Despite his well-documented personality flaws, I have been quite partial to Oliver Stone films since I was a pre-teen. I found The Doors (1991) to be absolutely
thrilling to watch, there’s so much exciting partying in that movie and
frenetic artistic and self-destructive energy, I thought (whenever I watched it, which was A LOT): “I want to be
like Jim Morrison when I grow up!” That’s
sort of a joke, but truly, I thought his character was very well-developed, and
the occasional ‘trippy’ camera work wasn’t overdone and it was just an
engrossing, thrilling film.
As a side note, I was too young to see any of the movies
that I’m writing about, but that’s beside the point. In my underdeveloped way, I was able to
appreciate them.
Less fun to watch but also a really engrossing film, where
you’ll feel strong, strong empathy for the protagonist, even though he’s been turned
into a self-defeating, powerless asshole because of the war, is Born on the
Fourth of July, made 2 years earlier. I can’t
stand Tom Cruise as the cult-leading, ex-wife controlling closet case that he
is, of course, but when people criticize his acting, I have to disagree,
because he was amazing in this movie (and Vanilla Sky).
Some Oliver
Stone movies were definitely too boring to me, since I was pretty young at the
time they were out: Wall Street (1987),
JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) – total yawn-fests.
I think one of those movies (JFK) is literally 7 hours long, right? And then there were the movies that came out
when I was all growed up, World Trade Center and Alexander, but they both
looked horrible.
But oh man, Platoon
(1986), Talk Radio (1988) and Natural Born Killers (1994), are all terrifying
and riveting movies that I would strongly recommend to anyone who has been
desensitized to violence and appreciates good dialogue (Talk Radio is actually
not that violent, per se – it is very talk-y – I think it’s from a one-man play
by Eric Bogosian but it was a little unclear on IMDB, but all the talk has an
edge to it so while there’s not much physical violence, it is definitely
unsettling to watch). Platoon and Natural Born
Killers are two of the grossest non-horror movies I’ve seen.
Then there’s his new(-ish)
movie, Savages (2012), and there’s something sort of pointless about this
film. It’s about a love triangle of
successful pot growers and their girlfriend whose lives all get thrown way off balance and violently
ruined when the major Mexican drug cartel wants to force them to become
business partners. I like the love
triangle part: it’s this hippie girl who
comes from money (Blake Lively), being willingly shared by a messed up veteran
and a hippie who grow this amazing strain of pot; the three of them live in a semi-utopia for
awhile. The tenderness between these 3
feels authentic, and Lively’s character, O., who is the film’s narrator, is surprisingly
likable, and her sometimes-eloquence never sounds forced.
The rest of the movies is sort of horseshit
though. I don’t know if you go in for
violence, like realistic portrayals of people’s brains being blown out when you
least expect it etcetra, but even if that’s your bag, I still feel that you won’t
care for the parts of this movie where there’s a bunch of well-done and shocking
violence, because this part of the film is really weak, plot-wise. Perhaps there really are cartel bosses like
the one Selma Hayek plays, but the whole character felt very unreal. And the real bad guy of the movie, Lado,
played by Benecio del Toro, it’s like …. He’s evil as can be, but somehow, who
cares? It’s just sort of a pointless
movie. Spoiler Alert – there is a
fake-out ending that I really liked that made me cry real tears and redeemed
the movie for me, but then it’s revealed to just be a possible outcome, and not
the actual one, and the real true end of the movie left me generally
indifferent.
