Panique à la Maison Blanche

I really enjoyed this movie. It was 10 times better than Costner's bomb 13 days. Richard Dreyfuss' portrayal of Alex Haig was marvelous. The thing I liked most was that even though you knew the outcome, the movie still kept you on the edge of your seat.

Although the makers of the film used the usual disclaimer of part of the film being "fictionalized", it was apparent they were passing it off as factual. I was surprised and somewhat angered at the sloppiness in one key scene, where Haig is upbraided for misquoting the constitution. In the scene they give Haig a copy of the 25th amendment. However, nowhere in the amendment is reference made to the order of succession beyond the vice president. In fact, the Presidential Succession Act, passed in 1947, and not a part of the constitution, defines the order of succession. This is easily researched and shows a lack of apreciation of history on the part of the film makers. Come on, gentlemen, let's be more careful.

This semi-docudrama is really two films in one. The first concerns the infamous 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan and the valiant efforts to save his life. The second relays the power struggle among White House staff while the most powerful man in the world lay under anesthesia.

Despite the fascinating subject matter, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT often falls flat, playing like a cobbled together movie of the week. Writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh spends far too much time on the ego trips of Secretary of State Alexander Haig (a semi-annoying Richard Dreyfuss), failing to fully explore the more human angles as a nation sat with bated breath. What should have been a subplot with Haig dominates the movie. It would have been nice to see more of the doctors handed this enormous task; more of Nancy Reagan, the beloved First Lady; and more of the behind-the-scenes details, such as the ailing president signing a dairy bill to prove he was still in charge. The dialog is unimaginative and some of the performances resemble those of actors fresh from acting school.

There is a great movie to be made about the chaos within government when its leader is sidelined. But with its dual personality, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT isn't it.

While the drama of this movie was entertaining, the reality was that the only people who got their knickers in a twist about this at the time were the media. In fact, it was only later that the anti-nuclear crowd, the bow-tied Harvard elite used this as a political opportunity to question whose finger was really on the trigger, and was the constitution was being ignored!

For those that look at movies to perform some sort of academic gratification or for those who live for governmental conspiracy theories and anti nuclear messages then this is the stuff for you. While 12 DAYS IN MAY was fiction and JFK stuffed with so many wild theories and ludicrous speculation THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT was a factual event that Hollywood has distorted to suggest we were near a nuclear war or a constitutional meltdown. Non of this was true, sure international politics at the time were tense, but the fact of the matter was that as soon as the president is incapacitated the constitutional procedure follows that the vice president takes charge. Al Hague said that he was in charge of the White House that is irrelevant if he has not got access to the nuclear codes that the President and Vice president has.

Interestingly was has been overlooked was that between 1981-1984 the USSR had to replace it's doddering and bedridden premiers three times until they put in Mikhail Gorbachov. Nobody in Hollywood seemed too be worried whose fingers were on the Soviets trigger for all that time bearing in mind some of them were never seen in public for months and were in a comatose state for weeks!!

Hollywood leans so far left it can't even comprehend what the center looks like. Yet it has the power to influence what future skulls full of mush, as Kingsfield would say, think about the past.

A recent tv movie about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings was simply a paranoiac extremist's fictional nightmare. If such a flick had been made about a person of color on the left, the makers would've been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail as "racists" ("racist" being what is used by the pc crowd rather than the McCarthyists' "communist", though to the same effect).

The cheapjack rush job "The Contender" was supposed to parallel the Clinton impeachment, but in trying to preach to us that a public person's private life is none of our business, Hollywood sets up an ingenious double standard: if you're Clarence Thomas, your private life must be public record (so far, no movie has been made about the Robert Bork nomination; perhaps Hollywood hasn't quite been able to skate around the liberal senators getting Bork's "Blockbuster" tape rental record in a vain attempt to try to smear him -- and don't forget bringing up Oliver North's purchase at a lingerie store (which was for ballet costumes for his daughters!). A public figure's private life is no one's business to Hollywood . . . if that person is left of center. Otherwise, the public has a right to know, and Hollywood and the media have a duty to blurt out every detail.

Movies about Richard Nixon invariably portray him as a psychopath, whereas movies about JFK invariably portray him as messianic. When we finally forget the disgrace that was Clinton, who committed worse crimes involving the FBI and IRS etc. than Nixon, no doubt Clinton movies of the future will portray him as truly messianic, whereas Clinton his a political Jimmy Swaggart (only more sanctimonious).

The Tom Clancy book "The Sum of all Fears" is about middle-eastern terrorists; despite the timeliness of that material, the movie "SoAF" is about right-wing terrorists. We mustn't offend the Taliban or the PLO. But right-wingers don't need to be understood but shot on sight.

Which segues us into "The Day Reagan Was Shot", Richard Crenna's Reagan isn't bad, considering the number of Reagan-haters who must exist in Hollywood, but he isn't that important, either. But Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, and one of the most experienced and savvy men in Washington at that time, is portrayed as an out-and-out nut case, simply on the basis of one erroneous statement. The whole weight of the film, in fact, seems to be, not that the chief executive was gunned down by a movie fan, but the fact that the Republican secretary of state spoke out of turn. The Crisis of the movie is not that a Republican president was shot, but that a secretary of state, who was the highest ranking official in Washington on the spot, had a slip of the tongue. The antagonist if the drama wasn't a true nut case who tried to eliminate an overwhelmingly popular chief executive, but a made-up nut case in the administration.

The Hollywood double standard continues in real life and in the movies. When Jerry Falwell said American deserved 9/11, he was castigated; when Clinton said America deserved 9/11, his vapid outspokenness was praised as "courageous". If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the war on Terror the Taliban and Osama can rest easy: the antagonist will be Condi Rice or Colin Powell.