Student Filmmakers: Enter Your Movies in the White House Student Film Festival
Posted on December 7, 2014 at 8:00 am
Cooler than Cannes — you could get a chance to have your movie shown at the White House!
From now through January 20, submissions are open for the second White House Student Film Festival. The theme of this year’s festival is The Impact of Giving Back, and it’s open to U.S. students, grades K-12. So tell a story about paying it forward, about community service, or what making a difference looks like in your eyes and through your lens. It can be a fictional story or a short documentary, so break out the lights, write a script, get the camera ready, and show us your passion for service and giving back. We can’t wait to see what you will make this year! For inspiration, take a look at the official selections from last year’s White House Student Film Festival, when the theme was the power of technology in education. They are on the festival website.
Films can be short – in fact, they must be 3 minutes tops. The official selections will be featured on the White House website, and shared across the world on White House sites and official social media accounts. If selected, you may have a chance to attend the film fest yourself at the White House.
Submission Guidelines:
All films must be shorter than 3 minutes.
All films must be made by students in grades K-12.
No film may use copyrighted material including music, TV shows, or movies.
All films must be uploaded to YouTube
All film submissions must be received by 11:59 p.m. EST on January 20, 2015.
The third movie of the year featuring an attack on the White House opens this week. How many of these films featuring 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue do you know?
1. Jeff Bridges plays a President with a taste for sandwiches.
2. Jack Nicholson plays two roles in a movie that has aliens in the White House.
3. A look-alike takes over for the President but does not fool the First Lady.
4. This tense drama is the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
5. A widowed President dates a beautiful lobbyist.
6. A murder takes place in the White House and Wesley Snipes is called in to investigate.
7. Name three movies with African-American Presidents.
8. Name two movies about the President’s children.
9. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for this portrayal of a President with many scenes in the residence of the White House.
10. Teenage girls get jobs in the White House in the midst of the Watergate era.
It turns out that being a spy is not glamorous at all, especially when you are the mother of twins. Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) does not get to pick up a bunch of fun gadgets from Q or change from a wetsuit into a ball gown to crash a party at the palatial home of the bad guy. What she does do is a lot of tough, gritty research and a lot of painstaking relationship building with people who have every reason not to trust her. And sometimes she also had to threaten people who were pretty scary. And then come home and make dinner for her husband and children.
Her job at the CIA requires judgment, skill, courage, intelligence (in both senses of the word), loyalty, integrity, and the ability to keep a lot of secrets. While she had all of that, the people around her did not, and she found herself outed as a spy in the press, not for anything she did but because the government wanted to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). Suddenly she was out of a job but still not permitted to speak publicly, even to respond to the false and disparaging statements being made about her.
The problem was not that the White House made a mistake in thinking — and saying in the State of the Union address — that there was evidence that Iraq was making an effort to buy uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The problem was that the White House made a mistake about how to respond when they were publicly contradicted. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate this rumor and found no evidence of any such transaction, explaining the basis for his conclusion. Instead of responding on the substance, pointing to a better source of information, or accepting his conclusion and providing additional justification for concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the White House decided to discredit Joe Wilson, which involved telling the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a spy.
Director Doug Liman (who was his own cinematographer here) can make a scene with two people across a desk as gripping as the action scenes in he gave us in “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Based on the books by Plame and Wilson and on court transcripts and other records made available since the trial, he has given us their side of the story, with the leak of Plame’s role a weapon of mass destruction aimed at their reputations and their family. Because it is from their point of view, they are in almost every scene. That means we never see who is plotting against them or what the plot is; we just know that the most powerful men the world has ever known see them as “fair game,” or, even worse, as collateral damage. Liman, whose father was counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation, understands the culture of Washington well, the wonky dinner party debates, the show-boating, the passion, the long hours, the patriotism and the partisanship, the ends/means balancing act, and the way that sometimes everything boils down to a kind of middle school clique-ish brattiness.
Watts and Penn are outstanding, very compelling in the scenes about national security and even more so as what is going on affects their marriage. Penn lets us see that Wilson can be a bit of a blowhard and Watts lets us see that Plame knows that, can be frustrated by it, but loves him because she understands that it is a part of his passionate engagement with policy. Watts makes Plame a serious professional who achieves her objectives with preparation and diligence, though her being an exceptionally attractive woman made it easier to diminish and marginalize her, and she contributed to that by posing for Vanity Fair. The best surprise of the film is David Andrews as Scooter Libby, a wonderfully layered performance that shows us his mistrust of the career staff and his insecurity about the way they saw him. At the end of the day, you don’t need a Dr. Evil to be the bad guy. You just need a bully who thinks he can get away with it.
More than 30 years after he resigned from office, Richard M. Nixon has transcended politics and history and become epic. He has been portrayed on film by Anthony Hopkins, the man who won an Oscar playing Hannibal the Cannibal. And his trip to China has been the subject of an opera, the art form most suited for larger-than-life stories of melodrama and scope. Nixon is like a Shakespearean character, the ability and ambition and the tragic flaws of Richard III, Lear, or Othello.
No one work of art or history will ever contain this man of extraordinary contradictions, but in one of this year’s best films, based on the Tony award-winning play, writer Peter Morgan, director Ron Howard, and actors Frank Langella and Michael Sheen take a pivotal moment in Nixon’s life and make it into a gripping story of the craving of two very different men for power and acceptance and how it plays into a contest of wit and will that becomes a larger story of accountability and meaning.
Richard Nixon was all but exiled to his house on the ocean in San Clemente following his resignation from the Presidency in 1974, relegated to working on his memoirs and finding excuses not to play golf. British broadcaster David Frost was also in a kind of an exile following cancellation of his New York-based talk show, relegated to lightweight celebrity interviews and presiding over televised stunts. Both were desperate for a way to get back into a position of influence. Frost proposed a series of interviews, even though he had no background as a journalist or historian. And Nixon accepted, in part because Frost had not background as a journalist or historian and in part because he would get paid $600,000 and a percentage of the profits. Negotiated by uber-agent Swifty Lazar (a shrewd Toby Jones) and widely criticized as “checkbook journalism,” the payment may have been unorthodox but it was most likely one of the most important factors in eliciting the unprecedented level of candor from the former President, not because of the incentives but because it shifted the balance of power from the subject to the interviewer.
It was also a stunning example of the precise conflict at the heart of so many of Nixon’s failures — his desperate need for approval. He accepted the interview as a way to try to regain his reputation as an elder statesman and remind America of his accomplishments and value. But once again, as it did in 1960 in the first televised Presidential debate, he was defeated by television, but what a character refers to as the power of the close-up. In yet another of this film’s infinite regression of paradoxes, the close-up that most exposes Nixon comes closest to creating sympathy for him. It is one thing to read about the evasions and cover-ups and corruption. It is another to see his face, the desperation, the soul-destroying awareness of how far he was from what he wanted to be.
Staged like a boxing match between the aging champ and the upstart, Howard and Morgan show us the combatants in training, sparring, retreating to their corners for some splashes of water, and then back into it, each going for the knock-out punch. They manage to create sympathy for both men without any shyness about their flaws. Both have some monstrous qualities but neither is a monster.
Sheen and Langella, after months performing together on stage, fully inhabit the roles and are exquisitely attuned to each other. Langella has the more showy character, but Sheen is every bit as precise. Watch the way he orders his lunch. In a millisecond he conveys all of his skills and all of his vulnerabilities. Even in the middle of an important conversation with his producer he stops and gives his full attention to the person behind the counter at the cafeteria and he orders in a way that perfectly demonstrates his charm, his showy self-deprecation, and his need to be noticed and approved of by every person on the planet.
And then there is Nixon, that infinitely interesting jumble of contradictions. Langella shows us his glimmers of self-awareness that cannot add up to meaningful insight. Morgan has taken the privilege of a writer to make it truthful without being accurate in every detail. For one thing, it has better dialogue. Morgan’s “The Queen” was another story of politics, celebrity, history, and conflict between two strong public characters (the younger one played by Michael Sheen) . As he did there, his selection of the elements of the story he wants to highlight and explore allows him to make this men not just historical figures but symbols of duality and contradiction and ultimately to deliver some over-arching messages about what it means to be human.
Maybe it is just too soon, maybe we are just too used to the high-gloss satire of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” maybe it’s the kaleidoscopic structure, but this movie feels like a rough draft. Director Oliver Stone throws almost-randomly arranged scenes from the 43rd President’s life up on screen in an attempt at insight but too often it dissolves into caricature.
It begins promisingly with a defining moment for the George W. Bush presidency, or at least a moment intended to be defining. In an Oval Office meeting, W. (Josh Brolin) and his top advisors are debating the terminology they will use to explain the President’s view — literally — of the world in his first State of the Union address in January 2002, just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. How to describe our enemies? They settle on “axis of evil.” And we get acquainted with the cast of characters who will be portraying the headline names — Jeffrey Wright as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Scott Glen as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Toby Jones as Senior Advisor and political strategist Karl Rove, and Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney. A strong beginning is diminished as the characters are introduced because the audience is distracted by the effort of determining which actors do the best job of look and sound like the real-life characters they portray (that would be Newton and Dreyfuss) and which look and sound nothing whatsoever like their characters (Glen).
Then we get some flashbacks to unroll the well-known story of President Bush’s misspent youth, the drinking, the partying, the series of failed careers. Brolin gives a thoughtful performance, but the superficiality of the assessment of Bush as a man (trying to both please and do better than his father) and as a leader (there is not enough here to understand his policies or priorities) give the film an uncertain tone, sometimes verging on satire, sometimes sinking to melodrama, sometimes showing flashes of farce, especially when almost every scene shows him chomping on a sandwich or when Rice murmurs support for everything the President says. Why give us Bush choking on a pretzel? Then why have it a second time?
Elizabeth Banks gives a warm and appealing performance as Laura Bush, Ellen Burstyn is fiery as Barbara Bush, and Dreyfuss has Cheney’s steely purr down perfectly. The movie ambitiously tries to make President Bush appear more overmatched than cynical or incompetent. There are hints of hubris but Stone does not doubt the sincerity of Bush’s intentions or the merits of his aspirations. But there are too many characters and the events are glossed over too quickly. It’s very tempting to make it a metaphor for the Bush Presidency — unclear in direction and suffering from attention deficit disorder. But ultimately, it is just a movie, and despite moments of value finally an unsuccessful one.
