Time Film Critic Corliss Works Anti-Bush, Anti-Perry Snark Into Review of 'Conan the Barbarian' Remake

Richard Corliss, a liberal film reviewer who found Oliver Stone's "W." too tame for his tastes has decided to let his readers know that, some two years and seven months since the 43rd president left office, he's still not over his anti-Bush derangement.

Corliss shoehorned his strange asides about President George W. Bush -- and 2012 presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) -- in his  August 18 review of this summer's remake of "Conan the Barbarian":

[M]en need myths, and perpetual adolescents need to see the pulp stories they loved as kids exhumed every few decades. So here's Hawaiian-Irish hunk Jason Momoa in Conan the Barbarian, a gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.

Tracking Conan's journey from foetus (no kidding) to gruff manhood, the new version finds its meager inspiration in the standard kill-dream of an orphan's revenge. As a boy (played by Leo Howard), he watches in horror while the ruthless warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) humiliates and murders Conan's father (Ron Perlman); it's kind of like Saddam Hussein's plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush, which supposedly led son W. to invade Iraq and chase down Saddam. Conan, though, grows up to be less like 43, the smiling tiger, and more like current Texas governor Rick Perry, with a compulsive appetite for red-meat rivalries. This barbarian has compiled an endless list of enemies and vows, as Perry did with Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, to make life pretty ugly for all of them.

Perhaps Corliss is just worried that whoever the 2012 GOP nominee is will end up crushing his enemies, seeing them driven before him, and hearing the lamentation of the women.