It was interesting, but only 3 1/2 stars.

I don't want to know anything else about him. I just want him gone.

What's the surprise? A documentary? Facts? Reality? Give me a break. This is another faux (read "play to the emotions"), for-profit mealy depiction of a war criminal. More noise to distract the citizenry. If Stone had any credibility, Harvard, Yale or Stanford might offer him a professorship. As it is, he skates around the periphery to make sure that his codswollop brings in the slow-thinking portion of the teeming unwashed.

Dylan song at the end was all wrong...the 60's are over...

I enjoyed W, especially the performances.

But it left me with a nagging feeling in my Colbert region (the gut.)

It's a stretch to call Brolin's W "likable," but he's certainly affable. And it was interesting to see W. consumed by the human emotions he has failed to show us over these years: gnawing self doubt, insecurity, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.

Ironically, this film leaves OUT what Nixon and JFK slathered on too thick, namely the sense of a sinister, democracy-destroying conspiracy at the heart of the government.

Perhaps Stone has learned something from W. Perhaps we've finally peered behind the curtain of secret government to find not a spider's nest of black operators and closet fascists, but rather a bumbling little fraternity of overachieving paranoids.

In the war room scene, Colin Powell asks "Why? Why Iraq? Why now?" Cheney responds with a characteristically megalomaniacal rant about the rise of a permanent American empire, Bush makes an impassioned plea for the righteous cause of spreading freedom and Rummy says the whole thing will take less time than a playoff season.

Had this been Nixon or JFK, no such speeches would be in the offing. W. would merely glance at a sinister Cheney would would intone ominously that the wheels of history are turning before them. Flash cut to black and white crime scene photos of Powell's body discovered floating in the Potomac.

But in W.'s world, the fake case for war is made proudly, in public, with all due disdain for any factiness that might stand in the way of truthiness.

Had Lee Harvey Oswald hired Palin's PR people, he would have claimed that the Warren Report "fully cleared him of any wrongdoing whatosever in that assassination there, you betcha."

Watching W., despite a few side references, it's easy to miss that this is the administration that authorized torture and illegal detention, that knowingly FALSIFIED (not just cherry picked, but FALSIFIED) the case for war in Iraq, that illegally wiretapped Americans, including American soldiers, including their private intimate conversations with their spouses, that illegal rendered terrorist suspects to countries that are willing to go further than waterboarding, that politicized the Justice Department and pushed phony vote fraud cases to rig elections and ensure the "permanent republican majority," that condoned and encouraged prisoner abuse and then left Lyndie England holding the bag when they were caught.

In W., these incidents are treated like just so much bureaucratic in-fighting and buck-passing, which is probably how the principals saw it.

One wonders if Stone will ever give Clay Shaw the benefit of such doubt. Maybe the JFK assassination was just a big gay misunderstanding!

Stone's W. is a honorable idiot. Looks like he got the man half-right.

Three stars.

the movie was better than you thought, but it was not a good movie. There is nothing new revealed that anyone who pays attention didn't already know. The only response I had is the same one I already feel - Pathos.
The political system and "values" that the US has self=inflicted is very very broken and will not be fixed by anyone anytime soon.
Good luck, USA. You need it 'cause your god left the building a long time ago.

One word review :
Whitewash.
All the talking points neatly stitched together to make it seem like they were said at the same time , multi millioniare Bush family did not have servants and lived in a regular house ?
glossed over all the bad stuff , and hammered away at the [false] good stuff.
utter horsesh*t, through and through.
When Stone said this is not a political movie , he meant it.

JFK, Platoon, Nixon, "W", etc.

"Heaven and Earth" will always be my favorite Stone movie.

Something didn't end right. Didn't he conclude with
"If God's on our side, 
He'll stop the next war."?

Producing a movie about a man who's inflicted more misery and huge burdens on future generations of Americans just doesn't sit right with me.

this movie blows CHUNKS!

I went to see this with a friend on Friday night. Perhaps it was the fact that I lived through the past 8 years and didn't really want to re-live it during the start of my weekend, but I didn't think this movie was very good. Parts of it were ok, but it goes back and forth between W in his early years and his years as President. There wasn't anything that I didn't already know and I felt like I was watching a movie about the biggest loser in history.

Perhaps this movie will seem better after W is no longer President for about a decade.

"With God On Our Side" was first recorded in 1964 on The Times They Are A-Changin' disc.

Back then, as now, a year made a huge difference.

this movies so bad you feel sorry for the actors that had to be in it!

Craptastic. Just craptastic!

A PG version of an NC17 man and his administration (or XXX, if you want to get down to the depravity of violence this man has lead the world to).

The vaseline-lens-treatment throughout. Really. Just really try to imagine what minute to minute existence is like for Bush and around Bush. You won't find one of those minutes in this film.

Delusional I tells ya.

I was busy putting food on myself.

Quite klugey.

Can't wait to see the movie, btw.

I saw the first showing of W. in Vancouver on Friday. It's just not very good. A lot of shallow psychologizing about Little George trying to measure up to Daddy (and Jeb), lamely written, with a whole lot of great actors doing extended SNL-style impersonations of the Bush/Cheney crew. Boring. It doesn't begin to match up to JFK or Nixon, Oliver Stone's previous prez bio-pics.

At the end, all I could think was that was the longest 2 hours I've spent in a movie theatre in years.

And that in 3 months, Bush will be on the garbage heap of history. HOORAY.

The movie is an American tragedy. With just the right amount of humor to make this depressing movie palitable. Or in other words, it would be a black comedy, if the result of said years of W in office did not result in the many deaths of both brave American soldeirs and inocent Iraq citizens. Also those citizens who survived to relocate outside of Iraq for saftey. And all of the mentaly and physically disabled people of both our military and Iraq citizens. To whom the US will be responsible for during the next three generations.

Not to mention what has been done to the economy of the United States and the world, after the Billon's spent in the Iraq war, and the billion's that have been stolen by goverment contractors, from the American tax payer.

This is a movie that needed to be made unfortuanelty.

Was Stone brave enough to show one single innocent Iraqi losing their life? Or, was it more about the lives of the famous bad people?

http://movies-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2008/1...

in about four years, when the impeachment trials and war crimes tribunals have had their say, and after the death toll from the illegal war in Iraq is fully tabulated and the troops have all withdrawn and the total amount of $$ bush/cheney usurped to bring this unnecessary war to conclusion is revealed, they will go down in history as the worst administration EVER!''

I for one don't feel a need to see either the first nor the sequel, i've lived it for eight horrible years and can't wait for President Obama to take his rightful place and remove the neocons from power once and for all!

The movie was painful to sit through. They only mentioned oil briefly as a reason for invading Iraq and didn't bring up corporate influence on politics at all. But the gorgeous (and underrated) Thandi Newton was absolutely superb as Condi Rice. Through sheer acting ability, Thandi uglified and stiffified herself into a shockingly realistic portrayal of Condi Rice, which I would not have believed to have been possible if I hadn't seen it for myself.

The movie was painful to sit through. They only mentioned oil briefly as a reason for invading Iraq and didn't bring up corporate influence on politics at all. But the gorgeous (and underrated) Thandi Newton was absolutely superb as Condi Rice. Through sheer acting ability, Thandi uglified and stiffened herself into a shockingly realistic portrayal of Condi Rice, which I would not have believed to have been possible if I hadn't seen it for myself.

The movie was painful to sit through. They only mentioned oil briefly as a reason for invading Iraq and didn't bring up corporate influence on politics at all. But the gorgeous (and underrated) Thandi Newton was absolutely superb as Condi Rice. Through sheer acting ability, Thandi uglified and stiffened herself into a shockingly realistic portrayal of Condi Rice, which I would not have believed to have been possible if I hadn't seen it for myself.