Frost/Nixon may have gotten skunked at the Oscars, but it did win “Best Picture for Grown-ups” in AARP the Magazine's awards for movies those over 50 enjoy. Otherwise, the media's fixation with Opie's flick is waning, but not with Richard Nixon himself, who is rolled into the plot line of a movie that will likely be seen by many more people (especially if they are under 50), Watchmen.
It's 1985 and Watergate never happened. Richard Nixon is still U.S. president, having secured an unlimited term by unleashing a devastating new weapon to win the Vietnam War.
That weapon was a glowing blue man with infinite powers, who now doubts whether the world is worth saving, and he's just one of the dysfunctional masked heroes known as Watchmen.
Wait, so you mean that didn't really happen? The blue man was not Tobias Fünke of Arrested Development? Gotta bring it all back to home to the OC somehow, people.
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Which reminds me: the notion of no Watergate and Dick serving a fifth consecutive term has got make his sicko-phants giddy. I can see them huddling in his Yorba Linda birthplace, burning sage, breaking out the crystal ball and chanting, “It all came true, oh Stubbly One, please come back to us, pleeeeeeeease.”
Among those drinking the Kool-Aid of the Nixon coven is Queerty editor Japhy Grant, who blogs that he “is a Nixon fanatic-I've even been to the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda (where, like a Simpsons joke, the Watergate exhibit was 'under renovation') and Nixon in China is my favorite opera of all time. . . . Nixon is our nation's lone Shakespearian tragedian, a conservative who by modern standards would be a liberal and a cultural touchstone a decade after his death.”
Grant offers his admission in the context of an Andrew Sullivan blog post about an infamous portion of the Nixon White House tapes where Dick goes on and on (and on) about gays and TV's All in the Family. “The best bit of this (there are many) is when Nixon starts talking about how homosexuality destroyed the Greeks and says, 'Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates,' and then John Ehrlichman butts in saying, 'But he never had the influence that television had,' and Nixon mutters, 'Yeah' while he goes on about gay Roman emperors,” recounts Grant. “God, I love that sonofabitch.”
So that'll be me in a rubber Nixon mask, trying to outrun Grant as I head over to Edwards University Town Center 6, the moxieplex across the street from UCI, for Friday's 10:55 p.m. Watchmen showing. About a half hour before the lights dim inside the theater, there will be a contest inside the lobby for best costume from Watchmen or any other movie, comic book, graphic novel, video game or computer game. Prizes will be awarded. Get you tickets now if you want to watch the flick because a sell-out is expected. There should be plenty of seats across town next to grandma at Frost/Nixon, however.

OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.