DICK (1999)
Rating: 3 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Andrew Fleming
Written by: Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, Dan Hedaya, Dave Foley
Synopsis: Tricky Dick Nixon (Richard M. Nixon), the 37th President of the United States, was famous for a few things and infamous for one. Nixon ended the Vietnam War and held successful strategic arms limitation talks with his Cold War nemesis, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But soon came the 1972 Watergate office complex break-in, an attempted burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by thugs hired by Nixon's close associates. In the end, President Nixon resigned in disgrace after erasing tapes which allegedly contained conversations in which he obstructed justice by halting the FBI's Watergate investigation just when big names were starting to become implicated.
The spoof DICK is a caricature of the Nixon years in which the Nixon administration's main accomplishments are accidentally caused by two ditsy teenage girls named Arlene and Betsy (played by Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst) who are hired by the White House as dog walkers.
In DICK, Nixon (Dan Hedaya) thoughtlessly erases the tapes which lead to his resignation because he doesn't want the world to hear Arlene singing an embarrassing Olivia Newton-John love song. Another running gag is that Nixon has a dog named King Timahoe, but he keeps absent-mindedly calling the dog Checkers, the name of a pet Nixon immortalized in a political speech, defending himself from charges of corruption 20 years before Watergate. Nixon era characters such as Leonid Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger are also spoofed.
Opinion: DICK is great satire, a hilarious take on the Nixon years. Even folks who weren't born in the days of Tricky Dick, Kissinger, Liddy, Dean, or Haldeman will still laugh at bigwig politicians eating the wrong (marijuana-laced) cookies. Or at the two oblivious teens - - Betsy and Arlene, like Jan and Marcia from the Brady Brunch, only mentally vacuous - - who witness surreptitious corruption time and again but fail to see what's going on. While nefarious events swirl, Arlene and Betsy dream of only cute 70s pop idol Bobby Sherman and the furtive man of their dreams, Richard Nixon.
Comedic parts concerning investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein fall flat, and some of the film's jokes are inside jokes, but for the most part DICK is pretty funny. And the DICK soundtrack includes everything 70s, from young Michael Jackson to Yes.
Reviewed by David Sunga August 8, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
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