politics and the politic of movies. tell me about the new jfk movie. this is interesting. i don t know if you saw the hbo movie about liberace, but no, tapper, i missed that. you missed it? it was good. it was about liberace, very good. rob lowe had a scene stealing performance as liberace s plastic surgeon. coming off that very well regarded and creepy performance he s been tapped to play, john f. kennedy in the national geographic version of bill o reilly s book killing kennedy and he s he s not known in hollywood for boeing a liberal. i think he leans a little bit the other direction. but it is interesting because this is, of course, the latest casting of a hollywood star as this iconic president. you may remember when greg kinnear played the president in the very controversial tv movie the kennedys, others like martin sheen and steven colins played the roll. we ll look at the difficulty of
fools if we take it to be journalism or history as such or scholarship. absolute fools. you know, john ford did a movie on lincoln, we would never substitute that for doris kerns goodwin history on lincoln. these are movies. these are romanticized. zero dark thirty. there you had the question of torture. you know, the filmmakers were pretending that this was real journalistic reality, real historic reality when, in fact, it was not. and i think they paid a price. i think the people that were voting on the oscars not that this is the most important issue in the world but torture is an incredibly important moral issue for the united states, and i think those filmmakers paid a price. by the way, people in the intelligence community that knew what happened, it s very interesting, we ve heard one side of the story where the left is saying hey, there are parts of this that just around accurate. there are people that were actually involved in the process that say hey, they ve got
happened, they said, actually, it went off without a hitch. it was flawless. you couldn t do a movie. unfortunately, the much bigger mission of that period was the big disaster. which was the attempt to free the american hostages. the true story was the canadian version, and that was dull as hell. the american version was fun. it s the ultimate reality, the bigger reality was horrendous disaster on every count. so why are movies still you know, we ve been talking about how the great stories are not being told on television. and yet movies had hollywood had its biggest bx office year, and people are still transfixed. this is one of those few events. and they re getting fewer and fewer every year, but this is one of those events where most a lot of america still stops and gets in front of the tv set and watches. why? well, i think first of all, they re great stories told by terrific storytellers, but we re
very end were kind of syrupy and filmed through gauzy light. i thought that performance and the script by tony kushner, the ability to tell the story and focus on the battle of the 13th amendment, legislative battle. can you imagine the sequel called sequester. do you have some of these chapters in your legislative life? you could do a whole hour and a half movie? i agree with you guys. to find that kernel of story. i also liked the debate about the necessity or lack of necessity for voracity for truth in a historical movie when it came to zero dark thirty, argo, when the mission went much more flawlessly in real life than in the movie. and lincoln and the battle in the end in the house. as far as argo, it s so funny you say that. there was no chase on the tarm tarmac. that didn t exist. when i talk to friends that knew what happened and were actually around when that
applauded like mad at the end. people don t applaud at movie theaters. the excitement in seeing america, to cooperate with another country, to do it without bloody, killing everybody and to actually end up getting away from a place like iran we don t want to be in, it had all the messages of today. just like m.a.s.h. was not really about korea. it was about vietnam. and i think movies are about today always. and i think it captures something. i also thought my other first impression was jennifer lawrence. when i saw i didn t know what to expect with silver linings playbook. when i saw her, i walked out of that theater and said that is the best actor of her generation, bar none. i had never seen a performance like that. so first impressions are very helpful. 5,000 people vote in this. daniel day-lewis, of course, i keep talking about daniel day-lewis and lincoln. i left the movie theater really moved. i was stunned by that movie. i m not always blown away by spielberg. he