Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_President’s_Men_(film)
Despite 3 Days of the Condor being one of my favorite films, I never got around to watching All The President’s Men until a couple days ago.
My god, what I’ve been missing.
It’s truly a masterclass in film making. It’s a slow burn, but never feels it. There’s always something interesting happening, some new piece of information revealed, tension always building, and acting so damned good I didn’t move from the sofa until the end.
There’s some really impressive cinematography in this, but something that consistently impressed me was the level of acting of even minor or unnamed side characters, who do virtually as good of a job as the leads in feeling absolutely believable and natural.
If, like me, you just haven’t gotten around to this film, I really recommend making it your next watch.
I recently watched the Paranoia Trilogy with this being the final one I watched. It’s a great movie. Unfortunately it made more sad than either of the other two. The movie presents the press as people that will doggedly pursue the truth and inevitably those truths will help bring justice. Honestly, the movie left me feeling depressed because that ideal feels like an impossibility now. The movie felt like a fairy tale. Parallax View felt much more in line with what America has become.
I do highly recommend all three movies though. Klute especially doesn’t get enough love and was the most memorable for me.
What is the Paranoia Trilogy?
All The Presidents Men has been my favourite movie for ages, and I have watched it countless times, although I am beginning to enjoy it less precisely because of the reasons you mention feeling as well: It is an ideal which once existed but is now completely gone, even though we need it more than ever. But I have not heard about a Paranoia Trilogy before.
It’s Pakula’s three movies in the 70s that all had the theme of political paranoia. I mentioned them in my previous comment and they’re all definitely worth a watch.
All the President’s Men (1976)
Here’s an article about them as a group
https://screenrant.com/forgotten-movies-1970s-paranoia-trilogy-modern-relevance-humanity-politics/
On the bluray’s special features of All The President’s Men, some journalists they interview about the film mention that nowadays it would be insanely difficult if not impossible for a journalist to get a story like watergate published, since the thousands of independent news agencies have been drastically reduced and consolidated into the hands of a few corporations who would never dare publish such a hostile story that could hit shareholder profits and get them sued.
However, I think a response to that is Citizen Controlled Media, of which the fediverse such as lemmy and piefed are now a part of, and they can bypass the control of the corporations.
This is a great movie. I’ve been wanting to see 3 Days of the Condor because of it. Someday.
All the President’s Men influenced Citizenfour which is also good, and which is also on archive.org someplace I think.
Looks like Condor is available for free on Bitchute, as well as Pluto, if you’d like to see it :)
Thanks, I’m sure I’ll be able to catch it someday. I’m unable to decode the censored url and I don’t subscribe to streaming. I have a friend who is into movies and has a bunch of subscriptions so maybe I’ll see it with her sometime.
The Pluto link asks me to enable DRM to watch it (which I didn’t try), but the Bitchute upload is not encoded, and works fine for me in a slightly hardened Librewolf browser. Does the Bitchute link not load for you?
The bit chute link got censored so I couldn’t see it (try viewing the page), but I eventually figured out what it was. I’m not much of a movie buff so I didn’t try to watch it by myself. I’ll try to watch it with the friend that I mentioned sometime. Thanks for the links!
Another great movie in a somewhat similar mood is Z by Costa-Gavras, with Yves Montand. I’ve probably seen that one 5 times.
Added: lol, bit chute didn’t get censored because of its possible complicity with unauthorized uploads. It’s because the first five letters are sometimes used as a sexist slur. Sheesh.
Added 2: I tried viewing the video and it works fine, it’s pretty low res but I’m not bothered by that. I only watched the beginning of the opening credits though, so maybe there are problems later. The other one of the series is Klute? I’ll put that on my list too.
I can’t wait for the remake about the Trump presidency.
It can’t really be made, he creates at least a scandal the size of Watergate a day, often more. Nobody is keeping count anymore, and even those who try gets nothing, because noone can be held responsible or feel moral obligations to truth or law anymore like they did back then. It is noticeable that Nixon fell because of his fellow Republicans, that would never happen today, they are all in cahoots and as criminal as their president, so they can’t even turn if they wanted to, because they would go down as well.
The power of the press is long gone, and thus a pillar of modern democracy, which cannot exist without it. It is a sad situation all around with no real solution, except tearing it all down, but that isn’t really a solution either.
So a soap opera then?
