No, it’s not Jimmy Carter, because that brittle, vain man has already passed from odiousness into irrelevancy. This week, it’s Oliver Stone, who opened Dubai’s fifth International Film Festival today with his expensively promoted, critically panned, and financially unsuccessful “W.” “He is not a nice man,” Stone said of his film’s subject, George W. Bush. “He’s a man with a giant ego and boneheaded arrogance.”
That description fits the Oscar-winning director as well, but I suppose I shouldn’t criticize Stone for criticizing Dubya. After all, in this forum I have dwelled at some length on the shortcomings of the policies of our 43rd president. But I don’t take potshots at Bush, especially with the offensive Danny Glover in tow, and I don’t glorify leftists with fawning documentaries of El Maximo Lider, Fidel I-hate-America Castro.
And speaking of making propaganda for Latin American leftists, Stone’s next project is a documentary about how Hugo Chavez faced foreign and domestic opposition, especially from the Bush administration. If that isn’t enough anti-Americanism for you – for those who never left the Sixties there can never be too much of that – I have to tell you, Stone is working on another so-called factual film. The director won’t say what the subject is, but – this is the truth – he does deny it’s about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
