Even with its subject still in office upon its release, Oliver Stone’s George Bush drama seems curiously out of time. In one of the first scenes, a reference to a 80% approval rating seems much farther away than 2003, when the scene takes place. With the president months away from leaving office, Stone has made not a political film but a biopic, like his 1995 Nixon. Richard Nixon was a complex figure who spawned his very own adjective, applied alike to his wavering conservatism, his petty paranoia, and his extra-constitutional affinities. Certainly Bush’s critics have called him Nixonian, but if it applies it is to the administration as a whole. The man himself (played by Josh Brolin) seems to lack the dimensionality that the term implies.
Or, at least, such depths haven’t been uncovered by Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, whose credits include Stone’s Wall Street and the curiously titled Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story. In a series of flashbacks, Weiser and Stone hit the known highlights of Bush’s life—Yale frat boy with a gift for crafting nicknames of the 1960s, drunken fuck-up of the 1970s, religiously healed, newly married oil man/baseball exec of the 1980s, unexpected rising political star of the 1990s—meanwhile revisiting the run-up to the Iraq war. Hovering over all of this is Bush senior, imperious yet almost Lincolnesque as rendered by James Cromwell. Stone zippily hits all these highlights while never going much beyond the pop psychology of a 1980s telemovie. The story of a son struggling to live up to the family name, and earning the respect of a father.
The presidential scenes do a fairly good job of summarizing the Iraq debate, with Richard Dreyfuss a particularly spot-on Dick Cheney. In retrospect, these scenes underline the irresponsibility of the war planners, but I don’t think Bush’s supporters would have thought so in 2003. Even today, Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) practically comes off as a spoilsport on the Iraq war party. As for other aspects of Bush’s presidency, there is nothing at all. Bush bashers may wish for an exposé, but there are other sources for that, including the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Instead, Stone casts this tale, like Nixon’s, as a tragedy, with Bush in the end baffled, though only in bordering-on-corny fantasy sequences, at the way things haven’t gone as planned.
The most interesting thing about Bush is not the way he sees himself, but the way others see him, and how he became the chosen vessel for the Republican party. By focusing narrowly, Stone misses a story that seems richer with possibility. Despite his historic presidency Bush himself has spawned no adjectives—those existing seem sufficient—just a noun. The term “Bushism” has given rise to a popular feature on Slate.com, a couple of books, and its own Wikipedia entry. Weiser works nearly all of the best-known ones into the script, though frequently out of the precise historical context. (For example, he has Bush ask “Is our children learning?” during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign rather than his 2000 presidential campaign.) Sometime he says them with his mouth full, so there’s some humor. And Brolin, though he doesn’t look that much like the president, does a marvelous job with his voice and his manner. He helps to make the film as entertaining as it is. Twenty years from now, this will be a perfectly good introduction to our 43rd president and what sort of person he was. For now, it seems to have no raison d'être, making this W., like its subject, something of a lame duck.
IMDB link
viewed 10/17/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 10/26/08
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Friday, October 17, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
Taxi to the Dark Side (***1/2)
Alex Gibney won the Academy Award for this documentary over, among other films, the Iraq war chronicle No End in Sight. Using the story of of an Afghani cab driver, Dilawar, as a jumping point, Gibney portrays the moral failures that have accompanied the global war on terror declared by President Bush. As with Gibney’s previous effort, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie is a triumph of reportage rather than filmmaking technique. The tape of Enron employees blatantly manipulating the California energy market finds its equivalent in the autopsy footage of Dilawar’s beaten corpse, the death certificate reading “homicide,” and the famous photographs and films of blatant prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. All this is attested to by, among others, military police who were, much later, charged in the death of Dilawar.
No officers were convicted of abuse in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanemo Bay, where prisoners continue to be held, but Gibney clearly connects the abuses in all of these places to tacit and explicit policies of the administration promulgated by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Department of Justice counsel John Yoo. Yoo wrote legal memoranda suggesting that no treaty, and perhaps no act of Congress, impeded the president’s ability to order torture. By removing or failing to enforce the restrictions that limited abuse, these higher-ups created the climate that encouraged a lawless climate to persist, punished the innocent, and produced no additional quantity of useful intelligence. (In fact, a coerced confession was the basis Colin Powell would use in his UN speech to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the link and the confession were both later discredited.)
There are many tentacles to this tale, more than I can describe. The film is divided into thematic segments, and lacks a strong narrative thread. The story of Dilawar, who died after five days in US custody, only takes up a small portion of the film. Nonetheless, Gibney utilizes a range of voices and makes a strong case that, whatever the merits of the war on terror, the battle against it has produced unnecessary victims and unintelligent “intelligence.”
IMDB link
viewed and reviewed 3/4/08
No officers were convicted of abuse in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanemo Bay, where prisoners continue to be held, but Gibney clearly connects the abuses in all of these places to tacit and explicit policies of the administration promulgated by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Department of Justice counsel John Yoo. Yoo wrote legal memoranda suggesting that no treaty, and perhaps no act of Congress, impeded the president’s ability to order torture. By removing or failing to enforce the restrictions that limited abuse, these higher-ups created the climate that encouraged a lawless climate to persist, punished the innocent, and produced no additional quantity of useful intelligence. (In fact, a coerced confession was the basis Colin Powell would use in his UN speech to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the link and the confession were both later discredited.)
There are many tentacles to this tale, more than I can describe. The film is divided into thematic segments, and lacks a strong narrative thread. The story of Dilawar, who died after five days in US custody, only takes up a small portion of the film. Nonetheless, Gibney utilizes a range of voices and makes a strong case that, whatever the merits of the war on terror, the battle against it has produced unnecessary victims and unintelligent “intelligence.”
IMDB link
viewed and reviewed 3/4/08
Friday, August 10, 2007
No End in Sight (***1/4)
Charles Ferguson’s documentary traces the history of the Iraq war, emphasizing the lack of post-war planning and the poor decisions that exacerbated the insurgency. Blame is spread around, but Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer receive the harshest critiques. Much of this will be familiar to those who followed the news closely, but as an overview of the repeated mistakes it excels.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Sicko (***)
Having failed to rid the world of the George Bush administration with Farenheit 9/11, Michael Moore uses the American president to open his broadside against the American health care system. But, bipartisan in his criticisms, director Moore notes that, after failing to overhaul that system in 1994, now-Senator Hillary Clinton has become nearly the largest benefactor of the industry’s campaign contributions. Her 2008 presidential quest finds her avowing none of her former grand ambitions. Moore also runs through a brief, entertaining history of the HMO and of earlier attempts at reform.
But most of the documentary’s first half is devoted to visits and interviews with a number of Americans whose care was affected by financial considerations. Cannily, he doesn’t focus on the “almost 50 million” uninsured, but on people who thought they were covered until they found themselves at war with their insurance companies. Former insurance company employees recall working hard to find ways to deny coverage of patients who became expensively ill, such as by finding minor omissions on their applications. A mother talks about a dead child denied a life-saving operation by the refusal of her insurance company to pay for it. The point being, even if you’re insured, the American health care system is your problem too.
The next part of the film finds Moore visiting Canada, Britain, France, and Cuba to examine their systems of providing care. Although there are differences, the uniform thread is that in none of these systems is cost a factor in the way individual patients are treated. The Cuban excursion, which got Moore in some trouble with the U.S. government, follows an attempt to get some 9/11 rescue workers treated at the American facilities in Guatanamo Bay. Terrorists get free quality health care, we are told, so why not these heroes? Undoubtedly, Moore knows that many of the people at Guatanamo Bay are not terrorists, and he knows equally that his people will be turned away, just as he knows what a British hospital employee will say when asked how much the patients are going to have to pay for their care. This is Moore at his coyest and most tedious, but except for this Guantanamo segment, this sort of stunt-making, ever present elsewhere in his oeuvre, is absent. Still, it’s useful to find out that a poor country like Cuba has an infant-mortality rate below that of the United States. (This is according to a United Nations report, as documented on Moore’s web site along with other facts stated in the movie.)
But Moore’s big sloppy wet kiss is reserved for the French. In this land of lengthy paid vacation and maternity leave, not only is the health care free, but so is someone to help with the housework during the difficult first few months. This is startling whether you think it’s a great idea, as Moore clearly does, or an unwelcome and quite literal extension of the nanny state. Moore also visits the well-appointed home of one doctor and asks about his income. He does something similar in Britain, where the doctors make less because they are government employees. (The distinction between socialized insurance, which is widespread, and socialized medicine, which Britain and relatively few other countries have, is worth noting, but you could fail to notice it in Sicko.) The point is, don’t worry, national health care won’t turn doctors into minimum-wage workers.
Yet the scene also may inadvertently make the point that it will cost something to do this. This will be the easiest shot for critics to take—reform will cost money. Herein lies what I think is the biggest flaw in Sicko, if indeed the goal is to persuade. There’s actually an economic argument as well as a compassionate one to be made on behalf of national health care. There’s a large group of Americans like me who already agree with Moore, a somewhat smaller group who opposes national health care on libertarian or conservative principles, and a group in the middle who kind of agree that everyone deserves the same health care but worry about practicality and cost. The visits to the faraway lands should convince them of the viability of a government-run system, but Sicko only hints at the way equity can be achieved while reducing the amount spent overall on health care. The hints come when we see the amount of resources insurance companies put into accepting and rejecting new policies and in finding loopholes that will allow them not to cover people who already have policies. These efforts save the companies money but in the aggregate add to the costs of care without making us healthier. The lack of uniformity in plans and the array of paperwork they require create burdens that doctors, hospitals, and patients must suffer also, which is one reason why in the United States the non-treatment costs for private entities are several times that of Medicare. A single-payer system (one in which government is the sole insurer) also means that the government has a greater ability to negotiate costs with drug companies and other providers. The U.S. spends much more, absolutely and per capita, than any other country on health care, by far, and in return has a population that by most measures (such as lifespan) is less healthy than most other wealthy countries. This is the point that should be hammered home.
Of course, such a system would mean just a little bit less money for some doctors, a smaller insurance industry, perhaps decreased revenue for advertisers, etc. Perhaps dwelling on cost issues would mean acknowledging that all systems have trade-offs. Moore has defended his one-sided portrayal of national health care as counterbalancing what’s already out there about its supposed detriments. A fair point, I think, but in taking this approach he is unable to effectively argue against some of the critics. For example, the most frequent objection to the Canadian system is that there are waits for some procedures. The web site acknowledges this, but the film merely shows one not-busy waiting room with no waits to counteract the point. By not granting that there are waits (but for procedures, not office visits), Moore can’t make the counterpoint that this isn’t an implicit feature of government-run systems, or even that Canadians nonetheless have a much higher support for their system than Americans do for theirs, even though they see its flaws. He can’t point out that by simply choosing to spend a little more (but still much less per capita than Americans do) Canadians would be able to eliminate the waits.
I don’t want to overemphasize the criticisms. Merely showing the alternatives is a public service, as is the inside look at HMOs. While making perfect sense for their shareholders, it’s hard to argue that the private bureaucracy dedicated to discovering pre-existing conditions is, from the consumer’s perspective, money well spent. The thread running through nearly all of Moore’s work is that people have some responsibility for each other, and that’s really the premise of Sicko, too. It’s not as funny as Roger & Me, or as fun and freewheeling as Bowling for Columbine, but it’s more level-headed than Farenheit 9/11 and is, Moore or less, a revealing look at a subject Americans currently rate near the top of their concerns.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/13/07
But most of the documentary’s first half is devoted to visits and interviews with a number of Americans whose care was affected by financial considerations. Cannily, he doesn’t focus on the “almost 50 million” uninsured, but on people who thought they were covered until they found themselves at war with their insurance companies. Former insurance company employees recall working hard to find ways to deny coverage of patients who became expensively ill, such as by finding minor omissions on their applications. A mother talks about a dead child denied a life-saving operation by the refusal of her insurance company to pay for it. The point being, even if you’re insured, the American health care system is your problem too.
The next part of the film finds Moore visiting Canada, Britain, France, and Cuba to examine their systems of providing care. Although there are differences, the uniform thread is that in none of these systems is cost a factor in the way individual patients are treated. The Cuban excursion, which got Moore in some trouble with the U.S. government, follows an attempt to get some 9/11 rescue workers treated at the American facilities in Guatanamo Bay. Terrorists get free quality health care, we are told, so why not these heroes? Undoubtedly, Moore knows that many of the people at Guatanamo Bay are not terrorists, and he knows equally that his people will be turned away, just as he knows what a British hospital employee will say when asked how much the patients are going to have to pay for their care. This is Moore at his coyest and most tedious, but except for this Guantanamo segment, this sort of stunt-making, ever present elsewhere in his oeuvre, is absent. Still, it’s useful to find out that a poor country like Cuba has an infant-mortality rate below that of the United States. (This is according to a United Nations report, as documented on Moore’s web site along with other facts stated in the movie.)
But Moore’s big sloppy wet kiss is reserved for the French. In this land of lengthy paid vacation and maternity leave, not only is the health care free, but so is someone to help with the housework during the difficult first few months. This is startling whether you think it’s a great idea, as Moore clearly does, or an unwelcome and quite literal extension of the nanny state. Moore also visits the well-appointed home of one doctor and asks about his income. He does something similar in Britain, where the doctors make less because they are government employees. (The distinction between socialized insurance, which is widespread, and socialized medicine, which Britain and relatively few other countries have, is worth noting, but you could fail to notice it in Sicko.) The point is, don’t worry, national health care won’t turn doctors into minimum-wage workers.
Yet the scene also may inadvertently make the point that it will cost something to do this. This will be the easiest shot for critics to take—reform will cost money. Herein lies what I think is the biggest flaw in Sicko, if indeed the goal is to persuade. There’s actually an economic argument as well as a compassionate one to be made on behalf of national health care. There’s a large group of Americans like me who already agree with Moore, a somewhat smaller group who opposes national health care on libertarian or conservative principles, and a group in the middle who kind of agree that everyone deserves the same health care but worry about practicality and cost. The visits to the faraway lands should convince them of the viability of a government-run system, but Sicko only hints at the way equity can be achieved while reducing the amount spent overall on health care. The hints come when we see the amount of resources insurance companies put into accepting and rejecting new policies and in finding loopholes that will allow them not to cover people who already have policies. These efforts save the companies money but in the aggregate add to the costs of care without making us healthier. The lack of uniformity in plans and the array of paperwork they require create burdens that doctors, hospitals, and patients must suffer also, which is one reason why in the United States the non-treatment costs for private entities are several times that of Medicare. A single-payer system (one in which government is the sole insurer) also means that the government has a greater ability to negotiate costs with drug companies and other providers. The U.S. spends much more, absolutely and per capita, than any other country on health care, by far, and in return has a population that by most measures (such as lifespan) is less healthy than most other wealthy countries. This is the point that should be hammered home.
Of course, such a system would mean just a little bit less money for some doctors, a smaller insurance industry, perhaps decreased revenue for advertisers, etc. Perhaps dwelling on cost issues would mean acknowledging that all systems have trade-offs. Moore has defended his one-sided portrayal of national health care as counterbalancing what’s already out there about its supposed detriments. A fair point, I think, but in taking this approach he is unable to effectively argue against some of the critics. For example, the most frequent objection to the Canadian system is that there are waits for some procedures. The web site acknowledges this, but the film merely shows one not-busy waiting room with no waits to counteract the point. By not granting that there are waits (but for procedures, not office visits), Moore can’t make the counterpoint that this isn’t an implicit feature of government-run systems, or even that Canadians nonetheless have a much higher support for their system than Americans do for theirs, even though they see its flaws. He can’t point out that by simply choosing to spend a little more (but still much less per capita than Americans do) Canadians would be able to eliminate the waits.
I don’t want to overemphasize the criticisms. Merely showing the alternatives is a public service, as is the inside look at HMOs. While making perfect sense for their shareholders, it’s hard to argue that the private bureaucracy dedicated to discovering pre-existing conditions is, from the consumer’s perspective, money well spent. The thread running through nearly all of Moore’s work is that people have some responsibility for each other, and that’s really the premise of Sicko, too. It’s not as funny as Roger & Me, or as fun and freewheeling as Bowling for Columbine, but it’s more level-headed than Farenheit 9/11 and is, Moore or less, a revealing look at a subject Americans currently rate near the top of their concerns.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/13/07
Friday, November 17, 2006
Shut Up & Sing (***1/4)
? Academy
Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (partnering with Cecilia Peck)
chronicles country-music superstars the Dixie Chicks as they deal with the
fallout from lead singer Natalie Maines’s famously controversial remark. During
the run-up to the Iraq war, Maines had told a London audience that they were
“ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” The result back
home was protests, criticism, lost sales and airplay, and even a death threat.
For the group and its publicist and manager, there was confusion about how to
handle the negative publicity. Alternating between footage dating from the 2003
tour and from the 2005–2006 period in which the group’s follow-up album was
recorded and promoted, the film shows the attempts of the trio, which also
includes sisters Marty McGuire and Emily Robison, to move forward in terms of
both sound and marketing.
+ The
behind-the-scenes footage displays the group’s contradictory impulses toward
damage control and anger (combined with wonder) at the firestorm an offhand
comment has created. Some of the most revealing scenes only indirectly have to
do with the controversy, such as an exchange where their new producer, Rick
Rubin, is telling Maines to rewrite the lyrics but keep the melody of a tune
she’s not too sure is any good. Using the rock-oriented Rubin, who’d also
helped market Johnny Cash to a new audience, is part of a part-forced,
part-voluntary attempt to move away from their former core audience. Maines is
definitely the most colorful personality and a funny presence.
- I’m not sure I
liked the switching back and forth between the 2005 and 2003. I’d have to
assume that Kopple didn’t decide to make the documentary the moment the remark
was made and had to rely on existing footage for the earlier period. Perhaps
the switching helped deemphasize that a documentary ostensibly about a 2003
incident was mostly shot two years later. This isn’t a huge flaw, but I’d have
liked to see more about the process by which the band or Maines decided to
issue what now seems to be a calculated (and now disavowed) apology for
disrespecting the president. There are also very few voices outside of the
band. It’s probable that a rock or rap artist would not have generated the same
level of rage as a country band, and it would have been useful to delve further
into the nature of the country music audience and its definition of patriotism.
= ***1/4 As any
documentary about a music group, it helps to be a fan (although there aren’t
any complete musical numbers), but this has enough general interest to be worth
a look if you were curious about the whole hullabaloo when it occurred. For
those looking for a lot of conflict, it’s not here. This is the opposite kind
of documentary as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which focused on a
band at war with itself. If this movie is accurate, whatever effect the
anti-Bush remark had on the Chicks’ fan base caused no real dissension in the
band’s camp.
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