Oh, <i>W</i>, You Tease!

Just released: the latest poster trumpeting W, Oliver Stone's slick forthcoming biopic giving George W. Bush the Walk the Line treatment. And, hey, it's looking good in 2-D. The shot is literally a tease -- the commander-in-chief, flanked by flags, having his hair ratted by a staffer while prepping for a press conference. A disembodied third hand dabs on powder. The image begs the question: who is the man beneath the pancake? And, with the boom so near the top of his tastefully graying (or is that thinning?) mane, we also wonder if W. shifts will he pull a classic slapstick move and bonk his head on the microphone?

The poster leads to the trailer,http://wthefilm.com/. which has a strangely pervasive sense of nostalgia for the good old boy in the cowboy hat beneath the heavy presidential crown. Which leads, ironically, in my mind, to the funniest moment in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: when the dudes share a doobie with the President in Texas and Kumar and W. bond over their shared father issues; both feel pressured by their fathers to be something that they're not, something other than a fuck-up. Stone's film apparently goes even more Freudian on W's ass. In the trailer, Babe's James Cromwell as George Herbert Walker Bush reams out his unruly son: "Who do you think you are? A Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." And so W. did. For at least eight years! No regrets. No surrender. Clean and sober. Sigh. He walked the line.

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