They’ll wish they had released this one after the next inauguration–this movie is going to be so bad, it’ll boost Bush’s lackluster approval ratings. I mean it: if John McCain wins the election, I’m blaming W. If the script reviews, set visit horror stories and on-set antics weren’t warning enough, consider this: you know that awful scene in the middle of the otherwise-decent Nixon? The one where the beleaguered prez wakes up in the middle of the night, leaves the White House unnoticed without secret security accompaniment, walks to the Lincoln Memorial and stares at the larger-than-life former president when a group of college students approach him and, using fifth-grade-level rhetoric, manage to make the man rethink his positions on every major issue? Well, W is going to be kind of like that: a hodgepodge of cherry-picked highlights with a coating of revisionist history and overearnest liberal nonsense.
Watching W and his friends on the big screen will be no different from when we did the same thing with American Dreamz, which gave us a surprisingly okay Dennis Quaid as Bush and a bald (BALD!) Willem Dafoe as Cheney. That movie was pretty awful, but I think W is prepared to set the bar even lower.
All that said, the trailer had been taken down by the time I got to your post. Maybe it’ll change my mind. Probably not.
EDIT: Finally caught up with the trailer. I like the style, but the montage of key players at the end is more funny than it is good salesmanship. Also, Slate.com has put forward a nearly identical argument against the release date.
by Eitan
Holy shit — the W. trailer is now available. Burn After Reading be damned, this ought to be the biggest mainstream mindfuck this fall. I can’t wait. Perfect casting for Condi (Thandie Newton), Karl (Toby Jones), Colin (Jeffrey Wright) and Dick (Richard Dreyfuss). Ellen Burstyn is too pretty to be Barbara, and — what the hell — James Cromwell looks and sounds like a jackass playing George H.W. Bush, whom he made no effort to look or sound like. They should have just hired Dana Carvey. He needs a new project; I don’t think the Master of Disguise sequel is ever going to happen.
This is really going to be an extremely surreal film — the first feature political movie about someone that WE lived through (unless you count Primary Colors, which I don’t really, and The Queen, which wasn’t about our own country). I don’t know if I’ve ever had a feeling of cognitive dissonance so far in advance of a movie as I have with this. There are clearly films I anticipate, especially ones based on books I’ve read, and long to know what the performances will be like, and how the film will work aesthetically. But this is the first film of my lifetime where every single frame will resemble the silent ongoing nightmare I’ve been having for the past seven and a half years. The fact that they’re not releasing this after the next inauguration is a bit jarring. I will likely see W. opening weekend or shortly thereafter, and what will I inevitably end up doing? I’ll turn on the TV, and these SAME people will be there — but who’s that playing them? Oh, it’s Dick Cheney as Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney…
These are the unavoidable characters in the never-ending real life soap opera of American existence — how can we look the real versions in the eye after spending three hours acquainted with Hollywood’s finest recreations of them? It’s like going to a lookalike convention where everyone is dressed to look like your family, or possibly the worst wax museum nightmare of all time.
To quote my sister, “if I didn’t know it was real, I’d think it was fake”
Elliot, are you even remotely as excited for this as I am?
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk, The Wire
by Elliot
I think the difference between how you and I view the shower scene in Elephant–and how we view the movie in general–is that you seem to think that Van Sant was trying, with his portrayal of the Harris/Klebold characters, to explain their motivations. I see it completely differently. Sure, he borrowed some details from the case files (the first-person-shooter video game, for example) but this film is more about its own style. If Van Sant were so interested in characters, he would have crafted some himself, rather than letting the rest of the cast just play themselves. As for the homosexuality, I don’t think it’s meant to be read as a factor into their decision to kill. Rather, I thought is gave much greater depth to the characters, making them far less the cookie-cutter villains they could otherwise have been. As you know, I’ve been catching up on HBO’s The Wire, and one of my favorite characters is Michael K. Williams’s Omar Little. Omar is pure evil, but he’s also gay. It’s not homophobia–in fact, one of the most sympathetic cop characters on the show is a lesbian–but juxtaposing scenes of Little mercilessly shooting drug dealers with a shotgun and scenes of him lovingly caressing his latest young love interest (okay, he’s also a bit of a pederast) give the man far more depth and personality than the usual villains we see shooting people and then bedding gorgeous women. All it does is flesh the character out; I think you’d have to be a bit homophobic yourself to see it as directly related to or inspiring his acts of violence.
As for Milk, I’m looking forward to this one quite a bit, both as a fan of Van Sant and as an admirer of Sean Penn. That’s not to mention the great story, of course. Still, a Milk Best-Picture win would be far from the first to match the subject of a previous Best-Doc-Feature winner; Schindler’s List could be paired with any of a number of Holocaust-themed documentaries that have taken the big prize. If you haven’t actually seen The Times of Harvey Milk, by the way, you have to check it out. I’ve never cried at a movie, but–and I’m totally sacrificing my man-card on this one–I don’t think I’ve ever come closer than during the candlelight parade sequence of this terrific film.
Filed under: Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, High School Musical, Milk
by Eitan
e, correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that Milk will be Gus Van Sant’s first film since My Own Private Idaho to deal explicitly with gay themes. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. After the nightmare of Elephant, which makes an offensive and tokenized use of a gay relationship in order to explore a cynical aspect of the Columbine shootings, it’s nice to see that Van Sant is reconnecting with a theme where he’s done relatively well in the past.
My problem with the shower scene in Elephant is not so much the idea that these two characters are written as both psychotic murderers and secret gay lovers — it’s the fact that Van Sant so casually and shortsightedly buys into the bigoted mythos about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which was concocted by right-wing groups (along with their crackpot video games/Marilyn Manson theories) to toss another “evil inclination” into the stew of the twisted Trenchcoat Mafia psychology. When we watched the film at my house, you remarked that you trusted Van Sant to make this kind of statement about young gay men because he himself is a gay director, and to a certain extent that’s true. Still, I think it was a cheap ploy. In JFK, for example, Oliver Stone creates a kaleidoscopic image of every single conspiracy theory out there — mafia! LBJ! Military industrial complex! Castro! The two Oswalds! Stone makes the conspiracy theory stirfry work because he’s so damn ambitious. When Van Sant tries the same thing in Elephant, by throwing in a bunch of refried theories about the massacre, it simply doesn’t work. The gay part especially.
The truth is, I know that Van Sant is incredibly capable of handling gay themes, which is why Milk is near the top of the list for this winter. I wonder if they’re going to show Dan White guzzling down Twinkies…
I read an interview with Lucas Grabeel (yes, of High School Musical fame), who plays a photographer and friend of Harvey Milk in the upcoming biopic, and I was struck by a comment he made about working on a gay-themed film where nearly every actor was straight and the director was the only gay man on set. I’d like to point to Grabeel as a great example of an actor who has played a gay character who was truly written to be both unambiguously queer and unambiguously a charming role model for children. Of course, the director of High School Musical, Kenny Ortega, is gay himself, but it’s hard to find characters like that in children’s entertainment. The HSM movies are both pretty trashy, but it’s hard to ignore the merits of a character like Ryan Evans, who communicates his queerness in the most explicit way that one can in a Disney movie.
The Times of Harvey Milk won Best Documentary Feature in 1985. If Milk were to win Best Picture, would that be the first time that a Documentary Feature and a Motion Picture covering the same topic both won the highest Academy Award honors possible?
shot / reverse shot 