W.

You know I couldn't resist this one.

Much like the man's presidency, W., the movie, is a big fucking mess.

Floating somewhere in the ether between cartoon satire and serious biopic, Oliver Stone's latest is full of those good liberal intentions to skewer the right (and its former poster child) with wit and irony but lacks the balls to simply go full bore and slap the little bitch in the face. It continually teeters on the brink of acceptance and understanding toward a man that decided to take a steaming dump on every good notion and ideal that this country ever had.

Stone should have leaned more on That's My Bush and less on The Last Temptation of George.

Of course, lampooning George W. Bush is as easy to me as a warm summer day, cookies at Grandma's, a pleasant stroll on the shore or a handjob from a tranny.

It's just good clean fun.

The difficulty of W. is in the film's confusing duality. With a subject as reprehensible as this, it's near impossible to tell whether the bit of bile crowning at the top of your esophagus is due to it simply being an awful, poorly crafted movie or a stunningly accurate portrait of a remarkably lousy person.

Stone continuously cuts back and forth from the first years of Bush's Presidency to his shit-kicking, boozy failures of youth. We see Georgie Boy through frat hazing at Yale, an early pregnant fiancé (who is "taken care of" by 'Poppi'), an oil well job (he quits), a loss in his Congressional bid, oil speculation failures and his successful run for the Governorship of Texas. This "rich" history is interspersed with national policy meetings with all the usual suspects (Rice, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, Tenet) and his day to day ruminations as the anointed "Decider" for the free world.

With Stone, there is always throbbingly dull symbolism, forced irony and overt megaphone metaphors.

In this case- music and baseball.

I can't say the film is unwatchable. At times it is a grotesque train wreck that demands attention. But you actually walk away from this either laughing hysterically at the downright silliness of it all or sobbing uncontrollably in the understanding that it all actually happened. On our watch. Here, in America.

And we must own his crimes. Even those of us who despised him.

The performances get plain weird.

Josh Brolin is passable as George- sans the soulless, beady black pupils and chicken pecker nose. He's at least got the twang and inflections down pat whilst behaving appropriately like a dimwitted asshole born of privilege.

Ellen Burstyn (Barbara) and Elizabeth Banks (Laura) are adequate, as is James Cromwell (George Sr.) despite the overplayed (near hammy) machinations of the Bush family ethos.

Curiously, Richard Dreyfuss received numerous accolades for his portrayal of Dick Cheney which amounted to little more than playing The Penguin from Batman without the tux and cane.

The absolute "what the hell were they thinking awards" go directly to Richard Wright (Colin Powell) and Thandie Newton (Condi Rice). Wright turns Powell into a gruff voiced Cassandra (and a caricature) while Newton's portrayal of Rice borders on the ferret-like. She twitches, strains, contorts, battles various tics and possesses a voice so weasely and strange that you think Eartha Kitt might burst through her skull at any moment and demand an end to the war in Iraq.

Nothing so dramatic happens.

As a matter of fact, anyone who has been paying the least amount of attention (about 2% of the U.S. citizenry by my calculations) for the last ten years will not be shocked by any of Stone's half-assed revelations or speculations here.

W. (the movie) struts around with the same cocky gait as W. himself. An unfinished, idiot man/child with an inflated sense of self-importance and no clue as to what he's doing in the grand scheme of things.

It's a dumb, ugly film about an even uglier and dumber man.

Perhaps that could be George W. Bush's punishment when we finally condemn him for his war crimes. We'll hurl him into a dank cell and force him (eyelids propped open with toothpicks) to watch this film over and over again.

Better yet, we can foist a perpetual loop of Oliver Stone's oeuvre on him, 24/7.

I'll need to check our treaties and laws on that, though.

Sounds like torture to me.