Vice - Christian Bale is Dick Cheney

Bale is nearly unrecognizable in 2000 era onward.

Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld?

I’m not sure I like the tone of this trailer. It feels like the “American Made” treatment.

I thought everyone hated Cheney, but this trailer makes him and everyone look “cool”

but then again I am sure it is just a subversion in before the actual movie

I’m not feeling Carell as Rumsfeld either, but Bush and Cheney seem like pretty entertaining portrayals.

I don’t know if I’ll actually like or care about the movie, but I’m glad Bale is still out there doing is crazy thing.

Wow, that trailer is kind of nuts. Rockwell doesn’t look much like W but he’s got the voice and mannerisms down. But holy crap, Bale has got Cheney down cold. Did he gain all that weight or is it a fat suit?

I think both. He apparently gained 40lbs, but even that couldn’t have been fat enough.

If you know your history or followed the post-9/11 events through non-shitty press, then there aren’t any major ‘revelations’ in this movie, but it is entertaining in its own way. That said, I watched with some fellas who were young teenagers in the early 2000s and who learned a thing or two while watching the movie.

To me Christian Bale nailed style and mannerisms so much that he absolutely was that character as I was watching the movie. Rockwell’s Dubya was servicable. Steve Carrell, on the other hand, did not really work for me. He has a very distinct voice, and it differs from Rumsfeld’s quite a bit, and I had a hard time not hearing the ‘Carrell voice’.

I thought everyone hated Cheney, but this trailer makes him and everyone look “cool”

I was also a bit cautious of how the movie’s take on him would be, but I’d say the movie itself displays him as a cunning person, but not a ‘cool’ one.

That’s a fair point. He certainly wasn’t doing a spot-on impression the way Christian Bale was doing Cheney. But I really enjoyed the way he channeled the malicious gleam in Rummy’s eye and his energetic disdain for everyone around him. He was actually my favorite part of the movie. Which isn’t saying much, since I really didn’t like Vice. It felt awfully lite for such a dark episode in our country’s history.

-Tom

This movie’s real star is the editor. And the makeup artists who turned Christian Bale into Cheney. But really, I was kind of blown away by the editing in this movie. It is not conventional. At first you think it’s going to be a more traditional editing technique of telling the story of Cheney post-9/11 interspersed with the story of his life leading up to that, and it starts off that way, certainly. But by the end, you actually have scenes where they flash back and forth between three and sometimes four parts of his life, and also intersperse that with TV commercials of the time, like the Budweiser guys yelling “Waaaaas uuuuuuuuup”. It really came together for me.

Overall, I really like the tone they ended up with. It does make you sympathetic to Cheney to a degree, as any movie would that shows his younger days and how he got married and the day he got his first White House job and how he excitedly called his wife. But at the same time, the movie puts that latter moment not by itself but shows it us later in the movie after Cheney has become Vice President, and is standing in the hallway in dark silhouette, looking at the Oval Office. It happens right after we’ve just seen a summary of how Cheney has staffed the administration with “his” men instead of Bush’s people.

So with the editing, the movie constantly goes back and forth and any time we start feeling sympathetic towards Cheney, it reminds us how power hungry he is and how he’s a Dick.

There weren’t too many revelations for me in this movie, but I was not aware of how exactly Cheney was pulling the levers of power even though Bush was President. Those exact mechanics of his meeting with “his” guys, including his lawyer, and how they were being BCC’d on all the emails, things like that, I was not aware of. I always thought that claims of him being the shadow President were kind of exaggerated, but this movie provides enough of these little details to finally show me how that was possible.

On a different note, did anyone see the mid-credits sequence? Where the guy in the focus group accuses this movie of having a liberal bias? And the liberal guy in the focus group says it’s filled with carefully vetted facts, how is that liberal? My first exposure to this movie in real life was when our long time insurance agent was in the office and he mentioned he saw the movie.

“Don’t go see that. Don’t go see Vice. It is a terrible, terrible movie. It shows things and claims things that are just horrible and untrue. Me and my wife had to walk out of that movie, it’s so bad. Just don’t go see it.”

After watching it, I have to wonder what it is about this movie that our conservative friend found so objectionable.

Cognitive dissonance is one hell of a drug.

It wasn’t fawning enough.

Hmmm, halfway through this and I’m thinking about, um, bailing, which I never do. I can’t stand the didactic tone telling me things I already know and, contra Rock8man, the editing is really grating. The performances are fun, but it’s all so bite-sized that there’s nothing to really get stuck into.

Edit: Yeah, I gave up. Too annoying to continue.