Hooray!  As if W. hasn’t made this year’s movie lineup exciting enough, we can also look forward to December’s Frost/Nixon.  Its recently released trailer looks quite promising:

Directed by Ron Howard and adapted by Peter Morgan from his play, Frost/Nixon is a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary 1977 television interviews between British talk show host David Frost and Richard Nixon.  The film retains the two very talented stars from the London and Broadway stage productions, Frank Langella (who won a Tony for his performance as Tricky Dick) and Michael Sheen (a favorite of Morgan’s who played Tony Blair in the writer’s The Deal and The Queen).  Early buzz is positive, with special attention being paid to the leads.

One of my favorite aspects of the play is that rather than portraying the former president as some sort of demented sociopath, Nixon is a sympathetic and often very likeable character.  He’s a poor, disgraced bastard who’s wasting away on the beach at San Clemente until he’s given the chance to salvage his legacy.  Intriguing stuff!

Hopefully, Frost/Nixon and W. will increase the public’s appetite for presidential pictures so we can finally get that Gerald Ford biopic we’ve all been waiting for.

I’m thinking Ford/Stairs.

(Note: Those with sharp eyes may notice the presence of diminutive British actor Toby Jones, perhaps best known for voicing Dobby in the Harry Potter movies and for being the other guy who played Truman Capote, in both Frost/Nixon and W.  Here, he appears bald as famed Hollywood talent agent Swifty Lazar.  In W., he’s Karl Rove.)