watergate | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On the Complicated Seventies Nostalgia of “Poker Face”…

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the end of the first season of Poker Face last week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at the show.

Poker Face is obviously designed as something of a seventies throwback. The show is very obviously a hybrid of classic seventies television like Columbo and Kung-Fu. However, there’s more than simple nostalgia at play within the series. Poker Face is a show about grappling with the memory and legacy of the seventies, of understanding why these stories resonate in the modern world. It has a nuanced and complicated relationship with the era from which it draws, which makes for compelling television.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: 1970s, charlie cale, cynicism, economy, memory, natasha lyonne, nick nolte, nostalgia, out of focus, paranoia, poker face, Rian Johnson, seventies, the escapist, vietnam, war, watergate | Leave a comment »

279. The Conversation (#—)

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

So this week, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

Harry Caul is one of the best surveillance operators in America. However, when Harry finds himself in possession of a potentially inflammatory recording with very real consequences, he finds hismel at a crossroads. Can the professional eavesdropper remain a passive observer in the drama unfolding around him, or will events force him into a more active role?

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: belief, Catholicism, francis ford coppola, gene hackman, nixon, podcast, religion, spying, surveillance, The 250, the conversation, voyeurism, watergate | 1 Comment »

X-Over: The X-Files & Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Darren

It goes without saying that The X-Files was a massively influential television show. As early as its second season, the show had launched all manner of imitations and copycats, both inside and outside the Fox Network. It seems quite likely that Fox invested two-and-a-half million dollars in the failed Doctor Who relaunch of 1996 in the hopes of spinning off another cult/mainstream science-fiction hit like The X-Files. It was launched as a two-hour television movie, failing to earn the rating necessary to spin it off into a weekly series.

However, although the 1996 telemovie provides an obvious point of intersection between The X-Files and Doctor Who, the influence of The X-Files can perhaps be most keenly felt in Steven Moffat’s work on the relaunched television series. Moffat is credited as the producer who helped the show to “break” America during his second year as showrunner, and he did so in a number of ways. Perhaps the most interesting is that he leaned rather heavily on The X-Files as a point of cultural intersection.

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Filed under: Television, The X-Files | Tagged: a good man goes to war, amy, conspiracy, Darkness Falls, doctor who, Forest of the Dead, nixon, one breath, scully, silence, Silence in the Library, steven moffat, vashda nerada, watergate, x-files | 2 Comments »

The Love of Richard Nixon…

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Darren

I’m not American, but I feel a strange fascination with Richard Milhouse Nixon. He’s a figure of almost Shakespearean complexity, driven to phenomenal heights and fantastic accomplishments, but never able to do enough to placate the insecurity gnawing at him. I had the pleasure of reading Conrad Black’s rather even-handed summary of his life and career last summer, and he seems as much a mystery as ever. The recent news item about another of his paranoid ramblings has grabbed media attention, but I’m amazed that there doesn’t seem to be much debate over the true impact of Nixon’s Presidency beyond the obvious shadow cast by Watergate. What is the American fascination with painting Nixon as a villain or a fiend? Why can he not embody something just a tad more complex?