Last night, I went to the wonderful Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar and attended a screening of Oliver Stone’s new film, W.. As is usually the case with Drafthouse, there were various related bits of media shown before the film, to entertain the audience.
If you’re uninitiated, Drafthouse is a great chain of theatres here in Austin that serves great meals during your moviegoing funtime and has strict ’shut the hell up and keep the kids outta’ here’ policies that make it one of the best places to watch movies. One of the things they do is find interviews, televisions shows, web videos, etc. that are related to the feature, and play them before the movie starts for the audience as they’re sitting there waiting.
So last night we were treated to Colbert’s Presidential Roast from 2006 (I think that’s when it was), as well as the web video for “Oliver Stone’s P.” - a flash trailer that jokingly shows us what an Oliver Stone biopic about Palin would be like. I’d seen it online, but it was interesting to see it on the big screen. All in all, that’s Drafthouse.
The main show came on, and I sat there, enjoying Brolin’s turn as George W. Bush, Dreyfuss as Cheney, not loving Tandy Newton as Condoleeza Rice (but not hating it either) and just soaking in Stone’s particular viewpoint on what the life of GWB must have been like. As a film, it did it’s job. It entertained me, it made me laugh, it gave me a protagonist I could sympathize with, and while it didn’t give me an ending, that was okay, because the ride had been good enough.
But something about the movie didn’t sit right with me. I’ll confess I was a W. supporter in 2000 and 2004. In fact, in 2000, I was a John McCain supporter, but when he lost the bid, I became a Bush backer. I lived in Texas, our surplus was high, the state was in a good position, and everyone loved W. Most of all, the guy was likable, and while he fumbled his words on occasion or maybe made up a few of his own, he seemed to understand the problems the country was facing and had an idea of how to fix them.
Imagine a film about your life, where the director & writer ignored how you got to where you were, what you had done right, and the good about you - and focused only on the mistakes, and hid your journey. This is W.
