What makes it different from others?

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Blistering performances.

This film was not a bad made for TV movie. It doesn't seem that all the facts are being put out during some scenes in the film. Richard Dryfuss is well placed as Al Haig. Same as Richard Crenna and Holland Taylor. And some of the side actors such as Beau Starr and Michael Murphy do fine as well. But the screenplay seems faulty at times, and you can tell it is a made for TV movie. You can also tell that Oliver Stone was involved in the project. The actors were right for this film, but the director and producers should have handled a different kind of film. Not an historical one. Don't buy it on DVD, either rent it or wait till it's back on the History Channel. HAs some f-bombs, that's the worst of the R rating.

This semi-docudrama is really two films in one. The first concerns the infamous 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan and the valiant efforts to save his life. The second relays the power struggle among White House staff while the most powerful man in the world lay under anesthesia.Despite the fascinating subject matter, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT often falls flat, playing like a cobbled together movie of the week. Writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh spends far too much time on the ego trips of Secretary of State Alexander Haig (a semi-annoying Richard Dreyfuss), failing to fully explore the more human angles as a nation sat with bated breath. What should have been a subplot with Haig dominates the movie. It would have been nice to see more of the doctors handed this enormous task; more of Nancy Reagan, the beloved First Lady; and more of the behind-the-scenes details, such as the ailing president signing a dairy bill to prove he was still in charge. The dialog is unimaginative and some of the performances resemble those of actors fresh from acting school.There is a great movie to be made about the chaos within government when its leader is sidelined. But with its dual personality, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT isn't it.

The president of the USA is shot after a dinner speech in Washington and this throws the whole office of government in to chaos and confusion. Despite being based on a mix of history, dramatisation and speculation about an event that most non cave-dwellers know all about, credit the cast and crew for making a cracking little drama out of it. Really fascinating stuff and enough is framed on enough indisputable events for us to believe what goes on. The only fly-in-the-ointment is that the American/Russian military situation is played up far more than was really justified. Also interesting that despite its length, it never gets to grip with gunman Hinckley and why Reagan acted like he did on the day. Indeed he seemed to want to deny that he had been shot and indeed he seemed confused as to what had happened. Maybe evidence that mentally the man was slipping already?The gun used was made in West Germany and although Hinckley used dumb-dumb bullets (as accurately depicted) what we are not told is that the reason they didn't "explode on impact" was due to having no mussel velocity on the gun. Is this a state secret?Equally the surgeons in Washington are experts in dealing with shot gun wounds, would they really have not been able to trace a bullet by using a tube through the entrance wound? Is this not standard practise? Did they really have to head scratch before coming up with that?The last question is why this movie has such a low IMDB rating: Are Americans embarrassed about Reagan and want to forget about his presidency? It held my attention well enough and I thought that it had enough going for it to be considered above average, rather than below average as scored here.

Hollywood leans so far left it can't even comprehend what the center looks like. Yet it has the power to influence what future skulls full of mush, as Kingsfield would say, think about the past.A recent tv movie about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings was simply a paranoiac extremist's fictional nightmare. If such a flick had been made about a person of color on the left, the makers would've been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail as "racists" ("racist" being what is used by the pc crowd rather than the McCarthyists' "communist", though to the same effect).The cheapjack rush job "The Contender" was supposed to parallel the Clinton impeachment, but in trying to preach to us that a public person's private life is none of our business, Hollywood sets up an ingenious double standard: if you're Clarence Thomas, your private life must be public record (so far, no movie has been made about the Robert Bork nomination; perhaps Hollywood hasn't quite been able to skate around the liberal senators getting Bork's "Blockbuster" tape rental record in a vain attempt to try to smear him -- and don't forget bringing up Oliver North's purchase at a lingerie store (which was for ballet costumes for his daughters!). A public figure's private life is no one's business to Hollywood . . . if that person is left of center. Otherwise, the public has a right to know, and Hollywood and the media have a duty to blurt out every detail.Movies about Richard Nixon invariably portray him as a psychopath, whereas movies about JFK invariably portray him as messianic. When we finally forget the disgrace that was Clinton, who committed worse crimes involving the FBI and IRS etc. than Nixon, no doubt Clinton movies of the future will portray him as truly messianic, whereas Clinton his a political Jimmy Swaggart (only more sanctimonious).The Tom Clancy book "The Sum of all Fears" is about middle-eastern terrorists; despite the timeliness of that material, the movie "SoAF" is about right-wing terrorists. We mustn't offend the Taliban or the PLO. But right-wingers don't need to be understood but shot on sight.Which segues us into "The Day Reagan Was Shot", Richard Crenna's Reagan isn't bad, considering the number of Reagan-haters who must exist in Hollywood, but he isn't that important, either. But Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, and one of the most experienced and savvy men in Washington at that time, is portrayed as an out-and-out nut case, simply on the basis of one erroneous statement. The whole weight of the film, in fact, seems to be, not that the chief executive was gunned down by a movie fan, but the fact that the Republican secretary of state spoke out of turn. The Crisis of the movie is not that a Republican president was shot, but that a secretary of state, who was the highest ranking official in Washington on the spot, had a slip of the tongue. The antagonist if the drama wasn't a true nut case who tried to eliminate an overwhelmingly popular chief executive, but a made-up nut case in the administration.The Hollywood double standard continues in real life and in the movies. When Jerry Falwell said American deserved 9/11, he was castigated; when Clinton said America deserved 9/11, his vapid outspokenness was praised as "courageous". If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the war on Terror the Taliban and Osama can rest easy: the antagonist will be Condi Rice or Colin Powell.