best movie i've ever seen.

Awesome Movie

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Zanuck - his name is all over this bio-pic of Wilson, and he was heavily invested in both the war waging at that time and a peaceful future, as advocated by Wilkie's book ONE WORLD. The budget was lavish for the film and Knox was perfect, as was the rest of the cast. Many reviews are more negative and I tend to agree. Certainly Wilson has his bad aspects to the story, most of which were not known in 1944 and, besides, 2 hours is an indecent limit of time to pose on a biography of anybody. It can't be done, but some do it better than others. Zanuck tried to get it right and succeeded on some levels as above. He violated, though, Capra's singular rule of film-making: boredom. The film has zero visual movement, takes run long and dynamic it is not. Zanuck was too close to his subject to see this flaw. It is worth the view to see the performances and learn about an interesting President, one for the shelf and to be watched when the interest is up.

. . . put out during a low point in U.S. public support for WWII, as Clint Eastwood's FLAG OF OUR FATHERS recently reminded us. This Bio-Pic WIL$ON found America on the verge of giving up the fight against Hitler and Hirohito due to lack of funding from a war-weary nation. Most U.S. citizens today are totally unaware that during WWII, ALL Hollywood movies had to comply with a 12-point checklist from the American War Department proving each film did enough to promote the U.S. war effort. Yes, this was on top of the 10-year-old program of "moral" censorship imposed on this self-proclaimed "free country." Yes, all this happened IN AMER!CA, even though it sounds like something that could only be dreamt up by Nazis. Therefore, WIL$ON glosses over Woodrow's life-long crusade against organized Labor and the American Common Man (hardly visible from Wilson's roots in Ivy League "ivory towers"). Of course, WIL$ON fails to point out Woodrow (campaign slogan in 1916: "He kept us out of the War") Wilson's voter back-stabbing decision to maim or kill hundreds of thousands of young American men then on the verge of making the entire country a "Union shop," with living wages, safe working conditions, and respect for normal citizens prevented us from achieving the very "peace on Earth" to which he was always giving lip service. Instead, Woodrow pushed the U.S. down the slippery slope toward the hopeless pit of Today, in which the "1 per cent" hoards 90% of Our Wealth, leaving the remaining 99% of us to scramble for the remaining 10% of Economic Crumbs. WIL$ON won five Oscars, just as German fat cats lauded director Leni Riefenstahl for her propaganda masterpiece--TRIUMPH DES WILLENS--a few years earlier.

My main reason for wanting to watch this film was to see how they depicted the politics of the signing of the Federal Reserve Act, signed into law by president Wilson on December 23, 1913. There was but a brief acknowledgment that yes he did sign it into law. But this single act by Wilson changed the future course of the United States in a more profound way than all the presidents and all the wars that have followed. It was this Act that funded those wars. It was the signing of this Act that gave the United States the ability to 'generate' literally unlimited amounts of money. I could go on, but I'm drifting off topic. The main emphasis points of this film's 'Wilson' consisted mostly of his rise to the presidency and his actions as president during the buildup of World War I and his involvement with the League of Nations. In my opinion, the complete lack of emphasis on the signing in of the Federal Reserve Act is a concerted attempt to downplay the significance of what it does and who it gives power to. Yet it defines the fundamental structure of American society today. This act was the billion volt shock that jolted the United States into the world power that it is today. Without the Federal Reserve Act, the world would be a completely different place. Someday, someone will make a film about it–but this one's not it. The beast that 'The Fed' has become since then is a whole other story.

This film has many remarkable things: Above all, it's a great recreation of the ambient of the beginning 20th century, done with a strange realism for being a Hollywood movie (the politicians are crying constantly for make himself hear, as it really was before microphones). And the choral scenes (and there are many!!) are really well done. On the opposite, the film seems in 2D, probably because of the color advisers of the Technicolor System, that gives that ugly colors and that kind of lightening, all full of light. But the main thing that makes the film boring is the lack of psychological characterization on the characters, above all, on Wilson, that Alexander Knox play as if he was made of wax. And, of course, because you end with a big stomachache of "democracy" a word that you can hear no less that 90 times.