W is pronounced ‘Dubya’. We know this, not least, because Oliver Stone opens his film with a discourse on nicknames. George ‘W’ Bush is shown, first in a White House meeting dolling out crude monikers: turd blossom (Rove), balloon foot (Powell), guru (Rice), and rummy (Rumsfeld).

We are then shown a teenage W’s fraternity pledge during which he is able to remember the entire fraternity by their nicknames (the ironic result is that the young W avoids having more whisky poured down his throat).

Stone’s counter-intuitive commentary does not stretch to his central thesis. He claims that W’s decision to invade Iraq arose from his relationship with his father. After depicting the many disappointments W causes his father (W can’t play baseball or hold down a job, and leaves his girlfriend pregnant) the Freudian tension culminates when father and son have a real tussle, and later when W dreams about fighting him in the Oval Office.

W’s own doubts about his ability to play baseball (and to win his father’s love) are played out in stadium dream sequences, in the last of which (the closing scene of the film) he drops a catch he had earlier made.

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq monopolises the depiction of W’s presidency but does not ring true and will be cringe worthy for those who enjoy the work of Aaron Sorkin. This is in part because of the intense exposition in these scenes, but also because of clunky (but not necessarily inaccurate) scripting and the caricaturing of Condoleezza Rice (as a simpering yes-woman) and Karl Rove.

An incident in which Cheney points at a cartoon-like map representing threats in the Middle East was so reminiscent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s puppet movie Team America that one half-expected one of the principals to cry out ‘my god, that would be 9/11 times a thousand.’ In using phrases like ‘I’m the decider’ (W tells Cheney not to challenge him when others are in the room) and ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, won’t get fooled again’, meanwhile, Oliver Stone tries to provide more realism by transposing public utterances into private White House conversations.

Earlier scenes in W’s life are interwoven with the contemporary in the style Stone perfected in Nixon. These earlier scenes are an attempt to provide the Freudian thesis with its backing. They are well paced, and give some genuine insight into the character of the 43rd president.

The first meeting with Laura (in which W continuously talks with his mouth full of barbeque food), is endearing, although Laura (Elizabeth Banks) never seems to age through the rest of the film. Most significant is a scene in which W, after debating an opponent in his first and unsuccessful congressional race, drives his car into the garage door in frustration.

The resulting promise W makes is to ‘out-Christian and out-Texas Texas’. However, from that moment on the viewer is led unquestioningly through scenes in which W professes his religion and claims to have been called by God to run for the presidency.

The same straight bat treatment is given to W’s drying out following his 40th birthday. Stone suggests W himself decided to give up drinking after nothing more than a dizzy spell during a run and under no duress from his family. In scenes showing W’s shrewd work on his father’s campaign in 1988 and his courting of religious conservatives, Stone is on safer ground, and is making important biographical points which again push against common prejudices about W.

In the sanctification of W’s father (James Cromwell) Stone fares less well. Cromwell dominates the screen both through the lines given and his acting. In scenes including the depiction of the first Gulf War the viewer is given to believe Bush 41’s only failing is his inability to relate to his son.

If this is the reason why W invades Iraq, as Stone is suggesting, he is led on by his friends. Cheney is painted in a familiar and sinister light (circumventing CIA director George Tenet to legitimise evidence that Iraq had attempted to acquire yellowcake from Niger).

Stone portrays W as innocent and unsophisticated, never asking enough questions (displayed at the climax of the film in W’s anger that no weapons of mass destruction are discovered following the invasion), but as having been in the room when the case was made (by Cheney and his map) in terms of both oil and regional power.

The film makes scant reference to 9/11 and the effect this had on W, leaving the case for war horribly out of context. What Stone delivers is interesting and entertaining, but not much more than fictional psychobabble.

Today once again brings the master of controversial political filmmaking back onto the silver screen as the three time Academy Award winning director and screenwriter Oliver Stone releases his new biopic on the life, thus far, of one of the least popular Presidents in American history, simply entitled W. (pronounced, of course, “dub-ya”).

Stone is not a man who shies from political cinema: his past works have split opinion at every juncture. Take for instance his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Platoon, documenting life in the Vietnam War.

This film’s overt criticism of the nature of this war and the actions of the American troops in Vietnam, written and filmed in response to John Wayne’s patriotic disaster, The Green Berets, courted great criticism and also great admiration for its realistic portrayal of life in war.

Stone did not stop there. His conspiracy-packed thriller JFK (presumably the beginning of his obsession with Presidential initials) presented a widely attacked view on the events surrounding Kennedy’s death in 1963.

From here to Nixon, where Stone, aided by a mesmerising and chameleon-like turn from the great Anthony Hopkins, arguably gave Nixon a more human face than he has often been afforded in popular culture before or since. Stone is not a man to toe the line and once again his foray into murky political waters with his biopic, surely the first of its kind, that of an incumbent President, makes us question whether this brand of highly political film-making has its place in cinema.

Political filmmaking has undoubtedly been at the forefront of cinema since its creation, and some of its greatest and most powerful works have undoubtedly come with serious political points to make. Some of our most political writers have indeed graced the screen with their scripts.

Take for instance Arthur Miller, a man who famously refused to give evidence to the House of Un-American Activities who sought to blacklist “communists” in the world of entertainment. It was he, after all, who scripted Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, a film not just famous for the brooding looks of a young (not yet clinically obese and socially reclusive) Marlon Brando, but also a film that showed the power of one man against the oppression of authority power. Can we possibly see the hint of a political allegory there?

In more recent years the filmmaking world has continued to be swayed by the political situation and represent this in its output. Take the intense political distrust and cynicism that overflowed from the Watergate crisis, creating a set of political thrillers in the mid-1970s portraying a society who had lost faith in the establishment, high amongst these two classic political thrillers All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor.

Both films attacked a society where the immorality of highly placed individuals had seen the abuse of power and lost the respect of those whom they had been entrusted to represent. So too in the present day burning political issues make their way into cinema, from Michael Moore to Team America, and now to Oliver Stone’s new biopic which puts the Bush administration in the line of fire.

Cinema is one of our most accessible art forms and beyond its purpose to entertain lies a chance to make a point. In a world caught in the grips of political intrigue over an American election, it is only right that film should have its say about that which influences its viewers so much.

Cinema is not escapism, it is a means of expression such as any other art form. Politics is truly alive in film, not least in Stone’s new project.

The only reason I’m not giving this film five stars, asides from a slight bias against mainstream cinema, is Jessica Biel. I’ve never found her particularly versatile as an actress; my notes inform me that she told the director she’d need help, since she “doesn’t have a sense of bitterness or cynicism in her”.

It’s called acting dear… And she just lacks the imperative classic 20s style.
Now for the facts. Easy Virtue can only be described as a fucking fabulous film. It is sensational, sensual, classic, decadent, deliciously funny underpinned by a sense of darkness. Noel Cowardian humour drips from every line, as the dialogue begins with chilling British reserve versus joyous wry sarcasm and descends into a veritable war-zone of sharp-tongued shrapnel, dead lap dogs have never been so funny. The soundtrack is crucial, and there is an almost orgasmic moment when a dirty, gritty, 20s jazz sounding version of Sex Bomb overwhelms the senses. You just have to love a movie that climaxes on a tempestuous tango!

The story follows two newly-weds, young Englishman John Whittaker and his spur of the moment American bride Larita when they arrive at John’s country manor home, reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett space in its deadly stuffed-animal stillness. Sparks fly between Larita and John’s family as their equally shady pasts and stubborn presents collide. The characters are delicious in their quirks and symmetry, from the drunk butler to the clinging mother. Ben Barnes does a brilliant job at depicting the young John, who dissolves from a sensuous young man into a bewildered little boy; Kristin Scott Thomas is her usual exquisite self, acting the “villain” of the piece. But Colin Firth is the true star of the show. There is the distinct feeling that he has finally been given a role to really get his teeth into; he’s beautiful, wonderfully funny and desperately dark.

The film ends just the way you secretly hoped it would, without cliché or predictability, and you find yourself starry eyed, hands clasped, laughing in sheer pleasure as the credits kick in. Go see it; trust me, you haven’t had this much fun in far too long!

4 Stars

Like printing, it’s hard to believe that it took so long for someone to think of telescopes-how was it possible that people used spectacles for three hundred years before someone tried using two lenses and a bit of tubing to bring far objects close and create an advantage over an enemy any general would drool over? But despite a few shadowy claims, the earliest certain reference to them is a patent application from 1608, and it’s the four hundredth anniversary of this the exhibition celebrates, even though the earliest telescopes it has are from around the 1670s (no major loss).

The information on the walls (there’s no guidebook) is limited but to-the-point, and gives a good sense of a time when science was a respectable hobby for gentlemen, even if supplying their optical demands was a cut-throat business with trade secrets and patent lawsuits: many telescopes are decorated with fishskin, painted designs and elaborately turned baroque endpieces, though functionality moves in towards the end of the exhibition (rather wisely: telescope tubes in Newton’s time were made of cardboard). It’s amazing to think of the meticulousness of the astronomers of the time, grinding mirrors so meticulously one had his sister on hand to feed him so he could work without pause, with no more self-interested a purpose than cataloguing the stars.

It’s also fascinating to look at the technological dead ends, like telescopes where the end you hold is the bigger one (easier to hold, before new technology allowed telescopes to shrink). The same feeling of looking at different ways the present could have gone goes throughout the museum, an amazing toyshop of technology, some strangely unlike modern equivalents (T.E. Lawrence’s camera, for example, with detachable lenses clearly based on microscope design) and some strangely familiar (a Zeiss microscope from about 1910 with white lettering and black enamel looking, if not utterly modern, at least like it could have rolled out of Jena in the ‘seventies). This is in no way a must-see exhibition, but it’s still interesting, and if you haven’t been to the museum already it makes now a good time to see what you’ve been walking past.

Three stars

As an Art Historian I’ve always felt that whenever people say ‘that’s rubbish, a monkey could do better’, it’s just a cop-out. Generally speaking I quite like contemporary art, not because I’d like to hang it on my walls or I necessarily think its ‘good’, but because it tends to make me think.

Last Sunday, however, I experienced something that has never happened to me before – I came out of an exhibition feeling totally depressed. It wasn’t because Kieran Stiles had highlighted the plight of starving children, commercial greed or terminal diseases, nothing of the sort; he’d just left me feeling totally flat. I felt genuinely miserable because I could hardly find anything to applaud in his exhibition.

It’s not just that my siblings’ nursery school paintings were better – one could probably say the same of Tracy Emin’s work, although I really hope my little sister never takes photos of herself shoving money into her crotch – but Stiles’ work was just unavoidably bland.

His paintings are splattered and daubed in uncomplicated representations of countryside scenes of the kind that seem to be popular in upper-middle class kitchens. They’re harmless enough but there seems to be so little to them.
I’m normally on the fence as to whether titles help a picture. If there’s something particular to be conveyed then they make sense, but Stiles’ titles remove what little interest there is in his works. ‘Beach’ adds absolutely nothing to a pastel coloured set of streaks and even removes any hint or suggestion of depth or ambiguity.

There’s no hidden meaning here. Much worse; there seems to be no meaning at all. Stiles’ works are extremely simple, and their composition is so uninspired that the only thing I can find to say in their defence is that the colours are quite nice. Shoot me now.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to Stiles. This is, after all, a commercial gallery designed to sell local artists at reasonable prices. But I certainly wouldn’t waste £600-£800 on one of these.

One star

I am a sucker for Sylvia Plath. Something about blonde Anglo-American manic depressives just does it for me. So when I spotted her name in Andrew Motion’s Ways of Life, the book very quickly found its way onto my shelf.

It almost found its way off again, though. Ways of Life is a collection of Motion’s essays and reviews, subtitled ‘On Places, Painters and Poets’, and the Plath piece is scandalously short. Despite that unforgivable failing, though, I decided to give the other pieces a try. Since Motion’s a multi-prizewinning Poet Laureate and all, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

And, in fact, the book starts brilliantly. Motion’s essays on places are carefully arranged in a symphony of plangent melancholy. A deep sense of vulnerability pervades them; the very first essay is haunted by his mother’s death, a memory that casts its long shadow throughout the book.

His landscapes are as troubled as his emotions, often becoming so strongly personified as to threaten him; the air ‘hurtles and charges’, while thorns ‘fling’ their arms up ‘in horror’. This strong sense of movement extends to the narrator too, who seems unable to rest in the places of his past but is instead constantly journeying, constantly in – wait for it – motion.

Where, besides bad puns, does this journey lead? As references to, and parallels with other writers appear, you can feel Motion self-consciously claiming his identity as a writer, sheltering in words where he couldn’t with places.
Yet this emerging sense of identity swiftly disappears again in the essays on painters and poets, which constitute the bulk of the book. Absorbed in his discourse on others rather than himself, he trades Andrew Motion the writer for Andrew Motion the reviewer, faultlessly erudite and faultlessly unemotional.

Not that it’s a bad thing. As a critic Motion valuably highlights lesser-known poets like John Clare, and lesser-known works like Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion, all in a highly accessible and informative style even for the casual reader.

But it does mean that the book has a highly specific and limited appeal. Orhan Pamuk’s essay collection Other Colours, for example, is a fusion of memories, meditations, political commentary, as well as literary opinions appealing to the general reader; Ways of Life on the other hand, notwithstanding the fine few essays on places, is much more impersonal and dominated by reviews.

So if you love Motion’s writing, or want to find out more about the people in whom he’s interested, then by all means pick this book up. Otherwise, you’ll probably have more fun reading stuff by blonde Anglo-American manic depressives.

Three stars