Oliver Stone's "W." is "boring" cinema, not much more than "illustrated journalism," lamented Time's Richard Corliss in an October 13 review.:
Like its central character, it seems never to have questioned itself about its mission or even asked if it had one. For this normally crazy-brilliant auteur, the last and lasting W. has to be Why?
But perhaps Corliss's real beef is that President Bush and his administration were not melodramatically portrayed as Republic-destroying megalomaniacal despots (emphasis mine):
Approaching George W. Bush, a Chief Executive with a shattered record and abysmal approval ratings who's now ignored or avoided by even his fellow Republicans, might seem way too easy a task for Stone. Historians have for years placed Bush at the bottom of presidential rankings, and The Daily Show, considering his legacy, chillingly guessed that Dubya is aiming to be not only our worst President but also our last.
For a related blog entry, see my October 13 post on Newsweek's more positive review by Alan Brinkley, who also insisted that "W." was "surprisingly, more or less fair," nay, downright "sunny and sympathetic."
