This is definitely not the column that I thought it would be. I did something this weekend that I rarely do anymore. I went to the movies. I originally planned on going to see the western "Appaloosa" with Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and Renee Zellweger, but changed my mind at the last minute. Instead, I bought a ticket for "W.", Oliver Stone's biopic about our 43rd president.

Oliver Stone is many ways reminds me of everything I hate about Hollywood today. Hollyweird has always been it's own little plant. But over the last 30 years or so, Hollywood has been hijacked by a bunch of left wing, limousine liberal nut jobs who don't live in the real word. That's why I don't go to many movies. I'm not going to put money in the pockets of actors like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin and the likes of Steven Spielberg, Rob Reiner and Michael Moore.

But I guess curiosity got the better of me. I'll admit, I went in to "W." expecting it to be a nothing more than a cheap shot, hack job on President Bush, whom I happen to like. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. Oh it has it's moments of pure fantasy which I'll address in a minute like most of Stone's movies, but overall I thought Stone really tried to get to the core of who George W. Bush is. Josh Brolin is dead on in his portrayal of George W. Bush. "W." is not a full blown biography of the life of George W. Bush. The movie starts with the run up to the Iraq War and intercuts with scenes depicting George W. Bush's early years as the hard-drinking family screw-up, a likeable guy if a bit cocky, who is struggling to live up to the expectations of his father, George H.W. Bush or "Poppy," and the weight of the famous family name. The movie is really more about the relationship between father and son than it is about his presidency. No matter what he does, he can never seem to please his father, even when he decides to run for governor of Texas. His father and mother seem more focused on Jeb's, the good son, race for governor in Florida.

The movie is a little more troublesome to me when it comes to Stone's interpretation of Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq. Bush comes across as merely wanting to exact revenge against Saddam Hussein as a way of earning his father's respect. Stone also clearly believes the Iraq war was solely over oil. There is a scene where Vice President Dick Cheney, clearly one of the movie's villains, has a moment straight out of Doctor Strangelove where he stands in front of a map of the world and suggests that Iraq's oil reserves hold the key to our future as a superpower. Secretary of State Colin Powell emerges as the hero asking the tough question of "Why Iraq? Why Now?" And when asked about the exit strategy the snarling Cheney, played masterfully by Richard Dreyfus, cynically answers "There is no exit strategy. We stay." Yet, in another scene when the war is already underway, Bush comes across as being clearly disappointed with his top advisors who led him to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He also includes a true scene in which Cheney talks about his "one percent scenario" where he asks the president if he would still eat his sandwich that has lettuce on it if there was a one percent chance it had ecoli and he could die? It provides the rationale for the need to take whatever is necessary to prevent a one percent chance of nuclear weapons from falling in to the wrong hands. But regardless of whatever your own thoughts may be about Iraq, Stone lets you make up your own mind. What is clear, is that George W. Bush's ultimate goal was to make the world safer by taking out the bad guys intent on harming us and making the world safer by bringing democracy to the Middle East which has been the cause of most of the world's troubles for the last 60 years. I also love the way Stone ends the movie. He shows Bush chasing after a fly ball deep to center field, presumably in the Texas Rangers stadium in which he got built. Does he make the winning catch? Or will history judge him to have dropped the ball? We'll just have to wait and see.

In many ways it is odd that Stone chose to make a movie about a sitting president, especially at a time when the country is clearly going through Bush fatigue. Still, I think it is a movie worth seeing.