53. Dick

The Watergate Incident was an ugly low point in American history.  It’s easy to think of that moment as indicative of all that was wrong during the 1970s. However, you could just as easily say what happened after Watergate showed what was right with our political system. For example, various branches of government worked to ensure that abuses of presidential power would be less likely in the future.

You could say that Andrew Fleming’s little-seen and unjustly ignored Dick took the latter view to heart and took everything one step further by painting Richard M. Nixon as a buffoon who was undone by two giddy schoolgirls. The film has Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams) foiling Nixon’s plans at every step of the way, but they have no clue that the president is up to no good until they hear him verbally abusing his dog.  Soon, Nixon’s sharing the girls’ pot-laced brownies with Leonid Brezhnev, telling his barking dog that he’ll feed the creature to the Chinese (lol), and sending Secret Service agents to shadow Betsy and Arlene. Obviously, Dick delights in skewering Nixon’s legendary paranoia.

The filmmakers were lucky enough to pair actors good at both verbal and physical comedy with a sharply-written script. For my money, Dan Hedaya was a better Nixon than Anthony Hopkins (Oliver Stone’s Nixon), and the inspired silliness demonstrated by both Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams comes close to the charming heights attained by Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. (Yunda Eddie Feng)