The Movie: I'd never actually heard of All The President's Men until I saw a poster for the film hanging on the wall in the Neptune High School journalism class room while working on the set of Veronica Mars. I figured someone on the crew liked this movie enough to put that poster up there so I dropped it into my Netflix queue to check it out.

I still really didn't know much about the film when I received the DVD and actually watched it. As it turned out, this film is based on the true story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), the reporters at the Washington Post who first uncovered the huge Watergate conspiracy during the Nixon administration. We follow the unlikely partners as they encounter numerous obstacles while gathering evidence, and shirking off the naysayers that don't believe their story has any merit.

The end result is a pretty solid, suspenseful, and interesting film which ended up getting eight Oscar nominations, winning in the categories of Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards), Best Set Decoration (the built a complete replica of the Post's news room!), Best Sound, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The other nominations were for Best Supporting Actress (Jane Alexander), Best Director (Alan Pakula), Best Editing, and Best Picture. Keep in mind that this was the same year that Rocky (Best Picture, Director, and Editing) and Network (Best Leading Actor, Leading Actress, Supporting Actress, and Original Screenplay) came out, so this film was up against some pretty stiff competition that year!

I did notice some weirdness in some of the shots that may have been effects shots using some kind of split screen effect where we'd see someone like Robert Redford in the foreground while also having some action in the deep background be in focus. Perhaps lenses weren't good enough then (or even now?) to achieve this so I noticed that the background would be blurry in the side of the frame with the actor in the foreground, while perfectly sharp on the side of the frame showing the action in the background. But maybe that was me just being nerdy that noticed this.

At any rate, this is a pretty great film that's definitely worth checking out!

The DVD: Yet another one of the many low-effort releases that came out during the DVD format's infancy bringing out the expected mediocre video transfer with low resolution and poor shadow details, though the video did prove to be relatively clean and free of dust and scratches and such. The mono soundtrack was also fairly clean, though lacking in dynamic range in the way you'd expect any mid-1970's movie to. All of the special features were of the text variety, including a now-outdated article about the identity of "Deep Throat" who was recently revealed to be Mark Felt.

So I guess what we got here is a great film that is somewhat marred by what is now considered a sub-par DVD release, but it's the only one we've got, so I guess we've just got to deal with it, haha.