THEY DID NOT, IN FACT, EAT VINCENT SPANO FIRST: Four of the films of note this season -- Milk, Valkyrie, Frost/Nixon and Marley & Me -- share the fact that they are all based on real-life events, and in each film there's a question for film critics (and anyone commenting on the films) as to how much to reveal about the Act III of each -- how does Harvey Milk's tenure in office go? Does Tom Cruise kill Hitler? What happens when Frost interviews Nixon? And does anything surprising happen in a movie about an ill-behaved dog as he ages?
From what I've read, critics seem to have no real compunction about discussing the dénouements of the first three films, but at least some seem to be holding back on the fourth -- and I'm not sure why. Given how widely-read Grogan's book was, I'd have to imagine there's at least as much awareness of how that film ends among American moviegoers as there is of the success of Operation Valkyrie or the details of a thirty-one-year-old television interview. And in all these cases, to discuss whether the movie works as a whole requires discussion of their endings, doesn't it? For all these films, how much should we be able to discuss without posting major SPOILER warnings -- and, yes, everything's fair game in the Comments.
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