VICE (2018 where Christian Bale is Dick... Dick Cheney)

I counted one pleasurable thing in this terrible picture: Steve Carrell, about whom I've never written a kind word.

I am looking forward to this. I like what McKay said about GWB being far worse than Trump. I liked Oliver Stone's W. quite a bit and the cast on this is equally nuts - surprised it's getting slammed considering how acclaimed The Big Short was, but I'm not about to read any reviews, I don't want to be "spoiled" (please though tell me if he shoots that guy in the face in this movie)

how much of Cheney's pre-2000 life/career is covered? looks like not much. No one plays Ford or Poppy, do they?

can a mod close the parentheses on 2018 in the thread title please

xp Ford is in the movie, dunno about GHWB

i see that Bill Camp does play Ford

surprised it's getting slammed considering how acclaimed The Big Short was

Mainstream critics were nuts in 2015 too

how much of Cheney's pre-2000 life/career is covered? looks like not much

Almost an hour's worth. Only Rockwell gets screen time.

Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Poppy get glimpses and a line or two.

Bill Pullman as Nelson Rockefeller

heh, i might watch a feature with this guy at the center

iMdB also credits a guy playing "Koch Brother"

cam someone spoil the Jesse Plemons/narrator "reveal" pls, cause I am never gonna see this but I am vaguely curious

Soto's review is excellent btw

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2018/12/22/vice/

learning that this has Tyler Perry as Powell makes me wish Fincher had tackled Cheney instead

aw, thank you

have you watched it yet?

The movie being made, however shitty it may be, is worth it for your review, which is really smart.

I have not seen it and likely won't

could be a hit as libs are now passionately defending the war in Afghanistan

Just because it's not for some dumb movie nobody gives *me* any credit for my astonishing physical transformation into Dick Cheney.

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) December 26, 2018

I don't know how much energy I want to put into defending this, but I didn't mind it at all. McKay does a some of the gimmicky stuff he did in The Big Short; some of it I didn't like (Cheney's puppet idea), sometimes I was on the fence (Alfred Molina's scene), at least once I thought it worked well (the fake ending--it actually made me think of Casey Stengel and Pauline Kael, two other people with surprise second acts). I thought Bale disappeared into his role just as well as he did in American Hustle (not exactly a favourite here either). Could have done without the graphic heart transplant, and I don't think I'd see it a second time, but sorry, thought it was generally fine.

Saw it last night in a packed theater and felt about the same. As with The Big Short, it connects dots for an audience that otherwise might never read a book that does.

There are less condescending ways to connect dots, though. McKay is the obnoxious uncle pinching your cheeks.

I like this review (I'd forgotten about the Shakespearean detour...another one where I was on the fence)--mostly that it gives Bale due credit. If I had to single out one guy as the best working actor (or at least best highly visible one) since Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, I'd go with either Bale or Joaquin Phoenix.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/12/vice-is-gimmicky-but-christian-bales-cheney-is-spot-on.html

Nick Pinkerton:

Now, humor is a fickle and subjective thing, but for the record, I laughed aloud exactly once while watching Vice, at the moment when Tyler Perry first appeared in the role of Colin Powell. More often the film is only embarrassing in its flinging about for novelty, the identifiable low point being a scene that imagines Dick and Lynne openly expressing their will-to-power in iambic pentameter, a burlesque of the Shakespearian soliloquy.

It’s a clumsy, loveless pastiche that plays to an assumed viewer who thinks that old-timey talk is weird and funny—a sharp contrast to the attitude of Orson Welles, a fiercely political artist who took great pains to bring theater- and cinemagoers a vivid, contemporary Bill Shakespeare, well knowing that this quintessentially Elizabethan artist could be vital to understanding modern power and its corruption....

http://4columns.org/pinkerton-nick/vice

Superstar Bale generally annoys me, his Oscar performance even more than the two Dark Knights I endured. And this after being one of the great juvenile actors... much like Leo.

agreed that it's been all downhill for Bale after Batbale. which is a bummer, cuz right up to that point he was p consistently great.

i liked the Big Short well enough but my god this was baaaaad

I saw this on Xmas Day and found it overwhelming sad. It left me in tears. That's not an endorsement. It reminded me of my dad's reaction after seeing Oliver Stone's World Trade Center in 2006. Watching the 00s compressed into 2 hours was just titanically depressing. I don't have much to say about the film itself other than a) Bale was great, b) the camp angle, which worked in The Big Short imo, felt completely inappropriate here, c) it felt like a rush job. I heard someone make a good point about these two movies, basically that McKay has found a way to teach recent history to dumb people. and even though I thought the tone was off, McKay is well-intentioned and recognizes how much of a monster Cheney is/was (I appreciated his comments to RS about preferring Trump over W.), so I can't say I hated the film or found it morally reprehensible like Zero Dark Thirty. Still, I don't ever want to revisit this movie or read anything about it or talk about it ever again.

In all honesty, I cannot think of the last time I disliked a film enough that I left angry (at the film, at the people who made it, at the people who like it--towards whomever or whatever it is that you're supposed to be angry). That's not necessarily a good thing; I guess I just don't care enough anymore to feel that way. That's reflected in my ratings on the "last (x)" thread. Most everything I see falls into the 6/6.5/7 range.

Bale should really stop taking himself so damn seriously and make a comedy.

time for a Bale/DDL buddy cop comedy imho

with Shelley Long and orangutan as co-stars

Brendan James offers a sorta-quasi-defense (I have no stance as yet, though I might see it tomorrow):

The negative reviews instead tend to focus on McKay’s job as writer and director. One of the most common complaints relates to his understanding of politics and the resulting portrayal of Cheney. A representative critique comes from national security writer and onetime Iraq War supporter Fred Kaplan, who declares that the director is out of his depth: “McKay reportedly read some very good books about Cheney . . . but his own grasp of Washington politics is thin.”

Kaplan calls the film an example of Lenin’s term “infantile leftism” (a phrase that does not mean what he thinks it does). In this reading, Vice “fails as history” by treating Cheney & Co. as power-hungry opportunists rather than sincere ideological mandarins. He cites a scene in which a young Cheney asks Rumsfeld, “what do we believe?” which leaves the latter doubled over laughing:

"The film portrays Cheney’s political ambition as entirely cynical, geared toward nothing but power for its own sake. […] In fact both men, especially Cheney, were deeply conservative. To discount their ideological impulses gives them too little credit for their egregious actions."

Sure, the cynicism in that scene is played up for laughs. But the fact is that, like Rumsfeld (once known as a pain in Nixon’s ass for pushing for an end to the Vietnam War), Cheney embraced a jumble of principles and positions throughout his entire career. He was, at different moments in his life, a budget hawk, a "deficits-don't-matter" guy, a practitioner of realpolitik, and, finally, an insatiable warmaker. In a strange pattern, each ideological shift happened to enable a new way for him to advance his career, enrich his allies, and expand US hegemony.

https://jewishcurrents.org/review/mission-not-accomplished-vice/

I left early. I knew how it ended

Kaplan calls the film an example of Lenin’s term “infantile leftism” (a phrase that does not mean what he thinks it does).

lol

Worst post-credits scene of all time.

Probably funded by the Bush family.

Amy Adams' Lynne Cheney telling amassed Wyoming cowboys that she's for keeping her bra ON! [cheers]

ttly agree w lots said upthread, i liked the big short & generally like mckay but applying those techniques did not work and prob wasnt a good idea here

the plemmons naration/reveal is also just not a cogent idea imo

also, minor but idk what or why it would be phrased how it was -- one of the final displayed statements re: the yoo memo -- the text shown read something like "this memo is still on DOJ computers to this day" uh ok, you mean its installed like microsoft office ?

complete dogshit

McKay should be flayed for the "Shakespeare scene" alone

meanwhile this review makes me wish I liked it more

Our fascination for Cheney may ebb and flow, but throughout the film, Vice never equivocates on the fact that he is the enemy. It’s telling that there are no heroes in the story of Washington power games from 2000 to 2008: it should come as no surprise that McKay is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, part of a growing movement that sees the economic and foreign policies of mainstream Democrats and Republicans, not as opposed to one another, so much as variations on a theme.9 As a bellwether, Vice stands alongside Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You—another imaginative and flawed film that aims to instruct popular audiences about the nature of power under capitalism, not just alongside, but through entertainment. If in the end, it's only the sum of its parts and not more, Vice remains an energizing experiment, one that contorts itself according to audience, influence, subject, style; a bewildering reflection on a moment of bewilderment—a Permanent Now extending from 9/11 to today, a state of emergency that some among our leadership seem adamant to bring to the swiftest and bloodiest possible end. Nevertheless, a reckless pursuit of such a vision can, at times, be too difficult to distinguish from a lack of control, and a theory-driven provocation of the audience can often feel, in practice, like disregard. A glorious neoprogressive cinema remains, alas, still in the wings.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-compleat-angler-adam-mckay-s-vice

I didn't really glean the "no heroes" element while watching it, but at the same time, it's not entirely radical to have no heroes in a movie about U.S. politics.

an energizing experiment, say

a bewildering reflection on a moment of bewilderment—a Permanent Now extending from 9/11 to today, a state of emergency

this is otm and why i found the movie so depressing

I don't usually have particularly strong adverse reactions to films but fuck this hacky, lazy piece of shit film.

Around halfway through, when the Macbeth scene kicked in and we got the credits rolling, I started to think that the hackiness was maybe part of the point, and then as the film continued I realised that was just to deflect from how bad the writing was.

Rockwell was pretty great as Dubya but casting likeable doofuses like him and Carrell just made me feel like the film was trying to exonerate everyone that wasn't Cheney. It just felt clumsy and dishonest.

this was fine, bale is good in it and its about as accurate and weighty as youd expect from watching the big short.

You take that back