cinema equipment you want to sell, let us help you.

If you want to utilize modern marketing techniques like twitter, facebook, blogging, or online marketplaces, to help you sell and promote yourselves, let us help you.

We already like you. Now we want to help. We want to talk about you to all of the other folks who love this industry. We want to increase your stability by increasing your sales.

Let's get started.