W.
My eyes almost rolled out of my head while watching W. last night. Oliver Stone never fails to deliver the kind of dialog that bludgeons the viewer with his point. In this case, the point is that George Bush is a well-meaning buffoon deluded by a need for fatherly validation and misguided by the idealogues surrounding him. There you go; save yourself the 2 hours.
The script includes a lot of real quotes from the characters (many cut and pasted from here, no doubt), but they're used out of the original context and jammed together in a way that makes me feel that the screenwriter was working off a checklist of items to add an air of "authenticity." Nullifying any sense of reality, however, is the way that plot elements come together so tidily. For instance, I'm not so sure that the decision to invade Iraq happened during one meeting in a dark room, with the key players sitting around a table looking at a big screen displaying a map of the middle east showing American flags surrounding Iraq and Iran. Ah, and who can forget Dick Cheney's monologue about how we'll never leave Iraq because it contains 25% of the world's oil?
One can forgive a certain amount of embellishment and corner-cutting in biopics, but Oliver Stone manages to highlight all of the cringe-worthy elements of the script while stuffing subtlety in the closet for the duration of the film. I should know better than to expect much from his films. There's a saying in Texas: "Fool me once, shame on you... If you fool me, I won't get fooled again!"