Covering for Oliver Stone
Dan Glaister, the Guardian’s LA correspondent, manages a review of Oliver Stone’s W that is embarrassing, possibly even by Guardian standards. The opening is just plain silly.
It is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the electoral season, a biopic of the Republican incmbent by a controversially “liberal” director that could swing an election.
I have no idea if the movie is “eagerly awaited”, although if the movie does not do well, do not expect an “I screwed up” mea culpa from Glaister. What are the scare quotes doing around the word “liberal”. Is Glaister suggesting that only some people think Stone is on the left? Maybe the ones complaining that Stone did not donate the production budget to the Obama campaign, but it is hard to imagine where else. But the corker has to be the bit about “swing an election”. Is there anyone who really thinks someone who chooses to go to an Oliver Stone movie will come out thinking he would switch from McCain to Obama?
After that disastrous opening, you just know it will get worse. It does.
Bush, uncannily portrayed by Josh Brolin, saying “Guantanamero” instead of “Guantánamo”; comparing himself to Moses – “He wasn’t a very good speaker,” Bush says to explain his own call to politics, “but he knew”; and agreeing with Laura, his wife, that the musical Cats is “one thing I’ll stay up late for”.
Bush is fluent in Spanish, so it seems unlikely he made the error, but if he did, you would think the lefty sites would be talking about it. Google says no. Ditto with the Moses comparison. So by the time you get to the Cats remark, it seems a good bet that Stone made it all up. But what is with the Cats remark? Are Guardianistas too snobbish for Cats?
The rest is boring, except that of course Glaister contradicts himself. Having said that the movie could “swing an election”, he remarks:
But the film (its title is the initial of the president’s middle name, Walker) plays like a TV movie rather than a cinematic epic, and it will not shift the political landscape ahead of the US election on November 4. Instead, it will reinforce the feelings of those who believe Bush was a dangerous incompetent, and provide ammunition to those on the other side of the political spectrum who prefer to worry about the bias of the liberal media.
And after sticking scare quotes around liberal, he says of Stone’s movie Salvador:
Stone nailed his political colours to the mast with a sympathetic portrayal of leftwing revolutionaries and a resounding condemnation of US policy in Central America in the story of a US photojournalist’s efforts to reveal military atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war.
Maybe he means that calling Stone a liberal is like calling Chomsky or George Galloway a liberal: real liberals are not blood soaked monsters.