Word: stoned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bush, the "good" son (played by Jason Ritter), is a fleeting presence in W., as is mother Barbara (Ellen Burstyn), and Neil, Marvin and 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...
...first we get hints that Stone is up to his nifty old tricks. It's a hazing session of Yale's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where the forced guzzling of whiskey is the gentleman scholar's equivalent of waterboarding. The other pledges are frightened, but Dubya (Josh Brolin, who's game but not great) impresses his brothers by not only rattling off their names but also appending a goofy nickname to each. In two lightning strokes, W. provides a reference point for the Bush Administration's interrogation techniques of terrorist suspects and imagines an early example of Bush's frat...
...That's just smart storytelling, courtesy of screenwriter Stanley Weiser, who worked with Stone on Wall Street, the 1987 "Greed is good" film that speaks more eloquently to our current morass than W. does. The larger tale the movie tells is of a slow-witted alcoholic, the wastrel son of a powerful family who found Jesus - and Karl Rove (Toby Jones) - and, with these two guiding him, a purpose and propulsion to his life...
...President, Poppy is depicted as having the strength to use U.S. military might to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and the wisdom - not the weakness - to stop short of Baghdad. Stone seems to admire him more than any other President he's depicted. (In JFK, Kennedy was a hallowed ghost figure.) His Bush Sr. might be a Lyndon Johnson who somehow got the country in and out of Vietnam with a win and few U.S. casualties. This 41 - this war hero, this fearless leader - could never have been impersonated on Saturday Night Live by Dana Carvey...
...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...