Tag: Liz Hannah

Long Shot

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Unlike previous US Presidential romantic comedies, this one is about a woman President, or more accurately a woman Secretary Of State campaigning to be the next President. Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) is savvy, smart and glamourous but has compromised the hard green environmentalist principals of her youth in order to attain political power. Meanwhile, poor and idealistic investigative journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) has just been fired for an article which spoke out against powerful businessman and anti-environment political lobbyist turned publisher and Fred’s new employer Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis under a ton of self-designed make-up).

Charlotte and Fred have a shared past. When she was his teenage babysitter he had a crush on her. He also admirer her idealistic campaigning for school president. But now, she’s one of the world’s most powerful women while he’s an anorak on the rocks.

Out of a job and wallowing in self-pity, Fred is dragged by best mate and positive thinking, self-made entrepreneur Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to a posh event where the band Boyz II Men are playing. Charlotte is also there, doing her best to avoid Wembley who wants to bend her ear about some issue on which she takes an opposing view. Fred and Charlotte collide. Later, to the horror of her Chief Of Staff Maggie (June Diane Raphael) and ‘Body Man’ Tom (Ravi Patel), Charlotte tries Fred out then offers him a position as a speechwriter. This means he’ll be travelling around the world with her and her small team.

The clever screenplay by Liz Hannah – who wrote The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017) as a spec script – and Dan Sterling – who cut his teeth writing episodes of dirty favourite animated series South Park and King Of The Hill – puts together an unlikely couple who, as it turns out, have a great deal more in common than either of them ever imagined. Journalists will be sympathetic to a script which gets inside some of the struggles of the writing process, although Hannah and Sterling wisely never get bogged down in such details. Offering some insight into the everyday working and living conditions of a high flying politician, they’re also not afraid to steer into implausible if hilarious high farce, such as when Fred takes Charlotte out at her request to “get wasted”, after which she must handle an international crisis while coming down from a drug high.

Comedy is notoriously the most difficult movie genre to pull off successfully. Although a strong script is key, much of this film’s success is also due to the casting and direction. It’s hard to imagine Fred played by anyone other than Seth Rogen, who manages to invest the character with not only a certain journalistic integrity but also the sort of nerdiness that has him wearing plastic raincoats and looking the very opposite of presentable. Theron may be known as a major acting talent, but her abilities and sense of timing as a comedian turn out to be astonishing. The rest of the cast, which includes a fair number of significant bit parts, impress too. And holding it all together is Levine, who previously directed cancer comedy 50/50 (2011) with Rogen and current producer Evan Goldberg. Long Shot is not a director’s film, it’s very much a collaborative piece utilising a variety of different talents. All of them, happily, possess the same vision. The result proves surprisingly effective on many levels.

Given the current state of things in the US with its humourless, right-wing, anti-environmentalist, post-truth President, there’s something refreshing about seeing a lightweight piece of entertainment which posits a capable woman setting out to take over the job from the current male incumbent and bringing in outsiders to enable her to push deeply held, pro-environment ideals. Recent developments in the UK with David Attenborough’s BBC show Climate Change – The Facts, the ongoing Extinction Rebellion protests in London and Greta Thunberg speaking to the UK Parliament may well mean the timing of its UK release couldn’t be better.

Long Shot is out in the UK on Friday, May 3rd. Watch the film trailer below:

The Post

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1971, The New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. These documents detailed how the incumbent Nixon administration and its predecessors had increased the scale of the US involvement in the unwinnable war in Vietnam for political gain rather than the national good. The administration’s response was swift and repressive: within two days, a legal injunction prevented the paper from publishing further details. The Washington Post (often shortened to The Post, as in the film title), at the time more a local paper than a national one, stepped into the breach with its reporters hunting down the New York Times’ source so that it could publish more of the story as it emerged. Having just floated on the New York Stock Exchange, the paper found itself in the tricky situation of being accountable to conservative shareholders who didn’t like the idea of exposing their investment to risks with the potential to close the paper down for good.

The two main players in this story, as envisaged by Liz Hannah’s original script, were The Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep). Bradlee is the hard-nosed newshound gutted that The Times has scooped The Post and determined to make the most of the story once his rival is prohibited from further publication. Graham is the former housewife and mother who, having inherited The Post from her late husband, is determined to make a success of it at a time when women didn’t do things like publish newspapers because their place was unquestionably in the home.

With Josh Singer, the writer of Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), brought in by producer-director Spielberg to further research and beef up the screenplay’s journalistic element, The Post feels solidly grounded in the world it purports to represent. Spielberg augments the script by finding visual ways to tell his story. His opening has Streep wake and sit up in her bed causing files of paperwork to drop off the coverlet onto the floor. We immediately know Graham is a woman who prepares thoroughly for her work.

Spielberg mines extraordinary performances from his two leads and his excellent supporting cast. An almost unrecognisable Hanks convinces as the quick-witted, determined and conscientious editor who more than meets his equal in his quick-to-learn, publisher colleague. Streep’s role is arguably the more challenging one: Graham finds herself in a place where women simply weren’t found back in the 1970s, in a world of men feeling her way through tough business situations as they present themselves. Moreover, she’s on friendly terms with the powerful likes of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and realises that she will have to choose between looking out for old friends and sticking up for the truth by publishing facts and stories which may run counter to those friends’ best interests.

Comparisons will be made with classic journalistic thriller All The Presidents’ Men (Alan J.Pakula, 1976) which takes up the story at the Watergate break-in at the point where The Post leaves off. Indeed, Spieberg’s film ends with almost identical shots to those which opened Paluka’s. However, the latter was primarily about two reporters chasing a story whereas the former is more concerned with what makes a newspaper tick in terms of the differences between an editor’s mind and a publisher’s. Pakula’s conspiracy thriller takes place in an all-male environment where women are never more than minor players, whereas Spielberg portrays a part of that all-male environment having to deal with a smart and savvy woman engaging with them on her own terms, something it really isn’t used to.

Moreover, whereas Pakula’s movie only dealt with events from a few years before, Spielberg’s retelling of history from over 40 years ago speaks volumes to the present day when the incumbent President wants the media to regurgitate his own, often contentious version of events rather than seek to present objective truth. Two images stick with the viewer long after the film has ended: typesetting printing blocks spelling out “freedom to publish” in the ready-to-roll newspaper presses and the President as a distant figure glimpsed through a window barking angry orders into his phone. This pre-digital US of the 1970s echoes the present day.

The movie reminds us that the US news media exists for the benefit not of the governors but the governed. Because this is a Spielberg movie and therefore by default popular entertainment, that notion will be widely seen by a mass audience both at home and abroad – as indeed it deserves to be – and that’s a pretty big deal.

The Post is out in the UK on Friday, January 19th. It is available for digital streaming from May.