W (the movie)
Oct. 20th, 2008 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedW: Colin Powell owes Oliver Stone lunch -- no, dinner -- no, a week of dinners. He comes across so well in this movie, is practically the only one who does. Stone decided to go the "camp impersonation" route for the cabinet scenes: Rumsfield is reassuring but clueless, Rice is irritating, Bush is a pawn but always wants that illusion of control ("I...am...The Decider!!!"), Cheney is Emperor Palpatine (no rly), and so Powell gets assigned the "voice of reason" role. Highly entertaining, but then, so was the PBS documentary with actual footage of these clandestine meetings.
(Part of me thinks Powel shouldn't get off that easily considering the role he played peddling blatant WMD lies to the UN, not that anyone outside of this country was the slightest bit fooled by that performance. But next to the rest of them he begins to look saintly.)
(Still I lolled when Cheney unveiled his EVIL PLAN: "There is no exit strategy," is that like "there is no Matrix"?!)
Generally I liked the movie and think it's worth seeing, if only because Stone's amateur psychoanalysis of Bush (daddy issues, alcohol issues, shades of grey issues, but most of all, never-held-a-real-job issues) is so convincing and so well done. One thing I found myself thinking while exiting the theater was that, given that the first and only job Dubya was ever genuinely good at was running his father's presidential campaign, perhaps he should have become a lobbyist and spared everyone the heartache.
...The other thing I found myself thinking was that Laura Bush was portrayed far more sympathetically than I would have chosen to portray her. As pointed out at Salon, in the movie Laura sees everything but says nothing. Whereas in reality I think many of us would agree that there is something...off about her. That maybe there is a reason, beyond sexual chemistry -- or which contributes to sexual chemistry -- behind the educated, liberal librarian and the boorish cowboy jerk. (On the other hand: she's a private citizen, not an elected official, so what business is it of ours anyway? ...Okay so I don't really believe that.)
On the whole though, and despite excellent casting and direction (all those long loving shots of half-empty bottles), I don't think "W" is a very good movie. There's no narrative, just a series of interspersed flashbacks, and none of the "characters" as imagined by Stone have the presence -- the charisma, or grandiosity, or whatever you want to call it -- to pull off a plot-less, character-driven epic. It's an epic organized around small minds.
(Maybe that's the point.)
(Part of me thinks Powel shouldn't get off that easily considering the role he played peddling blatant WMD lies to the UN, not that anyone outside of this country was the slightest bit fooled by that performance. But next to the rest of them he begins to look saintly.)
(Still I lolled when Cheney unveiled his EVIL PLAN: "There is no exit strategy," is that like "there is no Matrix"?!)
Generally I liked the movie and think it's worth seeing, if only because Stone's amateur psychoanalysis of Bush (daddy issues, alcohol issues, shades of grey issues, but most of all, never-held-a-real-job issues) is so convincing and so well done. One thing I found myself thinking while exiting the theater was that, given that the first and only job Dubya was ever genuinely good at was running his father's presidential campaign, perhaps he should have become a lobbyist and spared everyone the heartache.
...The other thing I found myself thinking was that Laura Bush was portrayed far more sympathetically than I would have chosen to portray her. As pointed out at Salon, in the movie Laura sees everything but says nothing. Whereas in reality I think many of us would agree that there is something...off about her. That maybe there is a reason, beyond sexual chemistry -- or which contributes to sexual chemistry -- behind the educated, liberal librarian and the boorish cowboy jerk. (On the other hand: she's a private citizen, not an elected official, so what business is it of ours anyway? ...Okay so I don't really believe that.)
On the whole though, and despite excellent casting and direction (all those long loving shots of half-empty bottles), I don't think "W" is a very good movie. There's no narrative, just a series of interspersed flashbacks, and none of the "characters" as imagined by Stone have the presence -- the charisma, or grandiosity, or whatever you want to call it -- to pull off a plot-less, character-driven epic. It's an epic organized around small minds.
(Maybe that's the point.)