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FROST/NIXON….Becks went to see Frost/Nixon and wasn’t impressed:

The movie is even worse than the play. I felt that it was total bullshit. I don’t want to get too spoileriffic, but my main problem was that the movie cultivates an air of a faux documentary, trying to convince the readers that it’s well-researched and based on actual events, and then completely invents a pivotal scene that is supposed to explain both Frost and Nixon’s motivations. I was pissed enough that this went unmentioned in the movie (my recollection was that it’s admitted in the play) but really turned against it upon learning of even more insidious manipulation of events from my fellow moviegoers after the show.

I haven’t seen the film either, partly for this reason, and I’m beginning to wonder if Ron Howard is planning to make a habit of this. As I recall, he was praised for the accuracy of Apollo 13, but then he went and made A Beautiful Mind, which bore practically no resemblance to the book at all. Like all of us, I’m pretty used to movies taking dramatic liberties with the truth, but aside from the fact that it depicts a famous mathematician who later became mentally ill, the movie version of A Beautiful Mind might as well have been made on another planet from the one where the book was published. I’ve been suspicious of everything Howard has made since then, and it sounds like Frost/Nixon is more along the same lines.

Anybody else seen it? What did you think?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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