Word: film
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...Dorothy are virtual no-shows. The secret sibling is Stone himself, who, like Dubya, came from a wealthy family and entered Yale in 1964. He left after a year and wound up in Vietnam, where his destiny ambushed him. Perhaps the political biography Stone really should put on film is John McCain...
...easier to identify whom the film would like to be about. That's George Herbert Walker Bush, the forgotten-but-not-gone 41 to his son's 43. As played by the 6 ft. 5 in. (2m) James Cromwell, Poppy Bush looms over W. (and W.) as a commanding, commandeering figure. According to the film, he's the master manipulator who sprang Dubya from jail after a rowdy Yale prank, "took care of" a woman his son didn't want to marry and "pulled strings" to get the boy into Harvard Business School. He hates the damage W. has done...
...Cromwell is exactly the guy for the job; he's played a President three times before in films and on TV. He gives Poppy a gruff machismo that both dominates the film and, given its ostensible protagonist, distorts it. When, toward the end, the octogenarian Poppy is shown muttering sage dismissals of W.'s Iraq escapades, we realize that the film is actually the story of a proud man perpetually disappointed...
...Well, he went ahead with this fairly judicious docudrama, in the seeming belief that a story with so many melodramatic twists and cataclysmic consequences needs little editorializing. The result is that rare Oliver Stone film that is not exhilarating, or enraging, but boring, because the director doesn't have a fresh take on Bush...
...Also on the committee was Dr. S. Allen Counter, professor of neuroscience and director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. Counter has had a curiously strong record for ethnic vituperation. In 1980, writing to The Crimson to protest a film screening, he played on anti-German stereotypes extensively, though no one involved was German. Counter used the same venue to vent his spleen on the Jews in 1992, in response to bad press about the Harvard Foundation from The Crimson. In the letter he blames “Crimson writers active in Hillel” for fomenting...