Oliver Stone's Decider biopic "W," starring Josh Brolin

is everyone just really hungry or something

no, "shamalamadingdong" always makes me twitch.

Results 1 - 10 of about 458,000 for "this needs to stop". (0.25 seconds)

it's not going to stop til you wise up

fair enough

speaking of treatment of women, why was only Condi Rice the ridic. character in the cabinet, almost thrown in there for comic relief ?

um, everybody in the cabinet was pretty ridiculous/comic relief. I noted above that every single Rummy line was incoherent pseudo-philosophical babble. "Turdblossom" was totally obsequious, Cheney villainish, etc.

everyone in the cabinet was kind of a caricature, but also kind of human, except for Rice. i also thought Laura Bush was insufficiently characterized, but what are you going to do?

is J. Edgar Hoover in this?

everyone in the cabinet was kind of a caricature, but also kind of human, except for Rice.

really? how were Rumsfeld and Ari Fleisher "humanized"?

yeah, he plays barbara bush

yes he plays jenna bush

lol xp

i guess i think the performances were more than caricatures. all thandie newton did was mug. dreyfuss mugged + was believable as a person. an awful, disgusting person, but still.

with laura bush i just didn't really get why she liked him. maybe she felt sorry for him?

Mugging isn't always a pejorative.

okay, but i thought thandie newton sucked.

Lots of great performances in Stone movies consist of lots of mugging.

i'm not saying condoleeza rice has not been a yes-man for this administration; i just would have liked more from the movie than easy laughs at her face + voice.

Lots of great performances in Stone movies consist of lots of mugging.

best example is Tommy Lee Jones playing the warden as Daffy Duck in NBK (tho "great" might be going a little far)

NBK is the last Stone movie I saw, I think.

or basically anyone in JFK!

dreyfus + brolin both gave great performances that consisted of a lot of mugging; i know what you guys mean. newton sucked.

nohn bitzgerald kennedy

Joe Pesci in JFK = great performance that's completely absurd.

JFK is definitely the single most entertaining Stone flick

i called this movie a long time ago:

Atta was in my Illuminati group. I taught him everything. He was a wannabe. No one liked him. Thought he was a snitch. But I treated him good. He wanted his kid to grow up with a chance. My neck is killing me. I've had cancer for years. Been working with mice to find a cure. You don't leave the neocons. Once you're in, they got you for life. Chertoff's an untouchable. Highest clearance. Chertoff, Atta, Al Qaeda, all Agency. Cheney was there from the start. Set up Texas Al Qaeda. Ran guns to Saddam when he was on our side. Saddam was almost with us till we tried to whack him.

Everybody keeps flipping sides. It's fun and games, man! The neocons and Al Qaeda worked together for years trying to take down those towers. There's more to this than you could dream! Check out something called "Operation Liberty Tower." Big time project. They're in charge. But who pulls whose chain? Who knows? "Oh, what a deadly web we weave when we practice to deceive." Who took down the towers?? Why didn't you fucking stop it? Shit! This is too big for you, you know that? Who did the towers?? Fuck! It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The hijackers don't even know! Don't you get it? Fuck, man! I can't keep talking like this!

-- gear (gear), Saturday, September 16, 2006 5:42 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

we've really needed you here.

This was a fairly banal and gratuitous film; all I really learned is that W drinks Dr Pepper and O'Doul's. Someone shd do a good remix of the pretzel seen tho.

Thandie got big yuks on the UWS with her Condi lampoon, but she was in a different movie.

It was odd that one of the few scenes where we got the Old Oliver Stone was the big Cheney explains the Persian Gulf meeting, cuz it was more like Dreyfuss was playing a Bond villain. (but Dick was right -- we ain't *leaving*, and this means O)

i came out of this movie ready to punch someone

rather ambiguously stated

Thandie... was in a different movie

^^otm

the real Condi looked and sounded Newton-esque during her post-election press conference.

I think I would've preferred the movie Thandie was in.

This was a bunch of bullshit.

yeah this was really terrible

eh. I lolled

I laughed through JFK and still do. This was even as funny as a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Poor Richard Dreyfuss -- he thought he was playing Donald Sutherland.

no, DR NO

*wasn't even as funny, I meant

It really felt like a made for TV movie. I'm not sure how much of that is related to the fact these scenes and issues are so current, though.

Great thread. Kermit the Frog's "Once in a Lifetime" completes some kind of life circle.

I think this is Oliver Stone's best film. It's his first since Salvador where I feel like there's something genuinely at stake in the drama of the lead performance, and it's odd how Hoberman didn't see Brolin's Bush as sympathetic, because this is the only Stone film that's really about a character. The key scene, edited for comedy in the previews but not funny, is Bush not being able to answer a question at a press conference about what he would do differently if given the chance. The entire movie is about why he can't think that way, what would lead him to not be able to think that way.

Seeing this and then reading that article in Harper's about conservative evangelicals in the military was sobering. Hoberman seems to miss how much certain kinds of faith can enable shortcuts past thought, including too much reflection about one's own corruption, and how corruption and zealous idealism can intertwine, and enhance each other.

I do think the performance has less charm than the real Bush, but Laura's love seems based on both sensing vulnerability and rooting for that unwavering, confident side. Maybe the sports inaccuracies (the most easily checkable of facts!) are added as a layer of "hey it's just a movie" faerie dust, in the way that nobody seemed to mind JFK's monumental slander of Lydon Johnson because it was such a fool paranoid worldview clogged with inaccuracies anyway. But W. says something true about Bush amid make-believe, and Cheney's ultimate-strategy speech is a great moment--and you can imagine something like that probably happened.

I even like the Condi performance--she looks like she's constantly struggling with the intelligence gap between her and her president, and her own short-cutting of reflections about corruption. You can see a continuum of irresponsibility from this through Generation Kill, Ugly American certitude down the food chain, that's probably something like the real-life latticework of U.S. power.

because this is the only Stone film that's really about a character.

this is an interesting point, probably true (except for the Doors, maybe?)

ya i thought this was fucking awful, didn't even get past the 1st hour tbh, and it stopped getting any lols after first half hour. i think that's when i started to realize that, 'wow, this is actually a full length feature?" it totally felt like a made for tv movie.

trailers were GREAT tho, many lols

should've just stuck to those

tbf i really like josh brolin tho and he did an okay job

i didn't like it, but it's not awful.

I was tempted to watch this to complete my "Brolin in Texas" trilogy after seeing Planet Terror and No Country for Old Men.

See I saw it as part of a "Brolin-as-creepy-bad-guy" trilogy with American Gangster and Milk.

"Oliver Stone ran into Bill Clinton in China. Clinton told Oliver that he had loaned Bush his DVD copy of 'W.' He said W liked it very much. He said W thought there were sad moments."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/t-magazine/02well-cover.html

G.W. Bush was a totally lovable dude in this movie. It made me see why people voted for him.

wtf at Jonah Hex movie