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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Richard Nixon, teenybopper's heartthrob? Only according to Dick, the 1999 multi-level political parody/teen flick gem. Two little babes in the Watergate stumble on some high espionage being conducted by G. Gordon Liddy, and somehow this opening turns into a tale of generation-gap love weirder than Harold and Maude.

The genuinely-adorable girls are played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, and they hold their own with the seasoned comic actors in the cast. (That's Williams in last week's picture clue, wearing flowers in her hair during her funny "Summer of Dick" dream sequence.) Harry Shearer plays G. Gordon Liddy like the twitchy sociopath he used to be in his younger days.** Dan Hedaya's Nixon isn't meant to be letter-perfect; instead, he focused on Dick's crazed inner rottenness, and he's hilarious.

(I can't say I remember being impressed by Dave Foley's Bob Haldeman, but maybe that's because 1) I can't stand Foley now that he's become a major perpetrator of celebrity poker, and 2) Haldeman's my favorite Nixon man, and my expectations were high. Someday, a movie will be made of The Haldeman Diaries, the funniest political memoir of them all. For example, when Duke Ellington was going to be a White House guest, Nixon told Haldeman to book a good jazz act-- "like Guy Lombardo.")

So congratulations to the following quiz winners-- they are not crooks! Wayne Palmer, Deborah Yang, Corey Anderson, Bill Hearne, E. Yarber, Mark Gisleson, and Hank Parmer.

**On Dick Cavett's PBS show, Liddy talked about killing, cooking, and eating a rat in order to prove to himself that he was tough, and Cavett asked, "Wouldn't a real tough guy have eaten it raw?"

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 14, 2005 12:35 AM

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