Pass the pretzels – it's Bush, the movieHe put Nixon and JFK on screen. Now Oliver Stone has a living President in his sights. As the trailer for 'W' goes viral, Tim Walker says this biopic shouldn't be misunderestimated
Is it a Saturday Night Live skit? Is it the Dead Ringers Christmas Special? No – it's the teaser trailer for W (pronounced, of course, "Dubya"), Oliver Stone's forthcoming film about the 43rd US President, George W Bush.
Stone is an obsessive chronicler of modern American history. In the past, he's given us movies about presidents, including the life of one (Nixon), and the death of another (JFK). He's done movies about US campaigns in El Salvador (Salvador) and Vietnam (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven & Earth); movies about the rise of unscrupulous capitalists (Wall Street), and the fall of the Twin Towers (World Trade Center). But W is a departure, even for him. A biopic of a sitting President, due for release on the eve of the next election, its producers even intend to advertise right alongside TV broadcasts for John McCain's campaign.
Stone has called the film "satire", "magic realism biography", but also "a fair, true portrait of the man". A leaked early draft of the script promises a story that jumps back and forth between Bush's dissolute youth and his time in office, from driving his car on to his parents' lawn and challenging his father to a fistfight, to almost choking to death on a pretzel while watching a football game, and telling the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar that he's given up sweets since the start of the Iraq War, as a "personal sacrifice to show support for our troops". Is this comic material, or pure tragedy?
The teaser, which exploded across the internet this week, begins with a confrontation between George Sr and a young George Jr. "What are you cut out for?", the 41st president demands of his son. "Partying? Chasing tail? Driving drunk? What do you think you are, a Kennedy?"
The trailer takes us straight to the fun stuff – finding out who's playing who in Bush's infamous entourage. Leading the cast is Josh Brolin as W. The artist formerly known as Barbra Streisand's stepson is finally gaining the recognition he deserves, after participating in some of 2007's biggest critical hits, No Country For Old Men, In the Valley of Elah and American Gangster. He's a good choice for Bush; as the 90-second trailer demonstrates, he can play a range of ages, and although he's better looking than the President, he's a character actor, which means he can do likeable-but-flawed – perfect for Dubya. (Interestingly, his father, James, once played Ronald Reagan in a TV mini-series.)
Elizabeth Banks (last seen in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) as First Lady Laura Bush is another solid piece of casting: innocuous, good looking but no knockout, and, like Brolin, she carries barely any distracting baggage from previous roles. "I just want to honour [Laura's] voice, her stillness, and her hairstyle," says Banks of the role. James Cromwell, meanwhile, was born to play Daddy Bush. He's been a US president before, in the Tom Clancy adaptation The Sum of All Fears, and played another con-troversial patriarch, Prince Philip in The Queen.
Then we come to Ioan Gruffudd's portrayal of Tony Blair, which makes you wonder whether Alastair Campbell had a hand in the casting, because, with due respect, Tone, Ioan's younger, better-looking and has a more expensive dentist than you. And his hair looks oddly blonde, too, but perhaps that's just the halo... Seriously, couldn't they just have asked Michael Sheen to do it again?
Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell and Toby Jones as Karl "Turdblossom" Rove are all good fits, even if Wright is a little young as the conscience-stricken former secretary of state. Thandie Newton as Condi Rice looks like she has half a packet of Maltesers stuffed in her mouth. People often feel the need for silly make-up in a film like this, but Bourne baddie Scott Glenn, who looks very little like Don Rumsfeld, may have the right idea: in a biopic, it's often better to look nothing like your famous character than to look slightly like them.
Bringing up the rear is Richard Dreyfuss as a rotund Dick Cheney. In the trailer, the Jaws star is barely recognisable inside a fat suit (or did he just bulk up on Freedom Fries for the part?). But Dreyfuss did a great job as a Republican scumbag in The American President, so we can legitimately foster high hopes for his Cheney.
As Oliver Stone says, Bush is "not your average president". Indeed, his approval ratings are now around the 28 per cent mark – lower than any commander-in-chief since Nixon. So do we really want to see a film about a man of whom so many of us so thoroughly disapprove? Well, yes, actually. Especially the pretzel bit.
Who's next to get Stoned? And who should play them?
*Barack Obama: Will Smith. It's the ears.
*John McCain: Robert Duvall, an old legend with Vietnam experience. ( Well, he was in Apocalypse Now.) Rumour has it that Duvall turned down the role of Dick Cheney in W.
*The Clintons: Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. They were so good together in Fatal Attraction, after all. Douglas has that charismatic-but-sexually-dubious thing down pat, and Close is (just about) scary enough.
*Bill Gates: William H Macy. Looks good wearing a sweater.
*Martha Stewart: soft on the outside, hard on the inside; Reese Witherspoon for her early life, then Joan Allen for the bit where Stewart gets famous and goes to jail.
*Arnold Schwarzenegger: we need a 6'2" Austrian-American ex-bodybuilder, 60ish, who can act. I can't think of anyone. Can you?
Gore's Bold, Unrealistic Plan to Save the Planet
By Bryan Walsh
When I caught up with Al Gore at his home in Nashville last December, the former Vice President–turned-green-guru was in a pensive mood. I was surprised — he was just finishing his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which he was due to give in Stockholm a few days later. For a man who had lost the Presidency in the most agonizing way possible, winning the Nobel should have offered some consolation. But when I asked Gore if he felt vindicated, he shook his head. "It's hard to celebrate recognition of an effort that has thus far failed," he said. He was referring to his work not only to awaken the world to the danger of climate change, but to get us to really do something about it. "I'm not finished, but thus far, I have failed. We have all failed."
Gore was right. For all the hot air expended talking about climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions continue, at a rate of about 70 million tons a day. The gap between the scale of the threat posed by global warming — it is potentially civilization-altering — and the solutions so far proposed — change a light bulb — are obvious and disheartening. Gore realized that back in December. "We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis," he said. "Our policies have to shift."
Now it's clear just how much Gore wants us to shift, and how quickly. Speaking in Washington on July 17, Gore called on Americans to completely abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within 10 years, and replace them with carbon-free renewables like solar, wind and geothermal. It is a bold plan, almost to the point of folly. But at the very least, it's one that certainly matches the scale of his rhetoric. "The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," he said. "The future of human civilization is at stake."
Gore's speech was less a step-by-step plan than a sweeping call to action. His path to a decarbonized electrical supply doesn't surprise: more investment in solar and wind, keeping nuclear in the mix, maximizing energy efficiency and implanting carbon capture and storage for existing fossil fuel plants, plus a shift to electric cars. But Gore's message was subtly different this time. The man who has in the past called climate change a "moral and spiritual challenge" sounded more pragmatic notes. While sounding the alarm on melting Arctic ice and strange weather, Gore also emphasized the financial toll that high gasoline prices were taking on average Americans, and the security threat posed by our increased dependence on foreign oil.
That fits with a growing concern among some conservatives, including Republican Sen. John Warner, who co-sponsored the Senate's recent legislation to cap carbon emissions. It's also a good sign for Gore. It remains impossible for most people to connect what comes out of our wall sockets to morality, or to believe that the nation needs to embark on a massive restructuring of its energy policy. But national security, or foreign oil dependency or high energy prices are all talking points that just might get a majority of Americans to support going green.
But doing it in 10 years? If the earlier, personal solutions to global warming — drive a hybrid, put in better insulation — were far too little, Gore's goal seems far too much. Less than 28% of our power currently comes from carbon-free sources, and the vast majority of that is hydroelectric and nuclear. High-tech renewables account for less than 3%. Wind and solar are growing far faster than fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas, but considering that we don't even know if economical carbon capture and storage will ever be possible, it's hard to see how Gore's target is remotely attainable. This isn't negative thinking, or fiction put out by the oil industry. This is reality.
Gore must have anticipated this skepticism. "To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider what the world's scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don't act in 10 years," he said. He's right. A number of scientists, though not all, warn that the world has a decade at most to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, or risk catastrophic climate change. But here's the fact that keeps me up at night: Gore and his allies could be right. We may simply be technologically and politically incapable of doing anything about it. Maybe we've already run out of time, and we just don't know it.
Night terrors aside, the 10-year target is a mistake for strategic reasons. It feeds into the perception still held by a large number of Americans that Gore is an alarmist, and alarmists can be ignored. Such a wildly ambitious goal sets us up for failure, and obscures the fact that the battle against climate change won't be won in a decade, or even two — it will last for the foreseeable future and beyond. (And if you think Gore has thoughts about returning to the political arena, forget it. His speech couldn't have come at a worse time for Democrats, who are already fighting off accusations that they're insensitive to rising gas prices.)
Gore ended his speech with a rousing reminder of President John F. Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon — a challenge that was met, Gore noted, in less than a decade. "We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history," he said. But the Apollo comparison, while great for speeches, only underscores how different the climate challenge will be. The moon shot called for focused scientific resources for a single target. Outside Houston and Cape Canaveral, most of us just watched. But decarbonizing our energy supply will require innovation, funding and sacrifice at every level of society. It will be long and arduous, and even if it works, we won't be rewarded with stirring film of a man on the moon. The spoils of this fight will be a world that will perhaps be less worse off than it would have been had nothing been done. What we most need is time to make these changes, but that's what we've squandered. If only someone else had been President these past eight years — someone like, well, Al Gore.-cnn.com
Israel Makes Arrests In Alleged Plot Against Bush
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel accused six Arabs on Friday of trying to set up an al Qaeda cell in Israel and said one of them had proposed attacking helicopters used during a visit by President George W. Bush.
Israel's Shin Bet counter-intelligence agency said one of the suspects had used his mobile phone to film helicopters at a sports stadium in Jerusalem that was used as a landing site for Bush's delegation.
The suspect then posted queries on Web sites frequented by al Qaeda operatives, asking for guidance on how to shoot down the helicopters, the agency said in a statement.
Bush visited Israel in January and again in May.
Lawyers for the six suspects could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Shin Bet identified four of the suspects as Palestinian residents of Arab East Jerusalem and two as Israeli Arabs.
The Shin Bet said the men had met several times at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, seeking to organise a local al Qaeda network. The agency said computers seized from several of the suspects contained bomb-making manuals.
Earlier this month, Israel indicted two of its Bedouin Arab citizens for links to al Qaeda and for planning attacks inside the Jewish state.
Copyright © 2008 Reuters
