Oliver Stone's Decider biopic "W," starring Josh Brolin

Why couldn't anyone besides Oliver Stone be the first to take this on?

has anyone noticed that oliver stone is a weirdo?

No. Never have.

The writer did the Giuliani TV movie that starred James Woods.

winners all

hahaha oh man this is gonna be funny

I'm unclear if this is gonna be a birth-to-surge all-in life story

omg this is gonna be the best ever !!!

I lobby for James Woods as Rumsfeld

That James Woods Giuliani movie is insane.

im assuming we can rely on stone to paint the least flattering picture possible? but after that 9/11 bullshit im not so sure. i mean not one hint at a conspiracy or anything?

alls im saying is oliver stone just be oliver stone here - now is the time we need you.

who will play Cheney!?

Cromwell is a good choice

Thing is this is NOT going to be funny. It's going to be a completely humorless take on a subject that is almost impossible to make humorless.

who for Fredo Gonzales? Javier Bardem?

Don't forget how unexpectedly soft Nixon turned out...

oh come on hurting theres really no such thing as a not hilarious stone pic

kinda can't wait for this!!

and ya jhoshea otm

yeah I kinda like Nixon and it IS funny (Woods as Haldeman! Discovering all the doorknobs in the oval office are missing! Praying on bended knee with Kissinger!)

resemblance be damned, Steve Coogan for Tony Blair

steve carell for tony blair

shadoe stevens for tony blair

Steve Carell for 'Brownie'!

hmmm i like it

its too bad Burgess Meredith isn't around to play Cheney

oh come on hurting theres really no such thing as a not hilarious stone pic

Alexander was rough going (but did have some big roffles as they went)

the doors movie is one of the top comedies ever committed to film

Sacha Baron Cohen as Saddam

Robert Downey Jr as Condoleeza Rice

Cate Blanchett as Bono

omg if he did this in a natural born killers motif w/our casting suggestions it really would be the best movie ever

The only way I could even get through the trailer of World Trade Centre was to decide the whole thing was a piss-take.

Sacha Baron Cohen as Saddam

This would make it all worthwhile, especially if every other actor played things deadly serious.

Terrence Howard as Powell

Larry David as Cheney.

martin landau as wolfowitz

wait Landau's dead

Larry David as Cheney!!!!

yes

Martin Short as Nancy Pelosi

This will be terrible. Oliver Stone is such a hamfisted, pious director.

Cheney's the toughest to cast, and obv crucial. maybe Woody Harrelson padded in a bald wig.

This will be fantastic. Oliver Stone is such a hamfisted, pious director.

woody must factor in somewhere

Meatloaf as Roger Clemens

woody could be W.'s alcoholic devil past, resting on W.'s shoulder during crucial times and whispering sweet cocaine dreams in his ear

I hope he scouts for locations high on mushrooms for this one too (a la desert scenes in NBK).

Actually one of the worst things about it being so soon is that it will not include the drunken post-presidential downward spiral.

How much of the film will occur in DC vs various golf courses and vacation homes?

Laura's already cast, btw:

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20186389,00.html

Stone, who wrote the screenplay with his Wall Street co-writer Stanley Weiser, has been openly critical of Bush's invasion of Iraq, but he has said the biopic will present a fair and accurate portrait, focused on things like his relationship with his father, President George H.W. Bush, his wild younger days, and his conversion to Christianity. Stone was quoted in Variety last January as saying, ''People have turned my political ideas into a cliche, but that is superficial. I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison, and Alexander the Great.'' Shooting on W is scheduled to start in late April.

ha, he DID direct Alexander didn't he? I completely erased that movie from memory.

god do people even remember this movie? brolin is a big star, and i feel like no one even remembers that he played the sitting president of the united states in an oliver stone film.

he's not really that big of a star; viz. oldboy

this movie was completely forgettable is the issue. toothless and forgettable

Case in point. I'd completely forgotten about it until the thread was bumped.

there was one good part of this movie

it was when bush and advisors are debating something in the oval office. suddenly a grumpy voice mutters something and stone either cuts away or pans over and it's revealed that cheney was there all along, standing against the wall

haha wasn't it, like, richard dreyfuss, too?

yup, he's grimacing and kind of hunched over

stone should have made a biopic of that dude

"loving husband, trusting parent, the greatest threat to the ideals he purports to believe in"

Cate Blanchett as Bono

― nickalicious, Thursday, March 27, 2008

should have been more scenes anticipating post-presidency visual art techniques/aesthetics

should have had george senior discussing being a sock man and saying "bieb"

bump

this one was pretty good

it was innnnnnteresting but 'good' is a bump too far

could've used more laughs but it was oddly sympathetic. well, as sympathetic as you could be to a congenital idiot with daddy issues that ruined the country.

i think at the time it came out it felt kind of weird and jolting to see a sympathetic take on GWB. dunno if it's 'good' or worth a revisit but it kinda stayed with me more than i expected.

I thought this was v good - unusually restrained for Stone, and it felt small in scope almost to the point of claustrophobia, it's primarily concerned with this weird hermetically sealed environment that Dubya exists in and in that sense it was very good at teasing out his motivations and internal conflicts even when he (submoron that he is) was totally oblivious to them.

has anyone watched stone's 'untold history' miniseries from a year or so ago?

yeah they're the fuckin bomb. Episode 6 about the Cuban Missile Crisis was incredible. they're edited at a ridiculous pace for TV documentaries though, that would be my one small gripe.

I liked W. I do wish there were more scenes of bush and his cabinet wandering through wilderness. Love love love the visual portrayal of Rove, he looks like a fucking Dilbert character or something.

it's primarily concerned with this weird hermetically sealed environment that Dubya exists in and in that sense it was very good at teasing out his motivations and internal conflicts

Yeah, otm.

gimme a fucking break this was fucking terrible, like a fucking 2 hour unfunny SNL skit

i also think it's an insanely difficult and probably futile task to sucessfully portray public figures who have the level of visibility of bush, et al. while they are still in office running the country. just ends looking like bad impressions and bad makeup regardless of how good the acting is

I watched this again because of this thread--third or fourth time. I don't like it that much, but for the same reasons other people level at Nixon, which I do. The only performances that work for me are Posey, Cromwell, and Dreyfuss; everybody else seems grotesque, especially Brolin and Newton.

brolin is on letterman right now and is pretty hilarious. he's kind of awesomely handsome right now; getting a bit of a ronald colman vibe from him these days.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Ronald_Colman_-_publicity.jpg

he plays hard-bitten working-class characters so often (maybe because of his weathered face and physique?) but his own speaking voice and cadences have a faintly dandyish quality.

no love for josh brolin hm

i'm a brolin fan. he's always had some great presence, i think i first noticed it for real when he owned russell crowe and denzel washington in their shared 'american gangster' scenes.

i hope he's dealt with his alcohol problem. that made me sad.

lookin sharp

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/11/13/1415839588362_Image_galleryImage_Picture_Shows_Josh_Brolin.JPG

Terrific in Inherent Vice.

big ups to brolin, lol.

has anyone seen W since 2008? i feel like it would be really weird to see again.

Everyone was so mad about Bush back then, hard to remember what the big deal was

wasn't a Democrat

hard to remember what the big deal was

O rly? Go back and take another look at the Iraq War, at waterboarding & Abu Ghraib & 'dark sites', and at the financial crisis that almost brought down the world. Even before 9/11, go back and look at his inheriting a budget surplus and promptly turning it into a huge deficit via tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%. That fucker ruined whatever he touched.

he doesn't deserve mere ironic dismissal into the memory hole. our red-hot contempt should never be allowed to fade away.

hard to remember what the big deal was

this is an insane thing to say.

this was on netflix last summer so i watched it for the first time since seeing it in the theater. it seemed...oddly slight. considering the characters, the stakes, the fact that it was a dude tackling a sitting president, etc. i am not an oliver stone hater -- thought at his best i think he only rises to the level of enjoyable batshit melodrama -- but it lacked even the a-cokehead-reads-the-nation intensity that gives his crappy work some verve.

many xps

2008 feels like yesterday. At first I thought silby meant what was the big deal about the movie. Bush years cast a long shadow. Feels like we're still in them. The movie is slight bc it was rushed: principal photography started in May 2008 (!!)

doesn't feel like yesterday to me - sometimes I remember that Dubya was President for two terms and it feels vaguely unreal

in part because even with Obama's massive flaws, it feels like we've made real strides on important things (gay marriage, abortion rights isn't purely on the defensive, people actually talk and care about police brutality/personal rights/privacy, etc.) vs the nadir of the Bush years that felt like the end of anything positive happening

also because he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, how the fuck did that ever make it past more than a couple of interns spitballing names

Harriet Miers looks like Virginia Woolf compared to Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump.

karl rove looks like he was drawn by garry treudeau or berkeley breathed

(in this film)

This is Stone's last good film. Cast is great, scope is tightly focused.

waiting for Brolin to play Rick Perry in a biopic

"thought at his best i think he only rises to the level of enjoyable batshit melodrama"

i swear i am not a chuck palahniuk fansite moderator when i say: natural born killers was something more than this. i have no idea if it was him at his best and it was certainly batshit, but that was some sort of cinematic something or other that was very memorable on the big screen.

i still feel like he doesn't get enough credit for the use of SOUND in that movie. and i never understood why more people didn't follow his lead. it was a true sensurround experience. i was totes impressed at the time.

kinda didn't need another 20+ year of IT'S THE MEDIA DO YOU SEE???? after that one. but what are ya gonna do?

(although part of me feels like he just saw wild at heart and said to himself: i can top that!)

nbk is definitely...an experience. it's like an american takashi miike movie.

also one of the few movies where i like the extended cut more. if only for the shot of tommy lee jones's head on a spike.

I like Stone in batshit epic mode, The Doors, JFK, NBK, Nixon. I've never seen W, but if it's like that, I'd definitely see it.

and as far as 90's heads in duffel bags go, i think U Turn is kinda underrated.

plus, the cast of U Turn is just ridiculous. where is the behind the scenes footage of jon voight, billy bob, nick nolte, and sean penn hangin' with j-lo?