W.

W. ~ There’s no way around this one, so I’m warning y’all up front – this is going to be messy, and worse than that, this is going to get political. And in reviewing W., I think I need to make my political standings clear.

I voted for George W. Bush once, and quickly soured on that decision in light of his behavior in both a post-9/11, and a pre-9/11 world. I didn’t make the same mistake twice. The following election brought me to independent candidates and in the most recent I was a major Barack Obama supporter, even when my faith in him wavered during the election, I still proudly gave him the vote. I believed in the man, and even though we remain in a war (or wars) we shouldn’t be in, I still do. Nobody’s perfect.

The point of bringing up President Obama is that I wonder if director Oliver Stone would ever make a similar movie about Obama in the same way he made W. I wonder this because W. is character assassination, pure and simple. I also can’t help but wonder why make such a film about a man that quite clearly is and was pretty much hated anyway. And it’s one thing to make a film, admittedly based on fact, that makes a man look bad, but another thing entirely to have nothing that makes him look good in the whole film. I don’t like the junior Bush myself, but I’m sure he has a soul and treats animals well. Heck, even Hitler was fond of dogs and liked to paint. I’m not asking for anyone to make a bad man look like a saint, but at least half the voting citizens of this country voted for him twice – he must have some good attributes.

Oliver Stone is also someone I dislike, but for different reasons. He makes movies based on real events, but frequently, in films like JFK, The Doors and Nixon (just three examples out of many) he depicts scenes that really no one could know about. Scenes of people alone doing things they would never admit to. How does anyone know about this?

All that said, technically it’s a well made film. Well shot, well written and Josh Brolin is impressive. Brolin should have asked Stone for some sympathetic scenes however, so he might have gotten an Oscar nod. But as I said, no sympathy here. And I sure would like to see footage of the real press conference that last scene is based on, ‘cause I must have been asleep that newsday. I can’t wait for Stone’s Obama and Hitler bio-pics, so I can compare and contrast.