Welcome to this week’s second Trailer Scaler… because I couldn’t wait until next week to talk about the trailer for Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush movie, W. (Here’s this week’s other TS.)Â
Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times has already said some very sharp things about this preview, so instead of using my traditional TS structure, I’ll mostly be responding to him.
See the trailer after the jump…
Goldstein makes the excellent point that instead of focusing on possibly-soporific scenes in the White House, this trailer shows Bush’s hard-partying younger days. Â And it ends with a fascinating question: How did Dubya go from Yalie Drunkard to Two-Term Terror? As the preview reminds us, there’s a killer story between the two extremes.
And that’s not the only reason the trailer is shrewd. Since 2000, we’ve all been watching the president, but when he was in school, no one was paying attention.
In other words: Dubya will still be in office when this movie is released, which means the White House, the media, and everyone at your local diner will still be writing their own narrative about him. If the trailer came rushing in with shots of the the Oval Office, it would seem like Oliver Stone was just one more voice in a shrieking choir.
But the president’s early life? There may be conventional wisdom about it, but there aren’t many images. We don’t have a daily reminder of what that period was like.Â
To that end, any artistic perspective on the Drinking Years would be fresh. But as an added bonus, this trailer makes Stone’s film look entertaining. Watching our president do a beer bong to a George Thorogood song is just so… goofy. Like Goldstein said, it’s like watching a boozier version of Old School.
It’s tantalizing to think what else will happen in those early scenes, and how they’ll affect the rest of the film. Frankly, I can’t imagine it. And while I thought I could imagine Stone’s furious take on the last eight years, now I’m not so sure. Maybe we’ll see Dubya and Condi at a strip bar. Maybe Dick Cheney is going to piss in the corner of the Lincoln Bedroom. Who knows? But I’m interested to find out.
The Rating: 5 Jello Shots
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1 response so far ↓
1 Alex // Jul 29, 2008 at 3:10 am
Oooh thanks for posting that, Mark. I was excited about this movie but, because it was Oliver Stone, I expected it to be mostly behind-the-scenes/conspiratorial scenes about Bush’s White House years. But, now I too am intrigued….. and, hey, way to go, Josh Brolin. Someone got their acting career back on track!!
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