All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucastold Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”
That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below. …Read more
“Lee Atwater destroyed the business of politics by going negative,” said Terry MacAuliffe yesterday, introducing an Impact Film Festival screening of Stefan Forbes’ Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. “Democrats don’t fight hard enough. They play tougher on the other side. The bottom line is that these guys will do anything to win.”
Forbes’ film, which caused such a ruckus at its premiere in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, essentially functions as an ideological ink blot––people see what they want in it. It’s possible (and, based on the director’s comments after the film, probably preferred) to see Boogie Man as a vicious indictment of the political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush whilst helping the latter’s father overcome the Iran Contra scandal to win the presidency, destroying Michael Dukakis’ political career in the process. But Forbes, to his credit, also clearly explicates Atwater’s appeal. You might need to put blinders on a bit, but it would be possible to walk away from this film cheering McCain to turn Obama into the new Dukakis
In fact, after the screening, Forbes acknowledged that there are lessons the left could learn from the enemy. “When a fight gets dirty, do you have to join? If you just play defense, you end up looking guilty. You have to turn the attacks into a referendum on the other party.”
After watching the trailer for Oliver Stone’s W. a few weeks ago, I had the impression that the George W. Bush biopic wasn’t going to be an impersonation fest. Of course, we only really got to hear James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, and he didn’t seem to be bothering to sound like anything other than himself — not that I was expecting him to do Dana Carvey doing the senior Bush, but a bit of a change in voice, in order to make me not feel I’m watching the junior Bush getting yelled at by L.A. Confidential’s Captain Smith, would have been appreciated.
Fortunately, as we can now see in some new behind the scenes footage courtesy of Access Hollywood, Josh Brolin is making an effort to sound like the man he’s portraying. Maybe it’s not so perfect that he’s mistakable for the real deal when you listen to the audio alone, but at least he doesn’t just sound like Josh Brolin, either. The video also gives us additional glimpses of Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush. The latter can be seen studying actual footage of the President (and likely the First Lady) and practicing mannerisms, and thankfully providing a tiny bit of playfulness to an otherwise too-serious looking set.
Now, when do we get to hear Banks speak? And, for that matter, when do I get my anticipated impersonations of Condi, Colin, Karl, Don and Dick?
It started off seeming like a joke. But Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic was legit — even if it then appeared to indeed be “a joke”. And now, because the internet can’t lay off writing about the thing (Bush=traffic), we are able to see just how much of a joke the thing is. Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter’’s Risky Biz Blog, we can read the first three pages of the script (originally titled Bush, now known as W), which looks like it was written by a student in a high school creative writing class (it was in fact written by Wall Streetscribe Stanley Weiser). Well, obviously Bush experts would declare it inaccurate. Are we to really believe that Bush called Karl Rove a “turdblossom”? If the script wanted to get the facts straight, he would have used “butthead” instead.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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It started off 
