FemaleFirst.co.uk: DVD: The Assassination Of Richard Nixon [2004] [DVD]

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon [2004] [DVD]
enlarge	Director: Niels Mueller Actors: Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Naomi Watts Studio: In2film Category: DVD List Price: ~~£5.99~~ Buy Used: £0.44 as of 24/11/2009 10:59 GMT details You Save: £5.55 (93%) New (22) Used (25) from £0.44 Seller: zoverstocks Rating: 6 reviews Sales Rank: 30326 Format: PAL Language: English (Original Language) Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over Region: 2 Number Of Discs: 1 Running Time: 92 Minutes Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2 Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 EAN: 5055002530012 ASIN: B000IB0K7Y Theatrical Release Date: 2004 Release Date: October 9, 2006 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days


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Customer Reviews: Showing reviews 1-5 of 6 1 2 Next » the view according to www.georgevader.co.uk August 27, 2007 R. J. Williams (Clevedon, UK) 5 out of 5 found this review helpful Loosely based on the true story, Sean Penn stars as Samuel Joseph Byck a furniture salesman who live seems to be going downhill fast.Separated from his wife, under performs in his job and is constantly rejected by banks in his effort to ressurect his brothers old tyre business.When his wife serves him divorce papers and he is turned down for a bank loan his state of mind crumbles and he hatch's an elaborate plan to hijack an airliner and crash it into The White House. br / br /The combination of an excellent story and a stunning performance from Penn make this compelling viewing, Penn must surely be one of the finest actors of his generation.The film is quite reminiscent of 'Taxi Driver', Samuel and Travis Bickle have a lot in common, ordinary hard working Americans constantly being put down by the establishment and those in power. br / br /Powerful, taught and a dynamite performance from Penn. br / Sean Penn's greatest performance November 1, 2007 R. J. Harvey (UK) 4 out of 5 found this review helpful Niels Mueller's sole feature film director credit is this character study about tragic loner Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), a furniture salesman disillusioned with the dishonesty of the world he reluctantly inhabits. Loosely based on a true story, Mueller presents a convincing polemic on the back of bold characterisation. Forget subtexts and pregnant silences - Mueller's film is all about the power of expression. br / br /What it's not about is the assassination of Richard Nixon. I feel the title is not a sensible one - like Sam's slug-like boss (Jack Thompson), it's selling a different product. Do not expect a Jack Ryan-esque heroic espionage thriller. This is, after all, the grimy Land of the Free of 1974, fed on a diet of Dickie Nixon promises and apocalyptic TV visions from Vietnam. Think Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation or Scorsese's Taxi Driver for its mood. But while those films may have lacked emotional warmth, The Assassination of Richard Nixon takes our anti-hero's plight almost into the realm of sentimentality. His scenes with his wife, Marie (Naomi Watts, with whom he memorably shared the screen in the previous year's 21 Grams), are an astonishing portrayal of the agonisingly pitiful. br / br /What seems at once like an exhilarating anti-capitalist diatribe turns into something far more moving: the fable of a lonely man. ("You miss me, don't you?" and "You love me, don't you?" he asks his ex-wife's dog - two things he cannot ask his ex-wife.) But also, fascinatingly, in the final reel Bicke is revealed to be not only deeply alone but deeply unhinged. When his brother (Michael Wincott - an excellent cameo) confronts him about a theft, Sam is forced to confront himself. Sam breaks down, becoming incomprehensible, ranting about racism, displacing responsibility for his crime onto the formless enemy of the honest man. Finally, he says sorry. This scene complicates Sam; it makes him human, not simply an alien observer of the troubled human condition. br / br /Disturbing, moving, cynical, slyly witty, and - horribly predictably - devastating. Remarkable performance by Sean Penn January 18, 2009 Dennis Littrell (SoCal) The movie is an intense focus on Sean Penn doing a sympathetic character study of a nut job named Samuel J. Bicke, a failed salesman who manages to lose at everything he does. He is a salesman who believes you shouldn't lie to make a sale. The only thing more ridiculous would be a lawyer who believes you shouldn't lie to win a case. I had a friend once who was a bit of a nut job like Bicke who said he never lied. To maintain this fiction he lied to himself. It was the only way he could continue to think he never lied. Such ideas ("a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"--from Thoreau--is ironically similar) are the stuff of inflexible minds unable to adjust to the vagaries of humanity and to a world that is not rigidly set in black and white. Bicke lived surrounded by a cloud of his own making, a cloud that kept him from seeing the world in a realistic way, so that instead he saw things through the shroud of his personal delusions. br / br /Sean Penn, in a virtuoso performance, makes us sympathize with Bicke's character. Bicke fails at his marriage and yet he has no idea why. It seems that his wife Marie (Naomi Watts) has cut him off from her and from his children (and even the dog) because she wants to move on to somebody better; yet we know he is unstable and unable to understand how he has fails her. And so she really does need to be rid of him. He also fails as a salesman, and then he fails as an entrepreneur. He is lost and desperate. And all the while there is Richard Milhous Nixon on the tube lying to the American people, the same Richard Nixon that Bicke's boss holds up as a shining example of a great salesman, the kind of man that Bicke could never be. br / br /It is remarkable that Sean Penn was able to so convincingly portray such a character since he himself is nothing like the poor pathetic Bicke. Penn has a winning personality, is charismatic and attractive. Very few women would give up on him as Marie gives up on Bicke. I mention this because if you know people you know that people like Penn and arguably Mel Gibson who played a somewhat similar role in Conspiracy Theory (1997), could never be one of the Bickes of the world since the world loves them too much. It is only life's losers that become the crazies who do the things that Bicke does. They feel so much like failures and have such low self-esteem that they are desperate to do anything to gain some kind of emotional equilibrium. Penn worked hard on the role, and I thought he gave the kind of performance that would be the highlight of any actor's career. But again, it was just so hard to not notice that this guy in the move named Bicke was in fact Sean Penn. br / br /The theme of the salesman as a tragic figure is an America staple. I am thinking of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross in which we see men who make a living by doing something they themselves respect only as an exploitive competition. Here we have Jack Thompson (in a nice supporting role) as Jack Jones, furniture salesman, handing motivational books by Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale to Bicke in an effort to get Bicke up to speed on how to sell by selling himself. I once knew a salesman who told me that the thing to remember is "you are always selling love. If you can do that, you will be a success." br / br /I think director Niels Mueller did a good job of putting this story together. It is an offbeat vehicle for Sean Penn, but the movie goes beyond his performance to examine the shallow, cold and corrupt values of our society that prevailed during the Nixon administration and have led some years down the road to the George W. Bush administration (only two days left as it write this!). I hope that Mueller's gets another chance to do something as interesting with a similarly excellent cast. A small political system produces small assassins September 8, 2007 Jacques COULARDEAU (OLLIERGUES France) 4 out of 8 found this review helpful A small film that has tremendously aged. In 1973-1974 a recently reelected president comes under fire for his Vietnamese policy that does not come to the end of the war in Vietnam, for his repressive policy, particularly against the Black Panther Party, for te Watergate scandal, and for his economic policy that is not producing the development that is expected. This is the story of a small salesman in an office furniture store who seems to be unable to cope with his job, with his business project, with the racist problem and with society at large. Little by little from neurotic he becomes psychotic and he has to impress his mark onto society, even against the will or the indifference of this society. In the hullabaloo around Nixon's scandals, Watergate and others, he decides to target that president. His assassination will never get close to approaching Nixon himself, which explains that no one knows about it, but it ends very badly. The film has a title that is supposed to lure people into being interested in it, though at the time it might have been felt as some kind of militant act against the crook of a president they had. But the film is a small budget something that never takes odd the tarmac. br / br /Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines br / Watch Penn June 24, 2008 Andy Millward (Broxbourne, Herts, UK) This is a small film and ultimately a depressing story that of a loser left without hope and nothing left to lose. A man who finally snaps and launches a futile gesture of defiance against the world which ends in the only possible way - with his death and the legacy of a posthumous feature on a news broadcast. It's also "inspired by" a true story. br / br /Many would argue that there is no reason at all to see this film (particularly those who prefer the usual Hollywood obsession with happy endings), were it not for the riveting Sean Penn. As a portrait of a man breaking up, piece by piece, you will not see a more finely nuanced anywhere - an acutely detailed, minutely observed portrayal of human resistance being eroded as the patently absurd aspirations that a man clings to are exposed: a dream of business success, that his wife would return to their wreckage of a marriage, and ultimately that he could hijack a plane and crash it into the White House. Penn is also well supported by an ensemble cast that includes Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle and Jack Thompson, and given good support by scriptwriter/director Niels Muller. br / br /Not a great movie, but certainly powerful and moving, and a record that Sean Penn is worthy of greater note than just a footnote that he was once married to Madonna. Showing reviews 1-5 of 6 1 2 Next »

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