'W.'

Some things don't require a lot of explanation. If I were to tell you I was planning a barbecue in my kitchen, filled my sink with kerosene and reached for a lighter, you wouldn't need to stick around to guess what happens.

Similarly, if I were to tell you that Oliver Stone was making a movie about George W. Bush, you wouldn't have to be Cassandra to predict an explosion. Hollywood's most pugnacious leftist, the director of "Salvador" and "JFK," taking on the embattled icon of red-meat neocons: The firestorm seemed inevitable.

And yet, despite the fact that Stone's biopic — simply titled "W." — opened just before last year's presidential election in the States, response to it was muted, nothing like the Armageddon that greeted Michael Moore's similarly-timed "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004.