The Post

These reviews may contain spoilers.

Friday January 26, 2018 9:35pm

Head #1:

Let me start off by saying that I hated history class all throughout school. Hated it. Maybe I never really paid much attention? Turns out I like learning about history, just not in a high school classroom. One of my favorite genres is historical fiction. I have learned so much about history from reading and watching historical fiction. I know it is still fiction, but it gets me interested in the story so that after the movie or book, I research the events because I am always curious about what was fact and what was fiction. (Don’t even get me started on The Greatest Showman….). I wanted to preface with that because it helps explain why I find this movie so fascinating. As we walked out of the theater, I actually googled “Was the Washington Post owned by a woman”. It was. The story so far in this movie holds up. It is currently almost midnight so I have not had a chance to delve further into the real history yet, but I plan to. (Seeing movies at the theater that start after 9pm is going to be the death of me).

I have always loved Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and they did not disappoint in this movie. I appreciated some of the clever dialogue about women in the workplace. It is interesting to see a movie that doesn’t have an actual villain, though one could argue that Nixon is the villain. It was a bit slow at the beginning, only in that I had no historical context to use to understand what was going on. This movie felt noble. The people that lived this story really believed in something and risked a lot to stand up for it. Movies like this make me think.

I know I toured my local newspaper when I was in elementary school, but I can’t remember it. I would love to see a newspapers’ printing facilities today. I think I would have loved to work on the printing press and load the metal letters, that sounds like a dream- newspapers can’t still be printed that way now right?

Head #2:

Extra Extra Extra

Of all the movies that get prequals these days, All the President’s Men was pretty low on my wish list. I’m not usually a huge fan of fictional historical drama. They taste too much like diet coke. While they taste vaguely similar to a true historical documentary, there is that Splenda-like sheen that is a bit off-putting. The history is there, but the dialogue is a bit too clean and preachy to feel like real life.

While I was somewhat aware of the events leading up to Watergate, the precursor story of the events surrounding the Pentagon Papers was interesting enough for me to want to restart watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary.

Strangely the most moving part of the movie was helping me realize how evil typewriters are. Next Thanksgiving, I need to remember the humble word processor that has saved me from an unforgiving click-clackity doom.

Best scenes were of those printing presses. Something about extended scenes of well engineered manufacturing equipment printing, folding, stacking away with no dialogue and just background music…mmmhmmm. Gotta go watch me some How It’s Made….