comment #1

BurmaShave says ...

Wahhhh! It makes me think things AND feel feelings! Wahhhhhhhh! I wanted a polemic! How dare he examine complexities and present characterization!!!

comment #2

p.Vice says ...

I don't think it's the loss of polemic that's being mourned so much as Stone's MIA spirit of intellectual anarchy.

comment #3

StoneFan1 says ...

"intellectual anarchy"....Yeah, and nobody outside of Hollywood wants to see that from Stone. He can't get that style funded anymore too.

Look, this is clearly Alexander, Part II...father vs. son, et. al. I think Stone has some Daddy issues.

comment #4

slutsky says ...

I saw this this morning and thought it was a really interesting and very good film. It's not a polemic and I think that's besides the point anyway.

My feeling is that Oliver Stone assumes that at this point, your mind should be made up about GWB's presidency—everything is pretty much on the table at this point—so why make a movie "making a case" that most people agree with already? (It's kind of too late for that now, anyway.) I was really happy that he didn't make the equivalent of a MoveOn video, actually.

That freed him to zoom in on his character, which I think is a much more interesting approach. "W." is not soft on Bush, but it takes all of his administration's arrogance, incompetence, and all of the damage it's caused as a given, a starting point.

comment #5

vp19 says ...

I doubt this will be a polemic, but instead a reflection on how W. used his father's legacy for power. (It'll certainly have some comedic elements, but this won't be "That's My Bush!" by a longshot.) Say what you will about George H.W. Bush; I was hardly a fan of most of his policies, but I always thought he had some natural decency about him. I can't say that for his son, at least not this one.

I've always maintained that if the brothers had each others' names, we'd have a better Bush in the White House, or at least a competent one. "Jeb" doesn't sound presidential, though in the "Barack and beyond" era we're likely about to enter, it won't mean much.

comment #6

Alan Cerny says ...

I can't wait to see W. But I'm going to let the movie be what it wants to be, not what I want it to be. I don't need a film about this President to define my feelings about the douchenozzle, and I doubt I'll feel threatened by Stone's take on the subject.

comment #7

Rich S. says ...

If this movie is half as good as Alexander...it will be the worst movie ever made by a long shot.

Wouldn't it have been more interesting had Stone told the same story in a different era? W as 30s gangster? Italian prince? Chinese emperor? Anything would be more interesting than a warmed-over docudrama of what we just went through for the past 4 years.

comment #8

slutsky says ...

No.

comment #9

bluefugue says ...

[quote]Look, this is clearly Alexander, Part II...father vs. son, et. al. I think Stone has some Daddy issues.[/quote]

And Hitchcock had mommy issues, but it worked out all right for him.

In the final analysis Stone is a professional storyteller, so it's hardly surprising he would approach the material this way. He has done purely polemical films before -- JFK being the major example -- but then, there were no characters in JFK except a few supporting players like Clay Shaw. Anytime you do a movie that's a portrait of a living character, you have to humanize them or the result is going to be pretty dull drama.

comment #10

GonePostal says ...

Stone showed he can make you at least understand a flawed character without forgiving them when he made "Nixon", which is a great film because it shows the flaws that made Nixon what he was. I have faith in Stone's intellectual honesty that he's speaking the truth when he said he wasn't trying to make a movie that was hateful or malicious. I can't wait to see this thing.

comment #11

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