Oliver Stone
Let me just go ahead and head this movie off now before I actually have to watch it. I’m sure that you have all read that Hollywood has decided an appropriate mourning period has passed and the go-ahead has been given to start the deluge of 9/11 movies. I am not against this, film is an art, film is cathartic and film can definitely provoke thought and public debate. There is power in well done movies, there is healing in well done movies and there is escape. I am not of the mindset that 9/11 movies are inherently tactless or that making one is akin to sacrilege. Something I believe about movies and the sometimes terrible things they can depict from history: It’s a truism that when a nation is ready to allow something to both intrigue and entertain them that the nation is recovering and proving that no mortal wound has been inflicted. It’s like that guy that jokes all the time no matter how grave or tragic the situation—it’s just how he copes. As a country, literature and cinema have always been a large part of how we cope.
But, yes, there’s always a but-Oliver Stone? Come on Tinsel Town, do you really have to hand this project to the most conspiracy crazed, sensationalistic, fact-twisting nut you can find? The man that alluded to the involvement of Lyndon Johnson in the Kennedy assassination? The man that turned Richard Nixon into a predictable and trite caricature? The man who once mangled a screenplay so bad that the original writer asked to have his name removed from the credits (Natural Born Killers—Originally written by Quentin Tarentino). Is this the time for Stone to wheel out his ridiculous cavalcade of theories? I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, I hope Stone knows that this is a good time to sheath his insanity for a bit. Save the Bush did it for oil, Marines are smuggling oil home in their boots and Dick Cheney still works for Haliburton and Haliburton owns, oh, I don’t know, Al-Jazeera, and Cheney invents the Bin Laden tapes and plays them on his station, Al Jazeera, in order to push oil prices…..I don’t know, it’ll go something like that, I’m not as good at weaving the long, half-baked conspiracies as Stone is. Why don’t they just let Michael Moore make the film…I mean if truth and accuracy aren’t even remotely important, let them co-direct it. That could be funny. Not that truth in movies is always important, but when your touching on actual events you should at least try for a pinch of truth. Sure, dramatize the events, that little bit of creative license isn’t a big deal, but a little more realism and a little less I’m-wearing-tinfoil-on-my-head-because they-listen to my thoughts would be nice now and again.
I was particularly fond of his ham-handed attempt to display football as some barbaric inhuman event. You know the scene I mean. A guy is tackled so hard his eye pops out. How did he even film that without laughing? That movie was one of the biggest, most predictable, unoriginal piece of crap ever. Remember that HBO show in the 80’s? First and Ten, with Delta Burke before she swallowed the cast of Designing Women? The exaggerated portrayal of football players as constantly drunk, steroid taking, wife beating, drunk driving, mindless brutes that ultimately became the victims because “the man” discarded them when their bodies wore out? The overt allegations of racism, the allusion to the white man throwing away the black man after he’s used him for all he’s worth? All that way before. North Dallas Forty sort of like that. The Program very much like that on the college level. Done before, Oliver, and better.
That’s not to say all of his films are stinkers I loved Platoon but did not like Natural Born Killers—two of my least favorite actors, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are in it.
I understand that Stone occasionally has some gravitas when he tackles a subject. He was a decorated veteran in Vietnam, he elicited the help of 9/11 family members in makin this film, he got permission to use some actual names of real victims. Most of this hyper-sensitivity is likely the result of studio pressure well aware of the PR disaster lurking one misstep around the corner in the handling of this topic, still it offers some glimmer of optimism for the movie.
I admit in a sick sort of way I am curious to see what Stone does with this movie. I love Nicholas Cage, so that’s something. Maggie Gyllenhall, sick of being famous for screwing that gay cowboy, is taking on a good size role. And Stone didn’t write the movie, so that’s something. I just don’t know how a guy famous for drug use on the set and for eating mushrooms with the cast and crew of Natural Born Killers is a good fit for this topic. Maybe he’ll surprise me.
In the one-more-bizarre-coincidence portion of the piece (the first one being my writing about Night of the Comet and then finding out about a possible sequel) we have more amputees in movies. Oliver Stone has cast Aimee Mullins, a actress with no, that would be zero, legs below the knees to play a reporter in the movie. Mullins has been in one movie, Cremaster Three, and a few TV specials, this will be her first role in a big budget film. Of course, Olive Stone may wax poetic about how George Bush stole her legs, filled the prosthetics with oil from Iraq and bathed Dick Cheney in it, but that’s up to him. The critics might have other ideas. Stone fell out of favor with them recently when Alexander was roundly lampooned.
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