Red

RED is a silly, ultraviolent, pulpy action picture that features Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.

I know.  I had you at “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.”  Now, try this on: “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown, wielding a machine gun.”

Woof.

Here’s the story: Bruce Willis is a retired CIA covert ops guy.  For reasons that will be revealed later, the CIA decides that he and his buddies all need to die, and quickly.  Well, as we’ve learned in The Losers, The Expendables, and The A Team, it’s always a bad idea to try to kill off covert ops guys – they can kill back.

So what?  What differentiates this from the other three “superduper commando teams solve the mystery and kill a bunch of people” movies that came out last year?

Um.  Helen Mirren.  Slinky white evening gown.  Machine gun.

Ok, there’s more to RED than Dame Helen Mirren mowing down hostiles while clothed in a slinky white evening gown.  Bruce Willis is a natural movie star who’s just plain fun to watch.  His team is made entirely of outstanding actors: Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, even James Remar and Mary-Louise Parker.  We also get the Great Ernest Borgnine in a crucial supporting role and Karl Urban and Richard Dreyfuss as villains.  We’re talking about serious wattage here: these people know how to own a movie screen.

And it works.  All that charisma carries RED’s wafer-thin story for a solid hour and a half of gunfire, ‘splosions, and a brand of carefree murder so blasé that we cease to think of the targets as characters and see them as the stuntmen they are.  Red turns out to be silly, fun, anarchic, and a great time at the movies.

I just wish I’d seen it on the big screen.

W.

W bounced on and off my Netflix queue a number of times. I knew that Oliver Stone is a major director, but I didn't particularly care to sit for a two-hour tomatofest directed at our 43rd president

Yep, I expected a hatchet job, and some blademarks are clearly visible: Dick Cheney's Strangelove moment in the War Room, the mannequin that stood in for Condi Rice. But the movie got at what I perceive to be the fundamental nature of its subject: a good man out of his depth. Josh Brolin was phenomenal, making us believe in his character at every step in his journey, and taking all those Bushisms and weaving them into the natural language of a guy whose brain often outpaces his mouth.

While watching the film, I wondered why it needed to be made in 2008. I think there's a difference between a sitting president and and an alumnus, no matter how recent. As the Obama team has learned with the lack of traction of its "blame Bush" public strategy, unless the last guy in the job was a towering figure, he may as well be Jim Garfield. W was urgent during 43's presidency because then, he formed a member of our perceived "circle," those people in our daily lives who have the greatest impact on us. Now, he's like a member of that circle who has since moved away. He's a person in whom we're still interested, but that interest lacks the immediacy it once had.

Immediacy aside, W is still a film worth watching. It's a take on a man and a time by a master filmmaker with a surprising point of view. It looks great, most of the supporting cast is terrific, and it was over before I knew it.