Rating

I don't really know what to do with this project.  I've been following it for awhile out of slight curiosity, and, as time has progressed my curiosity has gotten larger and larger.  I am not by definition a fan of Oliver Stone movies.  Platoon is indeed a brilliant film but the rest of his catalogue tends to hit me as bloated, overwrought and way too subjective for what is most often advertised as historical work.  With JFK being grandly imagined beyond the scope of reality, Nixon being a hate letter disguised as an investigation and films like Natural Born Killers being (after Stone's rewrites) a heavy-handed didactic instructional rather than the more philosophical violent meandering Tarantino had intended, I usually opt not to bother with his work. 

Oh, and The Doors, the most depressing movie ever made without any rational reason for being such a one-sided downer.  Let's not forget that.  If you disagree, that's fine.  At least you know where I stand.

And yet I have no understanding at all about what W. is supposed to be.  I assumed at first that it was another of his pseudo-historical attacks on republican presidents.  And then I started hearing grumblings about a script portraying Bush as a fiending foul-mouthed frat boy.  At first, I assumed this was simply par for the attack course.  But then, the foul-mouth aspect of it started sounding absolutely over the top.  I started to wonder:  Is Stone tackling a satire?  Satire seems to me to be much too subtle a genre for him, but who knows?  Maybe he's trying.  Is he doing the White House as Animal House with George W. as Bluto?  That could, indeed, be entertaining.  But it just didn't feel very Oliver Stone to me.

Now, today, we get the first four pages of the script - not written by Stone, mind you, which means it could be very different by the time he gets done with it.  But still, an indication of the direction of the project, and so I read the pages.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS MOVIE IS GOING TO BE.  AND, I'm starting to think, NEITHER DOES OLIVER STONE.  Granted, you cannot judge a movie merely by the first four pages of its script (though that is how they get bought and sold), but still the pages linked below could be played in just about any number of ways, so long as they all tend toward utter ridiculousness.  Read them and see if you agree.

I, however, don't know if I'm suddenly interested in this project like a train wreck or officially done giving a damn.  What's there doesn't feel all that different than Comedy Central's Lil'Bush show.  A complete sit-com feel to the dialogue with real "biopic" grandiosity in the description (note the opening stadium
sequence).  Maybe, it's just a mess.

Click here for comedy, or drama, or dramedy, or... something?