"Frost/Nixon"

Ron Howard is a resolutely lame filmmaker, a low-rent Spielberg who can successfully film every kind of genre with an equal eye for awfulness. "Far and Away," "Edtv," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "The Da Vinci Code," and "Willow" all look and feel exactly right for an epic, a farcical ensemble comedy, a kid's candy movie, a thriller, and a fantasy movie - the visual aesthetics are so perfect - and since each of them are respectively the worst example of their respective genre, Ron Howard can proudly call himself Hollywood's Retard Chameleon.

"Da Vinci Code," his most recent uber-successful crapfest, is a good example: it's darkly lit, there's lots of shaky closeups, the score is by Hans Zimmer, the love interest is a brain-crush-cute brunette actress who's so serious that she only gives the protagonist one kiss the whole movie, and the main character has a flashback-past in which he falls through a hole in the ground. That flashback was specifically added into the movie and rips off a scene from "Batman Begins" (co-scored by Zimmer), which proves that Ron Howard is at least uniquely gifted at stealing from the best.

The weirdest thing about Howard, though, is that no matter how perfectly bad he is at everything else, give him a true-life 20th Century story of everyman heroism and he somehow makes at least half a masterpiece. "Apollo 13," "Cinderella Man," and "Frost/Nixon" all suffer from imperfections, but Howard, who knows how to work with great actors, is confident enough to just set his camera down (even if it's weightless) and watch everyday fellas discover themselves at the epiccenter of history. (You can also throw in the first half of "A Beautiful Mind" into this batch, before the mid-movie twist sends the whole movie spiralling towards the outer reaches of the solar system.)

"Frost/Nixon" is probably the best of the bunch. The film centers on a mesmerizing battle of wits between a joke journalist and a failed President - the interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon which proved historic when Nixon seemed to almost maybe apologize for breaking the law- and the genius of the movie is that both actors seem to be overplaying their parts for the first hour (Michael Sheen's David Frost speaks through a wide grin, and Frank Langella somehow makes you see Richard Nixon's jowls using only his voice), and then the Interview begins and you see their true personalities emerge. Both actors originated their roles onstage, and it's intriguing how, in the first half of "Frost/Nixon," they both play for the people in the back row - more theatrically - whereas, after the interview begins, they become more precise, direct, more cinematic. Sheen plays Frost playing Frost, and Langella plays Nixon playing Nixon, and the film becomes a cat-and-mouse switcheroo.

The film would have been better just focusing entirely on the interview, but this is Ron Howard film, so the essential energy of the two actors' conflict is dampened and homogenized with precisely-honed cliches like The Girlfriend, The Character Played By Oliver Platt, and The Doing-Lots-Of-Stuff Montage. None of these things are particularly bad, and none of them detract from Sheen and Langella, except by virtue of not just letting them Just Be onscreen.