Worst Oliver Stone Movie.

haven't seen em all but I think the answer is platoon or the doors

I haven't seen anything from the 2000s except the Wall Street sequel; before that, I've seen almost everything. I want to say that when he's bad, he's good-bad but he's not evil, but sometimes he's just bad-bad. I thought U Turn was awful. I just realized you're missing W.--which wasn't exactly bad, I thought, just bland (some nice casting in supporting roles notwithstanding). Anyway, I'll vote for U Turn.

If more people had seen Comandante, I'd try to rally against it. Dull and embarrassing as well as revealing – it's the most explicit evidence yet of Stone's admiration for quasi-fascist and authoritarian trolls.

wow. Grouped together they show just how shitty Oliver Stone is.

there is no way it's not the doors and i say that as probably the only person on ilx who would call myself an oliver stone fan even if i'd never ever make a case for him as even a decent filmmaker.

u turn was like getting punched in the face

the doors is theoretically absolutely hilarious, of course, but it's so straight-faced and pretentious and reverent that it's almost too painful to even enjoy as an unintended joke.

plus, fuck the doors.

great run in the 90s. I kind of don't have any use for any of his non-90s films, except for maybe Wall Street and Scarface

also I love the Doors. which is weird cuz as a band I have no use for them.

salvador and talk radio are both entertaining period piece curios hugely enlivened by sweaty, twitchy, you're-not-paranoid-if-they're-really-out-to-get-you turns from the leads

you might be swinging my vote actually. i avoided the doors for a long long time but got stuck watching it on endless cable at some point and its really really terrible DESPITE hilariously boneheaded drug scenes xposts

i always forget he did talk radio - i kinda love that movie tbh

i will also throw down for natural born killers but i am sure i am mostly alone in that

platoon is great. WTC is crapola.

Watchable movies in some form or other:

Salvador
Wall Street
JFK
Nixon

i will also throw down for natural born killers but i am sure i am mostly alone in that

ok come on, we have had this discussion before

NBK was great

platoon is awful, prolly the biggest gap of reputation to quality on this list

yeah the "serious" vietnam movies are the worst of his '80s output for sure.

has anyone ever SEEN Heaven and Earth?

NBK is messy crap but entertaining
Any Given Sunday is messy crap at its most godlike.

BUNNY

well i just had to wiki h&e to remind myself what it was even about, but i'm still not 100 percent sure i haven't seen it.

also lol: The music, by composer Kitaro, won the 1993 Golden Globe Award for "Best Original Score."

At the time it was his worst performing movie despite massive Oscar buzz.

wall street is great

pretty sure the only ones i haven't seen are alexander and the docs.

best is probably jfk because it's the most of everything. "best" in terms of being a straight-up well-crafted melodrama is probably...wall street?

platoon has the moral sophistication of a chuck norris movie, who wrote this self-important dribble

Chris Taylor: [voiceover] I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I'm sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called "possession of my soul." There are times since, I've felt like a child, born of those two fathers. But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.

oh yeah, stone did

If someone polled Worst Voice-Overs Ever, the ones in Platoon would top the list.

someone should do a Serious Films of the 80s poll. it was quite a decade for movies aimed at adults.

I saw Heaven & Earth at the Ziegfeld, w/ about 30 people in a 1500-seat theater.

i also always loved that he thought his vision of '80s excess could be best soundtracked by my life in the bush of ghosts.

have to give it to U Turn, that movie was a total pile of shit.

his vision of 2000's excess was scored to overproduced Byrne-Eno.

Is U-Turn (my vote) his only movie without large political/social overtones? (Or maybe it did.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eZ9OnQgVKQ

Is U-Turn (my vote) his only movie without large political/social overtones?

Unless you think Jeff Spiccoli and the hunk in Racing with the Moon say something about youth.

I've seen a dozen Stone films (including the inexplicably omitted W), and none of them are terrible. Would give it to The Doors, H&E, or W, not having seen U Turn.

The Doors is horrible but I'm voting JFK - despite being watchable its paranoid/conspiracy theory quotient had a toxic effect

OTOH i loved The Hand

ts paranoid/conspiracy theory quotient had a toxic effect

not on ILX!

W is great, his last good film

well to be fair it only came out three years ago. maybe he's still got a batshit fast-edit clinton/ken starr biopic in him

working on fastpaced debt ceiling biopic

W only omitted because when I pasted from IMDB it showed up as blank+date and looked like a typo.

this is obviously Alexander, although i can see how you might miss it while sifting through his piles of shit. The only ones id ever watch again are Nixon, Wall Street, or Salvador. Maybe W too, just for the o_O of watching all the famous people play those other famous people.

w's not even close to being his worst, though, so it's not like the poll needs a re-do or anything.

xpost

why is everyone hating on u-turn? i liked it and billy bob thornton is great as the mechanic in it. i still havent seen alexander yet. im assuming no-one is mentioning it cos its hilarious. worst ive seen is the wall street sequel. the timeline doesnt make any sense either.

xpost

wall street sequel was so bland & inept it seemed like a zombie oliver stone directed

W needed Donald Sutherland educating Kevin Costner on a Mall park bench so that the Dick Cheney monologue acquires even more sinister weight.

You could feel the excitement in the audience when I watched Wall Street 2: a movie for us! Without bombs and 2-D! When the enervated ending finally revealed itself, the audience was making raspberries.

i thought 'w' was great! easily the most entertaining stone i've seen, and a lot less dishonest than his earlier political movies. maybe if stone could've made 'nixon' in 1974 it wouldn't have been a load of apologist twaddle.

doors works for me just because of the not to touch the earth scene

platoon, otoh, can go screw itself

what i remember of the doors is hilarious

Meg Ryan played John Densmore, right?

Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol

but more importantly, PAUL FUCKING WILLIAMS as Andy Warhol's sidekick

my mate jon keddie played ray manzarek

doors has to be the worst. But picking from such a shitbag of movies is always going to be hard. Almost all of these are watchable if you're out to laugh at the flaws. Talk Radio is actually pretty good though if I recall correctly. Wall street HAS NOT AGED WELL.

maybe if stone could've made 'nixon' in 1974 it wouldn't have been a load of apologist twaddle.

We argued about this on a different thread--maybe a Nixon thread, I can't remember. Anyway, I just don't see it as an apology for Nixon. Before the film came out, I remember Stone giving interviews where he said that everyone would be surprised by how "fair" he was, which doesn't really mean a whole lot--fair would mean something different to everybody. In the end, I think it treats Nixon as human. And I realize that for many people that falls short of fair. We argued about that somewhere too--whether Nixon was actually evil, or a badly flawed human--and I don't want to derail the thread. If I remember the other argument, and maybe this is your point too, the film does suggest there were unseen forces driving Nixon forward, summed up by the shadowy Larry Hagman character. But I don't think it comes close to suggesting that Nixon was some innocent bystander, whether Vietnam or Watergate or anything else.

it's of a piece with Dubya - he wasn't interested in demonization (or even really historical drama), he was interested in character study

he was interested in a good time!

even so, both still come off pretty badly - petty, blustery, riddled with insecurities

xp

All these movies are bunk as history -- they're fun pulp.

yeah i've read novels about the jfk assassination that contain explicitly made-up characters and conspiracy plot points that i take to have more actual history in them than "jfk."

you mean American Tabloid?

and Libra!

i have read far too many novels/books about the jfk assassination tbh

but especially libra, yes.

The Doors. by a mile. how in god's name did he make *all that* seem dull and colourless?

What if the original scene was dull and colorless?

'the doors' did at least inspire a funny sequence in 'wayne's world 2.'

Simpsons too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2djtizM42PM

At least I thought all the desert stuff was a reference to [i]The Doors</>, but I checked around and maybe not.

Apart from myself and m coleman, did anyone see The Hand? Wretchedly bad.

for some reason Leonard Maltin's review in his book made me chuckle as a kid: the hand should have killed writer/director Oliver Stone.

I saw U Turn in the theater when I was 17 and LOVED it. \o_o/

No contest, Money Never Sleeps is a pale imitation of the original film it spawned from.

Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol

― No Broehner (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, July 28, 2011 6:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^ only good part of the doors imo

A lot of his stuff is entertaining, messy (and wrong) crap. But I didn't pay attention as much after Nixon. And I don't like a movie interfering with my memories of September 11.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pKQvhIDxkQU/TZiWrpm7D0I/AAAAAAAANFY/xVSoCag0kn8/s640/worldtradecenter01.jpg

i remember really hoping that the money shot of his WTC movie would be nic cage leaping from one tower to the other while the first is collapsing

Show the firefighter who surfed down the debris to ground level.

transformers did 9/11

All these movies are bunk as history -- they're fun pulp.

I don't feel that way about Born on the Fourth of July, which was at least that guy's story, and Salvador might have been a grimy bad-trip compression of events there, but it was all based on stuff that actually happened, and I imagine the atmosphere it captures had something to do with reality. Same with the first half hour or so of Platoon, which I know many veterans responded to.

The Doors and Alexander are just bad, but JFK and Natural Born Killers cross over into evil, and I'm going with the latter, because the former was hugely entertaining, absorbing, and ultimately dismissible. I've never seen World Trade Center and will almost always have better things to do with the two hours it would take for as long as I live.

Mmmmm, evil.

Oddly enough, Talk Radio somewhat depoliticized the real-life figure it was based on. Love that movie.

BOTFOJ (whew) was based on fact but it's meretricious and phony as a film.

Agree to disagree, though I'm going on memory from when it came out. I thought Kael was way off on this as well.

And calling it tawdry is not the same as calling it bunk.

For me, Fourth of July is clumsy but moving anyway. I agree with Kael that Stone makes Kovic naive to an unrealistic degree. But I think Cruise is mostly excellent--he was sometimes such a good actor back then--the V.A. hospital sequences are scary, and there's just a lot of stuff here and there (e.g., "Moon River" at the prom, his apology to the other soldier's parents) I thought was really good. The worst scenes were with Dafoe in Mexico.

PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS

That dinner table scene is hilarious for all the wrong reasons, in part because Tom Cruise can't curse to save his life.

on the other hand, his drunken wheelchair battle is hilarious

movie is garbage imho

there is no amount of grit that stone can't slather with schmaltz and sentimentality. it's just that in the vietnam movies he smothers rather than slathers.

like i think there COULD have been a way to get across kovic's confusion and pain over his family's really rather gross denial of reality and repression, but as is it just comes off self-pitying and bathetic.

DON'T SAY "SLATHER" IN THIS HOUSE!

I'd forgotten about his penis rant. It always makes me laugh--Cruise isn't Joe Pesci or Sam Jackson, agreed ("I'm sorry, mom--did I break your concentration?"), but I laugh anyway.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

nakedindiancrying.jpg

lol, save Salvador, U-Turn is his only watchable film.

u-turn is a hilarious movie