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

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