Guaranteed to be the weirdest movie of the fall that everyone you know will be talking about, Oliver Stone's W. gets more intriguing the more we see of it. Every time I see Josh Brolin done up as our 43rd President, the less it seems like he's doing an SNL impersonation and the more it seems like he's making a real piece of work out of this role.
The first full trailer for the movie showcases plenty of the lookalike casting, including Toby Jones as the most evil, gnome-like version of Karl Rove you've ever seen, but its use of the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime" is a stroke of genius. It seems even more clear now that Stone's portrait of Bush will be as an ordinary man brought into extraordinary circumstances, surrounded by evil geniuses and a father who will be disappointed in him no matter what he does. Oh, and at one point he chokes on a pretzel-- you see a lot of that in the trailer.
When Stone announced he was making this project, it was hard to predict that, at this point in the Presidential election, Bush would have become such an irrelevant and ignored figure, almost receded far enough into history that we can look upon him benevolently. Hey, I said almost! When McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden are the only enemies or heroes anyone can get worked up over, maybe now's the exact time to take another look at the chief bogeyman-- or, OK, for some of you he's a hero-- of the last eight years.
Check out the trailer below, courtesy of Yahoo! Movies (head over there to see it in sweet high-res).
