Oliver Stone poll

for awhile there every movie he made was entertaining bullshit

A Thread about the film JFK

My vote.

miccio's writing style summed up in one ott post there, too

The Doors. Because it singlehandedly got me into classic rock music. Because it has a shitload of awesome lines like "I believe in a long prolong derangement of the senses to attain the unknown." Because I had the hugest crush on the actress that plays Nico.

This party is borink. Let's go to a clahb.

Tempted to vote for "Nixon." Such a thorough, considered portrait - makes "W." look like less than a cartoon by comparison.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I liked a lot of these when I was younger but his hysterical, scattergun style ("vibrant, intense horsehit", to quote the JFK thread) appeals less as the years go by. Nixon's the only one I'd want to see again now.

voted for "The Hand" because possessed disembodied limbs age better than agitprop ....

whoops ...were we supposed to vote for the "most important" of these films? Not sure I can justify the superior importance of "The Hand" but it might be fun trying.

must admit to enjoying the doors, particularly the not to touch the earth song moment which was a great mushy trip memory for me.

must be platoon though.

who the hell am I kidding, I voted for "The Hand" to be funny.

I somehow avoided watching any Oliver Stone film until W.

Actually, I did see the start of Natural Born Killers once, but God it was annoying.

I liked W.

Born on the 4th > NBK > Platoon > Nixon > Wall Street > Any Given Sunday > U-Turn > JFK > Heaven & Earth > Salvador > Talk Radio > The Doors

So JFK. It's the right ta-ta.

caught a nugget of Nixon on tv the other day, i'd forgotten how hilarious paul sorvino was as kissinger

in order of preference, best first

W. (2008)
Wall Street (1987)
JFK (1991)
The Doors (1991)
Natural Born Killers (1994)

haven't seen the others.

Heaven and Earth and U-Turn are NOT better than Salvador.

of all of them salvador's the one i remember least so i just threw it in there really. i remember thing u-turn was surprisingly good, but wasn't expecting much going in.

thinking

gotta be either Salvador or Born on the Fourth of Big Fucking Penis!
But I abstain.

W. was the first I'd seen since Nixon.

the Doors! but coulda given it to Wall Street, NBK, or especially JFK. W was fun. Lotta crap on this list.

I'm voting Talk Radio.

yeah actually eric bogosian was really good, good script, good atmosphere. i rated that too low i now believe.

It was def. the role Bogosian was born to play.

liked U-Turn

of the ones i've seen:
JFK > Wall Street = The Doors > Natural Born Killers = W. > Talk Radio = U-Turn > Nixon > Any Given Sunday

for all the flak & eye-rolling this dude gets (from me as much as anyone), some of these were pretty enjoyable in retrospect. note: haven't seen Doors, JFK, NBK, U-Turn, Talk Radio or Nixon in a decade, at least. And yeah, W was OK!

...not sure how i've made it this far without ever seeing Born on the 4th or Platoon.

Talk Radio took a rather sizeable crap on Bogosian's off-Broadway play by adding the Allan Berg stuff.

JFK is amazing, but not good.

http://www.movieactors.com/actors/Freezes-Characters/jfk305donald.jpeg

"The truth is on your side, Bubba!"

"Stone is amazing, but not good" pretty much describes most of these films.

I've never seen the play. :(

Man at Firing Range: [Approaches Lee Harvey Oswald after Lee shoots at his target] I didn't pay two bits for a target just to have someone else shoot at it!

Oswald Imposter: Hey, I'm sorry buddy- I thought I was, uh, shooting at that son-of-a-bitch Kennedy.
[Chuckles]

You don't know shit 'cause you've never been fucked in the ass!

More champagne!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

kinda surprised at NBK runner up

Missed this, but would have voted for Salvador, though it's probably as fucked up in its way as the movies at the top of this poll, which I hate. JFK is definitely seductive, but that only makes me hate it more. I also have a soft spot for Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and Any Given Sunday.

ILE loves the laughs, intentional or not

It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!

JFK has to be intentionally hilarious, srsly.

At least my reputation is still fine with people watching "Laugh In".

All I wanted in the world...
...was to be a Catholic priest.
Live in a monastery.
Pray. Serve God.
I had...
...one terrible fucking weakness.
And they defrocked me!

Seizure: Oliver Stone's Disowned Directing Debut

http://www.dangerousminds.net/images/uploads/afiles/seizureposterolvieredjsaat.jpg

herve villechaize!

(Villechaize, a well-known actor in NYC experimental theater circles, was Stone’s roommate at the time).

^awesome anecdote

Even better anecdote:

Aug 14, 2011
vaughan says:

I have a Herve Villechaize anecdote-
Back in the late 70’s, I used to hang out at Herve’s house in Shadow Hills.
My girl friend lived up the road from him,
and he used to let us hang out all day with him when we cut school.
The first time I ever did cocaine was up there with Herve. (it must have been the first time, cause I was only about 13 or 14 yrs old)
He had a pretty big piece of land-
The property was landscaped and beautifully idylic with ponds and waterfalls and tropical flowering foliage. He adopted/collected all kinds of deformed animals that wandered the grounds.
It was kinda weird.
He also had an amazing record collection-
He turned me on to Can and Gong and
Van Der Graaf Generator.
He had a bunch of speakers spread throughout
the property grounds and he would blast all kinds of avantgarde music over the hills-
It all seemed super high tech at the time.
The last time I saw him, he shared some mushrooms with us and put on Tales from Topographic Oceans.
I don’t know if it was the music or the freaky animals or Herve’s daemonic grin…but I never went back after that.
I’ve always regretted that-
cause he was a really cool guy.

that's a beautiful poem

Though popular with the public, Villechaize proved a difficult actor on Fantasy Island, where he continually propositioned women and quarrelled with the producers. He was eventually fired after demanding a salary on par with that of co-star Ricardo Montalbán. The show's popularity waned after this move, and it was soon cancelled. According to his former butler in an episode of E! True Hollywood Story,[2] Villechaize never got over losing his job, and for the remainder of his life practised an often nightly ritual of drinking in a darkened room while screaming obscenities at an episode of Fantasy Island playing on his television.

lol amateurist

man

http://www.oliverstone.com/vietnam-photos

anyone heard anything about this?

http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-united-states/home

this ten-part documentary series looks back at human events that at the time went under reported, but that crucially shaped America's unique and complex history over the 20th century. From the atomic bombing of Japan to the Cold War and the fall of Communism, this in-depth, surprising, and totally riveting series demands to be watched again and again.

oh please please please tell me this documentary about the history of America from a guy born in '46 starts with the bombing of japan

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BABY BOOMER'S UNITED STATES

it's probably too much to hope this is narrated at light speed by donald sutherland

honestly kinda feel like an insane coke-fueled oliver stone version is what american history classes have been needing and lacking all these years

more from a lefty blog

Most importantly, Untold History focuses on how closely Henry Wallace came to becoming president, and how differently history might have turned out if he had. If you don't know much about Wallace (I didn't), just imagine Dennis Kucinich running the United States. But instead Wallace was pushed out at the 1944 Democratic convention after serving as vice president for four years, and we got Harry Truman, Hiroshima and the Cold War.

The show especially shines here, digging up a truly amazing 1940 letter from Roosevelt, in which he threatened not to run again if conservative Democrats blocked his wish to have Wallace join him on the ticket. Read it all – it sounds like it was written by an angry left-wing blogger, except it's actually by the greatest president in the history of the United States.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003643.html

Not being snarky, but that's a well-known fact. FDR made him a typical impotent veep too. I sympathize with most of his ideas but from all I've read he shouldn't have been prez.

amusing piece on stone: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/oliver-stone-rewrites-history-again.html?pagewanted=all

replete with a typically moronic quote from sean wilentz, my least favorite historian in the world.

yeah, but Ollie falling hook-line-sinker for Col Prouty (Col X) is pretty lol.

ah but J.D. this book is grand: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-American-Democracy-Jefferson/dp/0393329216

But Brinkley has a point. If the only thing you ever learned about Truman was from “Untold History,” you might conclude he was a virulent racist, mentally unfit for office and suffering from a gender confusion that led to mass murder. “He was bullied by other boys who called him ‘Four Eyes’ and ‘sissy’ and chased him home after school,” Stone narrates. “When he arrived home, trembling, his mother would comfort him by telling him not to worry because he was meant to be a girl anyway.” This, the series implies, might explain why Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan — not to end the war but to flex his muscles and intimidate Stalin, as he himself had been intimidated as a boy.

haha alfred it's been on my shelf for six months but my kneejerk reaction to pretty much everything else i've read by him has put me off. plus it is, yknow, 1,100 pages. but i've vowed to read at least one more book on the jefferson-madison era before trying the henry adams book, so maybe that one should be it.

it's amusing how much stone's take on history seems like he's remaking 'platoon' over and over again with famous politicians in the roles -- the good sergeant, the evil sergeant, and the tragic innocent guy caught in the middle. no sweeping historical forces, no institutions, just the same clash of the same personalities over and over. noble JFK vs the bad guys, noble henry wallace vs the bad guys, evil harry truman against the forces of goodness (and, uh, stalin), tragically flawed nixon, tragically flawed W. that said i have the feeling i'll love this series despite everything when i get around to watching it.

the truth is on your side, bubba!

on Snowden, Snowden, the NFL, Hillary/Wall Street etc.

WALLACE: Who is profiting?

STONE: Well, this is a huge issue. And it's controlling our lives today with this so-called election—we really have no choice. We're really just onlookers. The national surveillance state has not been debated by any candidates, Democratic or Republican. Our wars, our repeated wars—our new war in Syria has not been brought up because everyone agrees essentially that we have to continue doing what we're doing. And maybe even now go back to Libya. The issue of Wall Street ... I don't agree with Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street. You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer her because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy.

WALLACE: There's a line in Snowden that what all of it comes down to is "military-industrial happiness."

STONE: I like that line. And there's no debate, nothing. On the Republican side, they only talk about how much stronger we have to get. And we're the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise. Clinton has been for every war we fought. She was for the bombing of Belgrade and the Iraq War, she was all for it, during all the lives lost. It cost her the 2008 nomination. She was happy when Libya fell, which was a mess. You know, these were secular regimes in Syria and in Libya, where the excesses were nothing compared to what's happened to that region since her policies were implemented. She was happy when Gaddafi was buggered and killed. She was happy and joking about it. It's brought us disaster, including, for her, the Benghazi shit. Kagan [Robert Kagan, a neocon historian and self-proclaimed "liberal interventionist"] said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it. At least, I haven't seen it. Maybe you read more than I do. I gave up on America. I read the Times just to find out what they're thinking. I read blogs....

Bernie Sanders is a disappointment on foreign policy, totally doesn't think about it. But he has the possibility to be more isolationist, which would be good for us actually. We manage to kill several million people on this planet without taking any credit for it or blame. It's a heavy karma we have.

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/oliver-stone-1#_

The Snowden movie looks like it might awful enough to be entertaining.

Stone's way past his sell-by date unfortunately. "W" was v good though.

Thought Snowden was okay--no surprises, no juice, probably redundant, and guilty of a little too much "No, this is live"/"What do mean 'live'?", but Joseph Gordon-Levitt disappears into the role well.

Missing a "you" in there.

as a kid/teenager, I really liked "platoon" (which made me discover "the tracks of my tears". for that alone I am grateful !) and "the doors".
I doubt I'd enjoy them now, though.
especially the latter which would certainly be painful to endure now !
the rest I haven't seen or didn't care much about (including JFK).

so Ollie talked to Matt Seitz about his Showtime series interviewing Putin:

I’m not offering a defense of Putin. I’m going there out of curiosity, and I’m letting him speak for himself. I’m saying to the American people: Listen, if he is so dangerous, as they say, let’s listen to the man and see if you understand what he wants, because you’re giving a hell of a lot of your taxpayer money to this Defense Department to build its muscles up with steroids against a perceived Russian threat, and we point out, and as Putin points out, his defense budget is about 10 percent of ours. Less, probably, given all the hidden ops and black ops we run. No, I don’t defend Putin. He defends himself. I put a camera on him....

We know that Putin is an important figure in Trump’s imagination.

I think Trump probably likes him. And I’m assuming that what he sees in Putin is what he’d like to be: a strong person with the ability to organize a country and push it in a particular direction.

So it’s hero-worship?

He has the instinct of a real-estate broker. If you talk to these sorts of gentlemen, and there are a lot of them in New York, they’re movers, they’re shakers. They go to parties, they’re always looking over their shoulder to see if there’s somebody more important they could be talking to instead, they’re interested in meeting the top people. They’re on the go, man. They’re not people who read philosophy books, or for that matter, read. It’s very depressing to hear that Trump doesn’t read very much, and that he doesn’t sleep.

But how could I be in Trump’s mind? You’re stretching it, man. Now, you’re really stretching it!

http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/oliver-stone-putin-interviews-conversation.html

I liked W. but Stone's career deterioration has been p sad

his untold history series was actually p good, for the most part

Snowden had it's moments, the final confrontation in his mind with the big floating head of his father figure was pretty well done.

that's a fascinating interview, despite the interview trying to make it all about Trump. im looking forward to that documentary.

mzs is on my FB feed, he's certainly into russiarussiarussia

My god, this piece of shit:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oliver-stone-asks-vladimir-putin-to-be-his-daughters-godfather

(the only movie of his I find watchable is his filmed version of Eric Bogosian's play, anyway)

Born on the Fourth of July is big and clunky, so I was surprised to still like it 30 years later. I'll try to read Kael (pan) and Kauffmann (praise) again. Too much speechifying, of course--but I find it more bearable here than coming from Costner in JFK. There are parts I find moving, especially when Cruise visits the two parents in Georgia. I don't know if the music here ever gets mentioned, but Stone uses pop really well: "Soldier Boy" early on, "Moon River" at the prom (great), the 5th Dimension at a parade (perfect), and he even gets a convincing cover of "Born on the Bayou" from a fictional bar band.

New documentary out next month:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c5RPk8FlIk

Nuclear Now takes viewers on a thought-provoking journey with director Oliver Stone as he explores the powerful impact of nuclear energy.