Did they get Ian McDiarmid to play Dick Cheney?
I despise Oliver Stone and loathe every movie he’s made since 1990 or so, which is when he decided that narrative, coherence and subtlety were something that happened to other people. Watching his movies makes me automatically sumpathize with whatever it is he’s ranting against.
If anything could make me like and respect George W. Bush, it’s this movie. I mean, he may be a worthless excuse for a president, but at least he’s no Oliver Stone.
When I heard Stone was making his WTC movie, I was fearing a 9/11 Truther POC. I still haven’t seen it but the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve read was that it was an inspirational, almost spiritual, film.
Heck, from the trailer, “W” COULD be a film about an elitist party-boy turned capable-governer turned decent-man-exploited-by-dark-forces. If so, expect the howls of “Stone’s a sellout!” here.
Considering W has the lowest public approval rating of any President, this is going to be an useless “preaching to the choir” exercise.
I will probably watch it on cable, but I am not going to waste money to go see a bio pic about a person I loathe.
Would have been far more appropriate if the film had come out in October of 2004 instead of now. At least then, it might have helped stop W from getting re-elected and saved us from a whole world of grief.
Will there be a scene like this:
Dan Rather: [played by Kevin Costner] Well, we have the Killian documents, but they’re not complete, so we can never know exactly what George W. Bush did in the National Guard but we can speculate… [followed by ten minute “speculation” scene, narrated by Rather with lots of uses of “assume” and “possibly” and “in all likelihood”]
Fahrenheit 9/11 didn’t have that effect, and it came within a whisker of blaming Bush for the attacks. I admit I’m a bit curious if Stone will go with the conspiracy idea or the flawed would-be hero idea.
Has anyone else noticed that Oliver Stone has become the American Ken Russell?
Nahh, you’re thinking of David Lynch! 
On edit: I might see it. Unlike the JFK assassination thing, there’s enough out there about Bush that you can make a pretty decent movie without that much speculation.
Cite?
Well, you could just Google it, but here is a nice quote from Wikepedia:
“As of February 20, 2008, George W. Bush’s approval rating had plummeted to 19%, according to the American Research Group.[6] With the record low having previously been Herbert Hoover’s 23% approval rating, George W. Bush now holds the record of the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a sitting U.S. President.[7] Additionally, he also holds the record for highest disapproval rating, with a 77% disapproval rating[5] and the record for the highest disapproval rating ever recorded by Gallup Poll for any sitting president with 69% of those polls disapproving of the job Bush was doing as president and only 28% approving.[8] Gallup also concluded that Bush might be the most unpopular president in American history.[9] On April 15, 2008, the results of an informal poll of 109 historians (conducted by George Mason University’s History News Network) found that 98.2% of the respondents considered Bush’s Presidency a failure. 61% of the historians said that Bush was the worst President in United States history.”
See *The Fall of the Louse of Usher *and then get back to me; Stone has a long way to go yet.
My ass it’ll be unbiased.
It will be incredibly slanted against the prez, but so what? JFK was Tinfoilhattery all the way through but you can’t say it wasn’t entertaining, kind of like listening to really good gossip that’s too good to believe. This seems like it will be the same way (except the gossip is true).
Sorry, but as some people have argued about the Obama related New Yorker cover, JFK has simply kindled the stupid conspiracy theory industry for decades to come, mostly by outright LYING about actual events and uncritically repeating things that have been debunked time and time again.
It is, in short, evil, and a hundred thousand GWB movies that cause his immediate impeachment and imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay can’t make up for that.
Your’e right, it is nothing but tinfoilhattery. If only I had mentioned that before.
I was disagreeing with your “but.” To me, the fact that it’s “entertaining” doesn’t even come close to justifying a “but.”
It’d be hard to find a cite but I remember reading somewhere once that JFK tinhattery was actually down before the movie came out and it’s up, up, up since then. It’s a huge majority now - 76% according to the most recent poll.
Seventy six fucking percent :eek:
Click on the pdf file that’s linked to in footnote 2 in this Wikipedia entry:
The movie JFK apparently had nothing to do with increasing the number of people who believed that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The number who believed in such a conspiracy rose from 44% in 1967 to 80% in 1983. It dropped to 70% in 2003. So whatever caused the rise wasn’t related to the film.
Good to know, but, no offense, meaningless. Out in Middle America Conservatism, Consumerism, American Exceptionalism, etc. are still as stong as the day the Soviet Union sued for peace and Ronald Reagan used Mikhail Gorbachev as a footstool to mount his horse at Rancho del Cielo.
Nope, GWB is some isolated embarassment, not mentioned out here anymore. Even though a massive political machine put him in place, and millions of Americans voted for him, he’s just some jerkwad and nobody’s taking further responsibility.
I really have no idea what movie releases of US films are like in other parts of the world–anyone want to fight my ignorance? It seems like despite the US’s presence all over the world, this is rather culturally specific, so I have no idea if it will be released elsewhere in a timely manner. Chances are, though, that if I see it, it will be in Europe with Europeans since I’m going out of the US next week. That would be interesting.
Ducktail writes:
> I really have no idea what movie releases of US films are like in other parts of
> the world–anyone want to fight my ignorance? It seems like despite the US’s
> presence all over the world, this is rather culturally specific, so I have no idea if
> it will be released elsewhere in a timely manner. Chances are, though, that if I
> see it, it will be in Europe with Europeans since I’m going out of the US next
> week. That would be interesting.
Are you saying that you’re going to be in Europe for months? The film isn’t going to be released till October. Here’s the release schedule given on the IMDb:
USA on 17 October 2008 (in limited release)
France on 29 October 2008
Belgium on 26 November 2008
Netherlands on 8 January 2009