A Terminus Twofer

Terminus has a couple neat new things. First of all, he's apparently doing an episode-by-episode guide to Doctor Who, a project which should take him into the twenty-sixth year of his blog in roughly 2029, I think. I can't claim much familiarity with Doctor Who, although I did really like what little of it I did get to see. The Buffalo PBS station used to carry the show, with entire episode arcs grouped together as movies during pledge break time. Even with the incredibly cheesy special effects, the show always managed to convey that wonderful SFnal sense of a vast universe out there beyond the walls of the TARDIS. I haven't seen any Who in a long long time, and my ignorance of Whovian stuff was made quite clear when I mentioned on a bulletin board once that I liked Peter Davison's incarnation as the Doctor. Imagine being cyber-assaulted by a dozen Comic Book Guys. Not a pretty sight.

Terminus also posted a new installment in his Oliver Stone project: this time he reviews Stone's brilliant 1995 film Nixon, which I've admired greatly ever since it came out. In fact, I'm hard pressed to name a film from the last twenty years that was less deserving of its cruel fate at the box office. Stone really brought every bravura-filmmaking skill he has to bear in that film, with only one real mistake in the picture. (At one point, if memory serves, he shows some archival footage in which some student protester is wearing a Nixon mask. This reminder of what the real Nixon looked like sort of deflated the powerful version of Nixon that Anthony Hopkins created.) There are a number of haunting exchanges in the film, particularly one passage where Nixon comments that "Death paved the way" for him, over "four bodies". J.R. Haldeman, thinking he is referring to JFK and RFK, corrects him: "You mean two bodies?" And Nixon quietly replies, "Four"....meaning his own two dead brothers as well as the Kennedys. The film also sports one hell of a John Williams score that is also terribly underrated. (Some film music fans, upon hearing the "Love Theme" from Attack of the Clones and noting its unique martial-sounding dark section in the middle of the concert arrangement, derisively referred to Williams's AOTC score as "Nixon on a date". Harumph.)