Yeah, when I heard about it I thought, wait, I hated this movie the first time around...and now they want me to pay to experience it again?

The older I get, the more I wonder if anything I think I "know" about the past is real.

Yes, yes, yes. There are even events unfolding in real time that I lack the time or inclination to dig into deeply enough to have any confidence that I know what's going on, so 100 years ago? Absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable.

I strongly suspect the reason "W" exists is to explain the ways of Obama to man, and to explain it all to the shmoes who thirsted for democratic vengeance and got bipartisanship instead.

Of course, if you were huggable and misunderstood, wouldn't you feel compelled to kill thousands of people and drive your country into a ditch? C'mon.

Unless there are salutary developments in the immediate future, I won't see the flick. Not because I don't like Stone. Just that I prefer the 'heroes' of my bio-pics be dead already.

Every day is a new day for our leaders, no wonder they all say they don’t want to dwell on the past but would rather move on. Who would have thought that reality could be so plastic?

Why? I just find it so hard to understand.

What is the problem with people who can't see real truth, even when it is so obvious? I find it hard to believe that a rich ass film director just wants to paint over what is still right in front of our damn faces just for the hell of it. Where is the motivation? Just to piss intelligent people off? To feed the cattles' ignorance?

Is what I've been reading all this time as willful ignorance just plain old ignorance?

Now imagine me singing the last comment opera style

The consequences of BushCo's actions are present and tangible. A little jailtime for the guilty parties would go a long way toward "shaping the narrative" for history.

Now what WAS so BAD about Wall Street?

Now what WAS so BAD about Wall Street?

Charlie Sheen staring into the darkness from the balcony of his apartment, saying "Who am I?"

Also the guy, just before he was arrested, telling him: "Bud, remember: when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you." Or something like that.

or maybe a musical about "W", singing "My way" with a chorus of patched-up Iraqis and paraplegic G.I.s...

Also the guy, just before he was arrested, telling him: "Bud, remember: when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you." Or something like that.

Didn't he say, when you stare into the abyss, that's when you find your character?

I liked "Wall Street" when it came out but that's in the past. I don't know if I would like it or not if I saw it now.

Also the guy, just before he was arrested, telling him: "Bud, remember: when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you." Or something like that.

Didn't he say, when you stare into the abyss, that's when you find your character?

I liked "Wall Street" when it came out but that's in the past. I don't know if I would like it or not if I saw it now.

"Nixon" wasn't bad.
When Ed Harris, playing Howard Hunt, says of Tricky: "He is the darkness," he got half of it.
The other half is really tricky. Why people embrace the darkness.

i haven't seen much of the series, but i thought M, V, and Z were really pretty good. as far as the reliability of history's concerned, i think a lot of historians would tend to agree with you. the what is easy to get to but the how and why of it are unstable.

I didn't see W, but Stone is obviously a guy who like to squeeze every drop of drama out of the subject, that's his schtik. Or, rather, that's Hollywood's schtik, and Stone is very good at it. It has about as much to do with facts as The Little Mermaid.

I liked Salvador, though.

Related to this "changing the past" topic, I just re-read "1984." The man was a freakin' genius.

...and 300 years of history were just made up by historians whole cloth...

Thanks for that link ...for some reason that concept is surprisingly comforting.

Off topic slightly, was the MSNBC headline today:

Families in a Syrian village near the Iraqi border prepared to hold funerals Monday for eight people they say were killed when the U.S. military launched a rare attack in Syrian territory.

Hm. Well I guess that as long it's rare, it's OK. It would be disturbing if it was habitual. Or maybe it would be disturbing if it was habitually referred to as rare. I can't decide which should disturb me more.

"W" is the price Stone has to pay to work after "JFK".

I dunno, Any Given Sunday was mostly good. It gets a little heavy-handed at times but its better than most of his expressly political stuff.

Like poking a sore tooth with my tongue, I couldn't help but go to "W." I thought Josh Brolin's mimicry of W. was spookily good, but the movie itself was a big yawn.

On history, what's that quote about how history would be different if the lions had been the victors?

Labiche:
"maybe it would be disturbing if it was habitually referred to as rare"
Or "well done". That would be pretty disturbing, too.
Viz. "W" some of us are thinking Bush has played his role exactly as ordered, that he did get that "Mission Accomplished", just that it wasn't the stated mission for the stated aims.
Stone functioning now as a kind of priest in the closing ceremony.
Some of us are thinking Bush has a cathartic function still. As repository of all the bad of these past 8 years. The bad that needed to get done yet had no moral or personal justification for the people who were conned into bankrolling it and sent their kids to die for it, and now watch their savings and their futures vanish into the pockets of the empty suits of Wall Street banksters.
So it gets done but then it's cast as mistake and wrong, still got done though. And the guys who really were in charge line the streets, jeering with the crowd as George is driven past in shame.
Because he's the guy that did it, all by himself, a man who can''t even talk sensibly for more than a minute at a time and never ran one single business successfully, that guy engineered a non-violent coup against the most powerful government in history, started a war whose real purpose is a mystery and whose consequences aren't even tabulated, same guy at the same time gutted the constitution then essentially threw it out the window of the train, locked down the US border to border like it was an open-air prison camp, and he did all that by his own goofy lonesome self.
And now he's done because he can only have two terms on the job.

Some of us are thinking possibly McCain will serve as a goat for the old wrong ways, too.
Attach all those sins like scraps of cloth to his raggedy hide. Throw him in the corral with Bush. Get everybody together. Open the gates and chase em both out onto the road. Run em out of town with beating sticks and throwing stones and loud angry yelling, then drive them over the metaphorical cliff and all our sins along with them.
Then we can start anew, refreshed, clean, purged, and sort of wholesome once more.

Catharsis, it's what's good for you!

Right now I just settle for IMPEACHMENT. (1-202-225-0100)

Mike Meyer: Constitutionally, can the president pardon himself after he has been charged, found guilty but before he is removed from office? ( how much time does he have between being found guilty and his having to leave the office? ).

Rupa Shah: The President can't be arrested for anything until removed from office.