Frost/Nixon (2008)

We saw Stacy Keach playing Frank Langella's Tony-Award-winning Richard Nixon in the Broadway Across America traveling production of the play earlier this year. It was pretty good, and I didn't really expect to love the movie. But I did. The cast is amazing: Langella (I loved him in Starting Out in the Evening (2007)), Oliver Platt (who is mesmerizing in almost everything he does--some of my faves are the now cancelled Huff from Showtime; one of my food movies, Pieces of April (2003); and the lead in Funny Bones (1995), which also features some wonderful arrangements of Duke Ellington music), Sam Rockwell (Choke (2008), Matchstick Men (2003), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), and many more), and Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in Peter Morgan's Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning screenplay The Queen (2006)) as David Frost. I am a big fan of Morgan's script for The Last King of Scotland (2006), and now he has written both this screenplay and the stage play which preceded it (he seems to have a thing about world leaders). Toby Jones' transformation into Swifty Lazar, like his metamorphosis into Truman Capote in the other Capote movie Infamous (2006), is a show-stopper (for me, anyway). For those who play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Kevin's in it, too.