‘Death of a President’ DVD review (R2)
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
'Death of a President' is a fictionalised documentary about the build up to and fallout of the assassination of President George W. Bush. The film has already garnered a lot of publicity due to its controversial subject matter and was always sure to divide critics and audiences alike.
The Film
Despite using a clever combination of archive news footage, dramatised scenes and recreations, the film falls short of its lofty premise. So an interesting idea for a film suffers from being over-hyped and plays out in a rather obvious and contrived manner.
The writer/director Gabriel Range has a history of experimenting with this specific kind of fake documentary (I’m refusing to use the term mockumentary). He is responsible for the films ‘The Day Britain Stopped' and 'The Menendez Murders', both of which used a similar mix of footage and techniques to lend an air of realism to the drama they're presenting.
The film is quite clearly broken into two pieces; the build up to the Presidents death and the aftermath of that event, followed by the subsequent investigations into those responsible for the incident. Range skillfully mixes real and fake footage together in the early stages of the film. With straight to camera interviews from the secret service agent assigned to Bush and the chief of the Chicago police, we learn about the preparations for the president’s trip and the political climate that surrounds him .The great score from Richard Harvey helps build an air of tension and genuine danger surrounding the president on his visit to Chicago.
The film takes real life situations and events which have characterised the current US administration; the spin and press manipulation tactics they use to shape the will of the country towards a predefined conclusion, and subsequently uses them to shape a 'What if..' situation. The US foreign policy, the scape-goating of Iraq and the post 9/11 climate of fear are all referenced and transposed from the past into the future.
What starts out as a brave attempt at something different falls apart in the second half of the film, by letting down the tension that was built up so aptly in the beginning stages. Turning into a trite mixture of Oliver Stones 'JFK' and 'In the line of fire', the film holds the documentary style but loses pace as they trudge through interviews with lawyers, forensics experts, family members of the suspected assassins and FBI investigators. The explanations of how the powers at be manipulate and control situations to their own benefit become very heavy handed.
Simon Pegg is a busy man these days when it comes to film roles, Schwimmer not so much, so it's probably about time he got back on the horse. It's weird hearing Simon Pegg do an american accent, he seems to be good at it (too my 'limey' ear at least) but it's just odd as I don't think i've ever heard him do an accent before.
I thought It might be interesting to break down the Grindhouse trailer into it's component parts, and see what we can gleem from it. So I took lots of screenshots (from the best quality source I could find) and we're going to walk through it piece by piece. the girls… the guns… the explosions…
I get angry at myself because I keep missing these '300' blogs, but the fact is Warner Brothers have chosen to scatter them to the wind and not well anyone about it. They're obviously just trying to spread their product around and generate as much buzz as possible, so they're giving certian sites exclusives on the 300 video diaries, which is actually a pretty cool thing to do. A while back a video blog was released on '
The teaser trailer for the remake of 'Black Christmas' has cropped up at acouple of places online. While not massively exciting as a trailer, it does feature the exclellent tagline 'The Ultimate Slay Ride', although very little can beat crappy kids movie 'Jack Frost' and its tagline of 'Snow Dad, is better than no Dad'… this comes close.
Why have I ignored this movie up until now? I really don't know. If My eyes are an email inbox, this film accidentally got thrown into the spam folder. There's two reasons I can think of that this may have happened; 1. It has a name that sounds vaguely girly, and 2. I was getting the stills i'd seen of the film confused with '
I try not to over-saturate myself with too many video clips and featurettes for upcoming films, but most of the time I can't help myself. Especially when it's a film i'm looking forward to as much as 'The Prestige' I have no defence against it.
