Two Movies and a Blackout

It was an interesting 36 or so hours this past Thursday and Friday that saw us seeing two movies and experiencing one significant inconvenience.

Let's take them in chronological order.

Thursday afternoon we saw the newest from director Steven Spielberg, "The Post".

For those of you too young to remember, or who have just plain forgotten about it, vey simply stated this is the story of the top secret documents back in 1971 that were leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, the documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.  The Papers discussed the mishandling and misleading (a nice word for "lying") by four Presidential administrations about the conduct of the United States in the Viet Nam war, and the conduct of a fifth Administration in subverting the first amendment.

Ellsberg first leaked the papers to the Times, and the Times published them.  The Nixon Administration then enjoined the Times from continuing to publish them.  At the same time the Washington Post came into possession of the Papers, and they had to make a decision as to whether or not to publish them themselves.  This was at a critical time for the Post, which was in the process of going from a privately owned family business to a publicly traded company.  It fell upon publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee

The real Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham

to make the decision:  Inform the public and defend the first amendment of the Constitution, or knuckle under to a bullying  President and all of his men.  The whole issue went before the Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of the Times and the Post, and, it might be argued, the American people.

The movie is well made and suspenseful, even though you know how it is going to end.  And it gives a great feeling for how it is, or at least how it used to be, to work at a newspaper (the building would literally shake when the presses that produced the newspaper would begin to run).  We attended this movie with friend Barb Vancheri, retired Film Critic for the Post-Gazette, and she said seeing the stories being written, the editorial meetings, and the actual production of the paper made her miss her job!

Attention must be paid to the terrific performances of Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the roles of Graham and Bradlee.

Is it a surprise to anyone that they were both terrific in their roles?  A scene where Streep as Graham is talking on the phone and wrestling with the publish-or-not-publish decision is worth the price of the movie and is probably why she will get yet another Oscar nomination.  As for Hanks, he may suffer by comparison to Jason Robards, Jr. who played Bradlee in "All The President's Men", which is certainly understandable, but also unfair to him.  

The issues underlined in "The Post" are, sadly, still all too relevant in 2018, which makes this movie almost mandatory viewing for the civic minded among us, but it is also an exciting and dramatic bit of movie making.  And it also might compel one to rewatch the great "All The President's Men", never a bad thing.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

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"The Post" was pretty much going to be our movie going activity for the week, but along about midnight, electric power for much of McCandless and Franklin Park, about 2,500 homes, was lost.  Have any idea of just how dark  it gets when all of the various nightlights and luminescent clock dials in you home suddenly go out?  Or how cold it gets inside when it is subfreezing outside?

Well, the public utility that serves us told us that power would be restored by 1:00 PM, then it was 4:30, then it was 6:30, then it ws 8:30.  We were this close to packing up and heading to a local hotel when at 7:17 PM, we heard the fridge click on, and an instant later the lights came on and the furnace began running.  It was an unpleasant experience, but it made us grateful for how we live, and appreciative of what we have and sad knowing that there are folks out there who don't have such everyday conveniences at their disposal.

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So what do you do when it's too cold to stay in your home.  We went out for breakfast.  We had separate lunch dates with friends, Marilyn went to the Mall, and then we decided to go to another movie.  

The choice:

If you were around in 1994, what became known as the "Harding-Kerrigan Affair" is well known to you, but it can be shocking to think that for people under the age of thirty or so, the story told in "I, Tonya" is probably completely unknown to them.

Tonya Harding came up through a hard scrabble upbringing in Oregon to become a world class figure skater.  She competed in the 1992 Olympics, became the first woman to ever perform a triple axle in competition, became the American Champion, and on her way to competing in the 1994 Olympics, her chief competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, was knee-capped at the behest of her husband and some of the gang-that-couldn't-straight entourage that surrounded her.  Was Harding complicit in the attack?  She still says, no, but even after seeing the movie, you still don't know whether to believe her or not.

One thing you know for sure is that she was the victim of an abusive mother.  Played by Allison Janney (a sure fire Oscar nominee), this lady brings new dimensions to the term "evil stage mother" and also to the term "foul-mouthed", for that matter.  She is just an awful person, almost hard to watch, but Janney is brilliant in the role.  Harding was also victimized and abused by her husband Jeff Gillooly, played by Sebastien Stan, whose name became a verb, as in, "to Gillooly someone".  Also terrific in this movie is actor Paul Walter Hauser who plays Shawn Eckert, Gillooly's loser friend who "masterminds" the whole Kerrigan attack.

But the real star of the movie is Margot Robbie who plays Tonya Harding.

Robbie as Harding (L) and 

Harding herself (R) in competition

She plays Harding as both a victim and a victimizer.  She pulls off the skating sequences, which were brilliantly filmed, very well.  She was brilliant in this role.  Watch the changes in her eyes and her face in one scene where she applies her own make-up prior to skating.  A simply marvelous performance.

At times this movie was hard to watch, and as far as language is concerned, it is for sure hard to listen to at times, but great performances by Robbie and Janney, and a terrifically written and filmed story (directed by Craig Gillispie) make this well worth seeing.

Four stars from The Grandstander.

By the way, both Harding and Gillooly were interviewed by screenwriter Steven Rogers in preparation for this movie, so one would think that what we are seeing is authentic.  And we know for sure that Robbie and Harding were in touch with each other, at least at various red carpets in relation to the release of the movie, as evidenced below.

Harding and Robbie on the red carpet