Reagan

Jake Alda Coffey1.0

The best part happened before the movie even began, when my theater showed a trailer for a documentary all about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, making almost all the old folks around me visibly frustrated and upset.

Will Menaker1.0

Upon seeing a screening of DW Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation' at the White House, Woodrow Wilson said that it was like "history written in lightning." After seeing a screening of the Dennis Quaid Reagan movie yesterday afternoon I can say it animates American history with all the vivid intensity of the reenactments on Forensic Files. Boring, treacly, shoddily-made in every aspect, bereft of any charm, talent or interest, and also evil. In many ways the perfect Ronald Reagan bio pic.

SamMuras

Angelika does “top secret” screenings where you buy a ticket but don’t know what you’re watching so I figured what the hell, maybe I’ll see something cool I would’ve never watched otherwise. You cannot understand my fucking disbelief when this started. Apparently this releases in theaters on August 30th, so technically my first prescreening. They’re definitely screening this for Trump, right? Did I get to see this before Trump?A few “hits,” so you can avoid this (like you were gonna watch this slop anyways):- Jon Voight does a questionable and vaguely annoying Russian accent, which also serves as the interminable voiceover for pretty much half the movie - Unbelievably long at 2 hours and 15 minutes, I didn’t think it was ever going to end- The implication that Reagan was the reason for the Soviet Union’s downfall, punctuated by numerous shots of Soviet chairs all sitting around a table together watching every one of his speeches (?) and looking forlorn lmao- They do some sort of bad de-aging on Jon Voight in flashback scenes (impossible to know what’s a flashback scene due to a ridiculous amount of jumping around in time) and give him a goatee and he looks like the prison warden from Arrested Development- Dennis Quaid, aside from looking like a lizard Muppet, is genuinely so bad and slurs his way through a ton of his lines. Reagan sucked but at least he was charismatic, something that makes it so much worse when they build up the big moments for Quaid to deliver debate zingers or the “Tear down this wall” speech- No mention of Nancy Reagan’s sexual prowess! None at all!- A really fucking bad and harmful presentation of college protesters (I guess you can’t expect much from the group that made this) and generally just a complete ignorance of any of Reagan’s policy failings, except to paint detractors as communists looking to drag him and America down- The most absurd portrayal of Margaret Thatcher I have ever seen. After the Berlin Wall speech it cuts to her cheering at her tv and yelling something along the lines of “there you go, cowboy!” I was very jealous of the people in front of me that got up to leave 20 minutes in- There’s no way you can look at this movie, its message and themes, and its despicable cast (Jon Voight, Dennis Quaid, fucking Kevin Sorbo), and tell me that this isn’t carefully timed to release just before the election. I’m grateful that the ticket was only $5, but I am gonna be real upset if I see this even touch its budgetGo listen to John Hinckley’s music on Spotify. It’s an infinitely better use of 135 minutes of your time.