A film notable for its talented cast and the first serious acting role for pop star Justin Timberlake, The Open Road is an endearing tale of father and son confronting their broken relationship. But what it has in talent, it lacks in coherence, which ultimately fails to make the movie stand out amid the rest of the road movie genre.

“Oh, Carlton,” a maternal but hopeful Kate Mara says to the wind as her ex-boyfriend talks through his estranged father’s behaviour while at the same time failing to see how it mirrors his own failed relationship with Mara’s character.

It is one of several endearing moments in this road movie that boasts an impressive cast of actors and possesses touches of brilliance but which ultimately falls down by trying to push the reconciliation of its main characters too fast.

Justin Timberlake stars in his first serious acting role in The Open Road, appearing alongside Jeff Bridges as a father and son rebuilding their relationship despite themselves.

Bridges’ character, Kyle Garrett, is a revered retired baseball pro living off his glory days who agrees to travel with his son Carlton to his estranged wife’s hospital bed before she undergoes surgery. But Kyle is much happier sticking with the unconditional praise he receives from fans than the messy and complex relationships he has left behind.

The film itself draws on the real-world relationship between director, Michael Meredith, and his retired quarterback legend father Don Meredith. And the movie is all the better, and worse, because of it.

In a second touching and subtle scene in a roadside diner, a small comment by Kyle makes it clear he has been quietly following his son’s progress, and Carlton swells invisibly on the screen; while stranded at a gas station, a small piece of fatherly advice is dismissed and yet treasured at the same time, in the way that only a son can feel when receiving passed-down wisdom.

But while Meredith beautifully captures the internal heart-lifts, when it comes to Carlton’s anger and mistrust of his father’s evasive behaviour, the film slips from 3D into 2 and is played out through internal monologues or clumsy explanations, rather than through the same nuanced observations. It’s a shame because in Bridges, the film had found the perfect actor for blending charisma and cowardice.

Bridges is on top of his game and is compelling viewing. Likewise Mara, who slips effortlessly between being distant and despairing, and soft and seductive. The falldown is with Timberlake, who despite showing moments of real depth, often can’t prevent himself from grinning, as if he’s enjoying proper acting so much that he just can’t help but be excited. The disparity between the two jars the viewer awake and means that the film never manages to hook you in.

The set pieces are great – well filmed, acted and directed – but there is not sufficient emotional padding in between leaving you a little uncertain as to why they have all started behaving so differently. You can feel the film’s impatience: it wants reconciliation between both the son and father, and it wants Lucy and Charlton to realise the obvious, and it doesn’t have time to be sat in the back of a red SUV for hours on end, as its characters are.

In the end, it is this impatience that gets the better of the film. The best road movies have you rolling along with the car’s occupants, dealing with the long stretches of nothing, observing the little details and flashing past the lives of others. The Open Road forgets that: even after the mother (played by Mary Steenburgen) speaks to Charlton on the phone to urge him, and, seemingly the film itself, to remember that the journey is the important thing.

The Open Road is a touching tale, made remarkable by its cast, but it opts to take the freeway rather than the scenic route and it is less enjoyable because of it.

7/10

The Open Road website: http://www.theopenroadmovie.com/

It may be worth declaring a conflict of interest straight off: I can’t stand David Frost.

As a child, he instilled a strange kind of lonely hatred on Through the Keyhole – a formulaic game show in which the preening host would constantly insert amusing anecdotes about some famous person he had interviewed decades earlier.

And as an adult, embarrassment turned to frustration as politician after politician was given an easy ride on Breakfast with Frost – the BBC Sunday morning current affairs show that was finally booted off air in 2005 (but not before 12 years of instantly forgettable and, in some cases, depressingly bad interviews).

But these shows are minor manifestations of the two things that David Frost has been doing with extraordinary consistency for the past 40 years: interviewing people and annoying people.

It was announced at Peter Cook’s funeral that the comedian had only one regret in life: saving David Frost from drowning in 1963. Monty Python felt similarly and its members spent years ridiculing the man on TV, on radio and in print. In fact, the long list of people who have taken a distinct dislike to David Frost is beaten only by the list of people he had interviewed. It’s as if he is trying to outpace his own personality.

It is entirely consistent then that Frost has also managed to infuriate the screenwriter of Frost/Nixon, a film that portrays what was undeniably the highlight of the Frost’s career: a series of interviews with disgraced former president Richard Nixon in 1977.

Those interviews – or, more accurately, ten minutes in one of four hour-long interviews – entered into television legend when Frost managed to elicit what thousands of lawyers, journalists, politicians and judges had failed to get out of the stonewalling 37th President of the United States: an apology.

Reduced to an anecdote

But it has been 27 years since those interviews. What was once striking seems now out-of-date; what was once daring is now par for the course. The moment in which Nixon confessed that he had let down the American people and the whole system of government has become an historical anecdote, recalled dimly by those that were there, and retold unclearly to those that were not alive or were too young at the time.

Until that was playwright Peter Morgan saw something fresh in the story. Morgan has publicly steered away from comparisons with George W. Bush, but there can be little doubt that the resonance of Frost/Nixon has much to do with the fact that another controversial president is leaving office and that the American people feel somehow cheated and in need of some kind of apology for recent woes.

Morgan wrote a play that open in London in 2006 and which became an instinct success. Shortly after, director Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Cocoon) visited and decided he had to make a film version of the play. And that’s exactly what happened, with not only Morgan as screenwriter but the two lead actors in the play – Frank Langells as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost – reprising their roles on the big screen.

The result is very close to the play and so both dramatic and spellbinding. It takes a director of great skill to make himself invisible when adapting a story from one form to another but Howard pulls it off. Nothing too flashy or over-the-top and yet the pace is kept up and the tension – which ultimately makes the film – is skillfully drawn in to the climax and then just as skillfully released.

It helps of course that Peter Morgan managed to make the story of two difficult, egotistical men talking to one another for 12 hours a gripping event. And he did so by telling the backstory, using – in Morgan’s own words – Frost’s “extraordinary self-aggrandizing lopsided version of events,” as published in his book I Gave Them a Sword, as well as a behind-the-scenes account by a key researcher in the original interviews, James Reston, since published as The Conviction of Richard Nixon.

Out of his depth

As such, both play and film put into context Frost’s extraordinary efforts to secure the interviews with Nixon. Here was a British talk show host more at home trading sparky anecdotes with sports stars than trying to secure a lengthy interview with a difficult, defensive and extraordinary intelligent political giant who had recently been pushed out of the most powerful job in the world.

Unsurprisingly, no one took Frost seriously, least of all Nixon. In the end, it was pure greed that led to the interviews going ahead: Frost offered $600,000 for a series of four interviews, and Nixon felt it would be easy money. As the film makes clear, however, Frost struggled to meet even the $200,000 signing fee, particularly after all the main US networks refused to take the interviews – leading Frost to have to broker dozens of different deals in order to pull in the money.

Frost also had to put together a team of people that could make the most of his multi-million dollar gamble (in total, the enterprise cost $2 million, or around $7 million today). That wasn’t without its own problems – personalities clashed as the team argued about the best way to attack the problem. And then there were Nixon’s people: defensive, suspicious, used to being in charge. The film covers this backstory brilliantly – focusing on aspects that move the narrative forward without getting sidetracked on the multitude of interesting stories along the way.

The film doesn’t shy away from the fact that the interviews themselves were nearly a flop either. Apart from an interesting start on day one, Nixon controlled the floor as Frost floundered. This caused tension in Frost’s team, leading to one dramatic scene where Frost them that if they didn’t think the whole enterprise was going to be a success they should leave immediately. He then invites them to a grand birthday party in his honour.

There are light-hearted moments that give depth to the characters: Frost picking up of an attractive woman on a flight into Los Angeles; Nixon trying to knock Frost off-track by asking him left-field questions about his shoes and his sex life; Reston’s limp capitulation to shaking Nixon’s hand when he first meets him; Nixon getting a cheque made out into his name.

These moments, and the general hubbub that surrounds the filming of a big interview, all help focus attention and so build up tension when they are stripped away for the climax of the film – the moment that Nixon confronts his lies and his stonewalling and the appalling abuses of the power that was provided to him as president of his nation.

Where fiction meets reality

In an entirely fictional but powerful scene, Nixon calls Frost the night before the final interview and tries to relate to the man interrogating him. The real Frost/Nixon interviews in 1977 never managed to get into Nixon’s head and so the film does it for us – providing a glimpse of the world through the eyes of a man who rose from nothing to become president but who on the way was blown horribly off-course.

Langells – who looks nothing like Nixon – starts to become the man as he struggles with conflicting thoughts and feelings. Sheen, likewise, plays Frost with tremendous sympathy: a determined yet very human interviewer who recognizes he is probably out of his depth but finds the courage to plough on. And this tension from the last-night phonecall is carried into the final day of filming, when Frost expertly prods Nixon into his famous confession.

In the moments before the audience is given its release – as Frost sits pregnant on the edge of his seat; Nixon rolls words and phrases around in his head; and popcorn hovers over hundreds of people’s mouths – for a moment it is possible to look back nearly 30 years and understand what it must have been like for a nation torn apart by Vietnam and Watergate to have their former president finally confront his culpability on screen and in close-up.

For that reason alone, Frost/Nixon is a remarkable and valuable film. It brings something important alive and keeps this moment in history in people’s minds for another generation.

It is not without its flaws however. As ever with such a persuasive medium as cinema, the artistic licenses taken with the story (carried over from the play) will soon be fixed as fact in many people’s minds. The late-night phonecall never happened; the dramatic break when Nixon was about to confess was created by Frost, not Nixon’s chief of staff; the “last-minute” Watergate revelations had been uncovered eight months earlier by Reston; the interviews actually continued for another two days after the Watergate session.

Confession

These are all dramatic devices and probably harmless. What is less harmless is the confession itself. Far from the sharp, concise, tense confession Nixon provides in the film, the reality – as watched by millions of Americans – was a very much longer answer, circular with a number of explanations and threads, and ending with Nixon blaming his mistakes on listening to his heart rather than his head. By boiling down this real-world answer to a short clip, almost soundbite, history is rewritten in the worst sort of way: the past is redrawn to fit in with the present.

Also, as brilliantly written, filmed and acted as the film is, it will never become a great film for the simple reason that the subject matter offers no hope and the interview itself had no great or lasting impact. There are no lessons to learn here. As it is, Frost/Nixon is an entertaining and insightful record of a dirty job well done. Watch it once, be glad it happened, and move along.

[7/10]

With my book out the way, I now have lots more time to, er, read books. And one of those near the top of the pile was Who controls the Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. The book has frequently cropped up in conversations with various Net people since it was published in March, and so I have been itching to read it.

I finished it this morning. And my gut feeling is that this is a very important book. Not only does it cover a big hole in knowledge and understanding of the Internet, but it is also well written, easy to understand, concise, coherent and thoughtful. I strongly suspect it will be ones of those books that informs opinion and so has a lasting, global influence far beyond what you could expect from 226 pages of text.

Being a journalist and knowing a thing or two about the subject though, I also have a number of criticisms. It has a dangerous US bias despite its avowed international outlook, it completely misses a fundamental plank of Internet governance, namely ICANN, and it has missed recent changes that will come back to haunt it.

But first of all, let me say that I think this book should be read by everyone that has an interest in Internet matters. In fact, I would argue it should be a text for students not only of the Internet but also international law, relations and politics and perhaps even the more pragmatic end of philosophy.

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com or if you’re like me, pop into the Oxford University Press shop on Oxford High Street to get it.

Rundown

Why the big sell? Because it tells the story of the Internet in a simple, interesting and relevant way. Obviously not the full Internet story. But what it does manage is not to get bogged down, and – something that books from the academic community consistently fail to do – uses real-people examples to make wider points accessible and understandable. In fact, the book is journalistic in its style – something that the authors could very likely view as criticism but is fervently meant as praise.

What immediately struck me was how far the authors – Jack Goldsmith, professor of law at Harvard and a former high-ranking government lawyer, and Tim Wu, professor of law at Columbia Law School – had dived into the extraordinarily deep well of Internet experience.

I struggle to think of one important, precedent-setting example of how the Internet has affected society that has been missed by Goldsmith and Wu. I was immediately impressed that they had discovered and researched A Rape in Cyberspace, a 1993 article in Village Voice by Julian Dibbell. The article was I think probably the first that opened up alot of people’s minds to what this Internet thing might become, why it was so different to what had gone before. It was the rallying text for a hippie style of thought over cyberspace – one that was unique but has largely fallen under the feet of a pragmatic human race, much as the hippy philosophy did in the 60s. As soon as A Rape in Cyberspace turned up in this book, however, it was obvious that the authors had grasped some of the more intangible, and less legal, elements of the Internet.

Telling it how it is

It gave the Yahoo Nazi case (where Yahoo was forced to block access to Nazi memorabilia on its US website for French Internet users) the focus and importance it deserves. Even though it didn’t dig into the cases themselves, by mentioning Barcelona.com and JK Rowling (two remarkable examples of disputes over ownership of particular domains), it was clear that Goldsmith and Wu had researched far beyond what appears in the book. And this research has lent an indefinable weight to the book which in turns encourages trust in the threads it draws and the conclusions it reaches.

What are those conclusions?

Very broadly, the main argument is that the Internet is a medium like any other and as a result, national governments and national laws *will* have their way with it. And the lesson to learn is that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

This of course flies in the face of the majority of Internet culture and thinking up to this point, but it comes at an absolutely crucial point in the history of the Internet – a point where the lines of future government control and influence are being drawing up through the United Nations. By pointing out the big lies (that were always there) about governments not being able to control content or interaction over the Internet, and by doing it in a non-aggressive or preachy way, this book could well be the appeasing text between government and technologists that helps both sides understand why the other has a point.

It puts an end to the lie that it is only China or Saudi Arabia that are evil filterers of Internet content by pointing out that Google constantly filters information within the United States. It shows the full range of greys in freedom of speech, albeit with China in the dark grey area. It makes entirely commonsense arguments about people’s sovereignty and cultures, but arguments that nonetheless aren’t heard or understood in the West, leading to the peculiarly American Internet fantasy that the Internet will somehow bring US-style freedom and democracy to the rest of world simply by existing. It won’t, it was never going to, get over it, is what the book effectively says, although in far more diplomatic and fair language.

America, America

And here of course I have strayed into the great dangerous America issue. It is particularly unfortunate for the Internet that the United States of America has embarked on an extraordinary and frequently baffling period of confused nationalism at a time where it still retains control of the Internet in so many ways.

In fact, while Goldsmith and Wu never answer the question that is the title of the book – who controls the Internet – the answer is written right through the book. The answer is America.

Despite a brilliant summary of different scenarios across the world, and despite its avowed international perspective, the book comes with a very strong US bias, and that invariably means big business. The examples are all how changes in the Internet have affected US interests. The French government/courts decides against Yahoo; the Australian government/courts decides against the Wall Street Journal; the Indian government/courts decides against eBay.

The book tackles the social conceits and fantasies borne through the early US-centric view of the Internet but it doesn’t stretch beyond that to look back the other way, to see what the rest of the world is doing with the Internet. The one exception to this is a brilliant and perceptive rundown of China’s approach to the Internet. Yes, China has built an enormous and highly sophisticated fltering mechanism for its Internet, but that hasn’t stopped an explosion in its use – and its uses. Many Chinese now have a everyday grasp of technology that puts everyone else – including the West – to shame. But even though the book still views China through the eyes of someone longing for American values, it recognises that different systems have different advantages and disadvantages.

Of course, in some senses it is an unfair criticism of the book to say it is too US-centric because it is that very approach that makes the book so powerful. America is in control of the Internet right now, and it has to be persuaded to slowly take its hands off the reins to prevent the rest of the world going their own direction. As such, a book like this, which intelligently and carefully points out the realities of the Net to Americans could be a vital tool in expanding understanding and knowledge in an increasingly polarised society. That is why Who controls the Internet? could well become an historic and defining text.

ICANN

But this US perspective, and its academic roots, does result in one glaring and ironic omission. And that is the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN.

There is a strange cabal of US academic thinking at the moment that ICANN is not relevant to what goes on on the Internet. Despite being a not-for-profit US company based in California that oversees the Internet’s main directory and decides policy for domain names, and a company that is ultimately owned and run by the US government, American academics – with the exception of Milton Mueller – have effectively given up on ICANN.

The theory is that ICANN is no more than a symbol of power – the king’s golden crown – which governments fight over while failing to realise that the real influence of the Internet is what goes on over the Internet. You don’t get excited about who runs the telephone system, so while ICANN is currently in the midst of an international power struggle, it will eventually just become an exchange system and so is not worth concentrating on.

I think this is startlingly short-sighted and academia will come to regret it. Despite covering every other element of Internet control, possibly the most significant and certainly the most controversial area of it is given only four pages in Who controls the Internet? It is so concise, it reads like a Wikipedia article.

It is extraordinary that so many intelligent and imaginative minds cannot see why this organisation will become fundamental to the future of the Internet. There are frequent high-flying essays at the moment over how the domain name system (DNS) will become increasingly irrelevant. For one, programs like Bittorrent ride on the Internet, rather than use the DNS per se. And secondly, search engines like Google mean that domain names themselves aren’t important – what’s important is content.

Failing to learn the lessons

When I hear this I hear overpowering echoes of the earlier philosophies that this book does so much to dispel. The Internet was going to override all governments and laws, the cyberspace pioneers predicted. Rubbish, says this book. The Internet will make it impossible to restrict free expression, was the argument. Sorry, already happening, the book points out.

I say the same to those who argue that the DNS is going to be irrelevant. It is foggy thinking. While you are using Google to undermine the DNS – where do you go? Google.com. How do you find bittorrent files? You go to a website – located by its DNS – to find links to them. There simply isn’t another self-reliant system that run on the Internet outside the DNS.

But more than that – what do people will think will happen when more and more top-level domains are introduced (as they are going to be)? People point to the poor take-up of new top-level domains such as .info or .biz but this is again ludicrously shortsighted. New top-level domains will give people the opportunity to devise new ways of using the Internet **run over a TLD**. For example, the mobile phone companies now own .mobi. They now have their own chunk of the domain name system that they can run entirely differently to what we are used to. They could, for example, write new code that links directly with the next generation of mobile phones: no need to use the browser system we have grown used to. It could well become the mobile Internet because with your own entry into the DNS, you don’t have to follow the same philosophies as defined by the dotcom model.

The huge growth at the moment is in sites like MySpace (note: found at myspace.com). But it isn’t your space, is it? It’s space that a company at MySpace.com gives you because people don’t know who to set up their own websites. Is it possible to give everyone their own actual space? Theoretically yes – but only through the DNS.

And who decides not only who runs these top-level domains, but also how the DNS is used and what new top-level domains are allowed to exist? ICANN.

The other glaring area of importance is IP addresses. Even if you assume that the DNS will become only one of many Internet uses, I have yet to hear anyone argue that they can do without IP addresses. And who is in charge of allocating IP addresses? Who defines the policy surrounding IP addresses? ICANN.

Choke-point

ICANN is stood right in the middle of the future possibilities of the Internet and yet most of the people telling grand tales of barbie dolls and new ways of communicating have failed to see what is right in front of their face. The control point – and potential choke-point – that is ICANN.

There is another very important element of ICANN as well that is frequently missed by Internet commentators. The idea is that ICANN is just something for governments to squabble over. And yet, if Who controls the Internet? tells us anything it is that, no matter how much you believe you don’t want to mix with governments, you do not have a choice. Governments *will* define how the Internet works in future whether you like it or not.

So, rather than ignore the one organisation that everyone is fighting over, it should be obvious that this is the organisation that needs to be focussed on, because whatever happens to it will have far-reaching effects across the world and billowing into the future.

What I see as the failure of Goldsmith and Wu to properly research this area – led, I am certain, because of a deliberate decision by the US academic community reviewing the Internet to give ICANN a miss – has also led to them missing a fundamental change in the control not only of the Internet but also of a wider power shift in society itself.

What has come out of the ICANN model and the numerous battles fought, and continuing to be fought, has been a new model of power-sharing and decision-making that could well change society as a whole. Anyone that has been following Internet Governance issues will immediately recognise it in the endlessly repeated phrase “multi-stakeholder”.

The future of control?

Put simply, governments have realised that business and civil society are vitally important as almost-equal partners in dealing with the Internet. Governments have learnt very slowly through the course of the World Summit on the Information Society process that not only do they not have the answers to many of the problems they wish to solve but that unless they listen to business and civil society their solutions will not be effective. In short, governments needs other people to be able to do what they want. Legislation is often too slow and ineffective in a highly flexible Net environment.

It is a remarkable change that led to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself pointing out that the Tunisia World Summit was the first to ever welcome in non-governments as almost-equal partners. The United Nations men most at the heart of the Internet Governance issue, Markus Kummer and Nitin Desai have frequently commented on how different the government interaction is over the Internet. And the Internet Governance Forum, given no more than a sentence in Goldsmith and Wu’s book, is an experiment that, if it works, could see the philosophy of multi-stakeholder meetings take root right across government, right across the world.

The lasting legacy of the Internet could be that societal control – something that this book so clearly demonstrates cannot be removed or wished away (nor should it be) – becomes the territory of not solely government, but a blend of government, business and civil society, with government given the casting vote.

Now, this is very unsettled waters and of course it is my philosophy at a time when the IGF hasn’t even been held, so you can hardly blame Goldsmith and Wu for not loosening up their taut, concise and persuasive approach to include the very wishy-washy spaced-out philosophy that they do so much to pull apart, but I do believe the failure to properly review ICANN in this book is its Achilles Heel, and hope it is corrected in what I’m sure will be future editions to make this a classic text.

That said, it is by far my favourite book about the Internet (exempting my Sex.com book which is tastier in parts, but isn’t published yet), and I implore everyone to buy it and read it. It gives great clarity in what is frequently a confusing and emotive sphere of modern life.

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Update (18 Sep): I’ve been looking for other reviews of the book and have eventually stumbled over two good ones, following a series of poor ones. Both come from Syracuse University, one from Milton Mueller, an Internet governance expert, and the other from John Mathiason, the university international relations professor.

I’d say that Mueller and I are broadly of the same mind, although he makes some stronger critical points [pdf] about the presumption that national governments as is will take control of the Net. His is also a more scholarly review.

Mathiason provides a much more knowledgeable version [pdf] of my complaint about the book’s US centricity, pointing out basically that Goldsmith and Wu don’t seem to understand how the rest of the world works. I only have the reviews as pdfs I’m afraid.

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