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W.
USA / Hong Kong / Germany / Australia / UK 2008
produced by Bill Block, Moritz Borman, Paul Hanson, Eric Kopeloff, Teresa Cheung (executive), Elliot Ferwerda (executive), Peter D.Graves (executive), Johnnny Hon (executive), Christopher Mapp (executive), Tom Ortenberg (executive), Thomas Sterchi (executive), Matthew Street (executive), David Whealy (executive), Albert Yeung (executive) for Emperor Motion Pictures, Blobal Entertainment Group, Ixtlan Corporation, Millbrook Pictures, Omnilab Media, Onda Entertainment, QED International
directed by Oliver Stone
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright, Stacy Keach, Thandie Newton, Scott Glenn, Dennis Boutsikaris, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Gaston, Jesse Bradford, Jonathan Breck, Wes Chatham, Toby Jones, Rob Corddry, Bruce McGill, Jason Ritter, Noah Wyle, Jennifer Sipes, Randall Newsome, Jeff Gibbs, Maria Chen, Teresa Cheung, David Born, Bruce Bryant, Jon Michael Davis, Chris Freihofer, Terry Gamble, Jim Garrity, Colin Hanks, Jeff Hoferer, Jonna Juul-Hansen, James Martin Kelly, Tom Kemp, Allan Kolman, Ioan Gruffudd, J.Grant Albrecht (as Charles Fathy), Sayed Badreya, William Lanier, Brinkley A.Maginnis, Madison Mason, Bryan Massey, Lee Ann McDade, John Neisler, Gabriela Ostos-Tamez, Anne Pressly, Paul Rae, Randal Reeder, Andrew Sensenig, Marley Shelton, Bill Stinchcomb, Ronan Summers, Paul T.Taylor, Taylor Treadwell, Jonathan Tripp, Thomas Wallace, W.Douglas Waterfield, Drew Waters, Brent Weisner
written by Stanley Weiser, music by Paul Cantelon
George W.Bush
review by Mike Haberfelner
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The expectations everyone has set in young George W.Bush (Josh Brolin)
are high, him being the offspring of a family of Southern
millionaires/politicians, and he is expected to be a good boy in the
tradition of his ancestors, including his father, George Bush (James
Cromwell), a man who seems to be groomed to be president ... however,
young George W. prefers to spend the family fortune to becoming part of
the establishment, prefers to party heavily to holding a job, he's a heavy
drinker and womanizer, and he frequently gets arrested for his escapades -
much to the dismay of his father, who more and more favours his brother
Jeb (Jason Ritter) - the good boy who does as he's told - over him. More
and more, his father's dismay gets to young W, so eventually he stops
drinking, turns to the church (with Stacy Keach playing his reverend), and
marries a decent woman, school teacher/librarian Laura (Elizabeth Banks) -
and rather unexpectedly, he helps his father win the 1988 election for
president. New rifts between W and his father arise when George sr
doesn't go all the way in the first Gulf War - and when W sees his father
a broken man after losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, he decides to
go into politics himself, to show his father what he's made of. However,
when he wants to run for gouvernor of Texas, his father denies him
assistance because he wants to run for Jeb's campaign in Florida. Jeb
however loses while W wins. W suddenly realizes that Texas is only the
beginning, now he wants the presidency ... and wouldn't you know it, in
2000 he gets his wish - only to be first regarded as little more than an
in-joke on the international political scene ... until terrorists strike
on September 9th 2001, and he proves himself capable of handling an
international crisis. The terrorist attacks though and the Afghanistan
war that follows them though give the ultra-conservative wing of his
cabinet a boost, and thus, morally questionable full-blood politicians
like Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn)
drive him into the Iraq war on the basis of forged evidence and against
the advice of W's more level-headed secretary of State Colin Powell
(Jeffrey Wright), a war that seems to be an easy victory at first, until
it turns into the attacking forces and into total disaster - leaving W's
political legacy seriously tarnished ... Ellen Burstyn can be seen as
George Bush sr's wife Barbara. Released months before the
actual George W.Bush left office, W. failed to create any real stir
at the box office, and the explanations were manyfold: That the outgoing
president, whose approval ratings at the time of the film's release were
only about 20%, was shown into a too sympathetic light, that the
moviegoing public wouldn't go to the movies to see the president when they
could see him in the TV-news for free, that there wasn't really too much
of an audience for political films and so on. However, what everyone seems
to forget to notice is something completely else: By and large, W.
is a completely toothless film, it totally fails to even touch its
satirical potential and comes across as a rather boring matter-of-fact
biopic (even though several portions of the film, especially of the White
House closed doors meetings are of course completely made up). And apart
from director Stone's humourless approach (truth to be told, satire was
never Stone's strength to begin with), the film also lacks proper pacing,
making it a rather dull sequence of events, edited together in very
deliberate order. And since Oliver Stone as a director doesn't add too
much originality to the already slightly boring narrative, the outcome is
a rather dull affair. One thing though: Josh Brolin's performance as W
is flawless (even if he's a tad too handsome for the part), and he
dominates most of the film by impersonating the man without becoming a
bland carbon copy, with only James Cromwell (who might look nothing like
the older Bush but does a great acting job) and Stacy Keach being able to
give him a run for his money. Still, Brolin alone isn't enough to carry a
whole biopic.
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review © by Mike Haberfelner
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Robots and rats,
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