This post does not actually contain hate.

Emily's informed me that I must have a post up here by the end of Sunday OR ELSE, so here I am. Now, the reason for my absence from this blog of late is still present - namely, I can't really focus my hatred onto any one particular thing that I can write about. So, instead, with the memory fresh in my mind, I'm going to explain how W. was a rather disappointing film.

If you, Dear Reader, are one George W. Bush (hello!), spoilers will most likely not follow - though I doubt that the film was anything close to one-hundred-percent accurate, so perhaps I'm wrong there. For that matter, if you aren't G.W.B., chances are spoilers won't follow for you either. I mean, really, you'd better know the plot.

Now, as a wise man once said, W. is "an interesting idea, an (unrelated) interesting storyline, and great performances, poorly executed."

- the interesting idea: that most of W.'s decisions as President come from a sense of failure instilled in him by his father, and by the desire to be like "hey, man, I can totally do what you couldn't."

- the unrelated interesting storyline: Colin Powell's reluctance to dive right into the invasion of Iraq (leading to his resignation IRL, but the movie never shows that).

Hang on, gotta turn my record over.

Okay, back.

- the great performances: this would encompass pretty much everyone. Standouts, though, are Josh Brolin as W., Jeffrey Wright as Powell, and Toby Jones as Karl Rove. That about covers that subject.

The poor execution mostly comes from a lack of a central focus, I guess. Stone does play up the almost Oedipal relationship between W. and his father, but only in the sense that it's more prominent than any of the other motivations that W. may have had for his decisions - most obviously the whole "born-again Christian" thing that I'm pretty sure he went through. That period is in the movie, but it's done with a couple of seemingly perfunctory scenes: W. collapses while running the morning after a drinking binge, then in the next scene is talking to his pastor after a small support-group-type meeting at his church. His pastor mentions something about "not having touched a drop in six months." Then that's the end of that 'til W. calls the pastor in to say he's "heard the call" and God wants him to run for President. Thus endeth the evangelical part of his development, apparently. So there were some interesting ideas there, but none were really given the proper attention.

There was also this really fucking weird thing where they were re-enacting W.'s landing on the cruiser (with the Mission Accomplished banner etc.) and they had a fake commentary by people on a show called "SPINBall" who were saying "This is why women like him, and why they like the war" and "You'd never see a Democrat doing something like this!" in a completely out-of-sync with the rest of the movie, heavy-handedly "satirical" way.

There were a couple of good things to it, though. There's a central scene where most of the cabinet is deliberating in the war room about invading Iraq and Powell has a rather nice speech about, like, what the fuck are they doing? W. always calls Cheney "Vice", too, which makes me laugh because I can imagine that actually being true.

But the best part was a scene during W.'s campaign for Texas governorship, where Rove tells him he's "just a magical fairy, sprinkling pixie dust at your feet" and then dancing a little jig as he walks off.

That pretty much made me look on the movie more sympathetically.


Oh, and also: I love James Cromwell as an actor, but the dude apparently cannot sound like anyone but himself, because he just sounded like James Cromwell, President of the United States. And, as my friend said, "I see James Cromwell as President and I just assume it's true, because it seems like a fit."