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.

RocknRolla

ROCK N ROLLA is a great time at the movies.

Like LOCK, STOCK, AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, ROCKNROLLA is a British thug drama, though drama may be the wrong word. This isn’t a film about the human condition, and it isn’t a film about real people with real problems. It’s a game, a Rube Goldberg device, a chance to set up a bunch of characters in impossible situations and see how everything works itself out. And while that kind of movie can be a grinding bore of plot machination, ROCK N ROLLA hums like a finely tuned engine.

Why? I’ll chalk it up to two things: witty and well-written dialogue, and propulsive direction and editing. The dialogue seems like the kind of stuff that I’d enjoy reading as much as seeing performed, though the performances (by “The Wire”’s Idris Elba, Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton, and Tom Wilkinson, among others, do it credit. The direction and editing, which combine for the look of the film, are alive with energy and excitement, like the kind of storyteller
who’s so caught in the moment that the words tumble out of him at nearly the speed of thought.

So here I am, four paragraphs in (if you count the lede), and I have yet to say what the movie is actually about. You know what? It doesn’t matter what the movie’s about, any more than it matters what a good storyteller’s tale is actually about. What matters is that it’s a tale from a good storyteller.

That’s enough for me.