Oliver Stone: No Reason To Hold Back Now
With “World Trade Center” having essentially finished its satisfactory, if not spectacular, domestic run, Oliver Stone obvious feels no need to continue wearing his muzzle:
Filmmaker Oliver Stone blasted President Bush Thursday, saying he has ”set America back 10 years.” Stone added that he is ”ashamed for my country” over the war in Iraq and the U.S. policies in response to the attacks of Sept. 11.
”We have destroyed the world in the name of security,” Stone told journalists at the San Sebastian International Film Festival prior to a screening of his latest movie, ”World Trade Center.” The film tells the true story of the survival and rescue of two policemen who were trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, after they went to help people escape.
”From Sept. 12 on, the incident (the attacks) was politicized and it has polarized the entire world,” said Stone. ”It is a shame because it is a waste of energy to see that the entire world five years later is still convulsed in the grip of 9/11.
”It’s a waste of energy away from things that do matter which is poverty, death, disease, the planet itself and fixing things in our own homes rather than fighting wars with others. Mr. Bush has set America back 10 years, maybe more.”
Good ol’ paranoid, drug-addled Oliver; “ashamed of my country”, “we have destroyed the world”…say, wonder if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking for his Leni Riefenstahl?…Or, if not, maybe Hugo Chavez has some work for you…
mark,
have you seen the new allen commerical-”I am james webb and I hate women”?
I can’t help but think that after the way Webb supporters have gone out to prove Allen a racist, based upon hersay and a the testimony of a democrat, that this commerical topic is fair game.
This race is over. Funny, becuase the Allen camp would have gone with it anyway, but by the dems first strike-it would seem they want allen to bring it on.
The link is over at the sixers on nro.
I heard about it, but haven’t seen it yet…I’ll check it out…
“wonder if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking for his Leni Riefenstahl?”
Allen must have beat him to it. The difference between Allen and Webb? charisma.
Jim will be sweaty over this, the lefty blogs will be screaming.
Let’s see, Bush has “set America back 10 years”, which, by my precise calculation, puts us in the year 1996 and smack dab in the middle of Bill Clinton’s time as President. I recall, as they say on SNL, that many view that year through a nostalgic “good times, good times” prism. So is Oliver thanking Bush for a return to the the golden years?
Lest we forget that Stone was the director and producer of the excreable “Letter to Fidel” doc that aired on HBO about two years ago. The man definitely needs to be put out to pasture – or at least encouraged to leave the country he always professes to hate so intensely.
I’m in a panic…
oliver stone, rosie o’donnell-they might actually convince one person to vote this november.
I did enjoy “Natural Born Killers”. Of course, that was a Tarantino story…
Oh, man, I despised that movie (and that was before I knew Jane Hamsher was involved!); my favorite Oliver Stone movie is JFK; as long as it is treated like the complete fantasy it is, it’s a darn good piece of filmmaking…
You aren’t alone (in despising NBK) and, in fact, are among the very small group of people who is polite while sharing a negative opinion of the movie with me.
I am often reminded of what I consider the key theme of the movie: that much of broadcast “journalism” is nothing more than prurient voyeurism that (too) much of our society is more than happy to watch. The most recent example is the TO flap of two days ago.
But I get it that most people seem to feel the depiction was over-the-top, in terms of the extreme graphic violence. Of course, I suspect that aspect of the film is most attributable to Tarantino rather than Stone.
Nbk did an excellent job of translating a ‘few’ of many aspects of mushroom induced hallucinations. Altered States is the only othe movie that comes to mind that captures a hallucinigenic experience with any degree of accuracy, and the visuals were more consistent with peyote, than shrooms.
Hard to seperate the crap and stigma of violence in nbk(which is not an aspect of mushrooms) from the actual qualities that make it a unique experience. Stone did little justice by linking mushrooms and violence, and while I laugh at ‘reefer madness’ and its campiness, i found the propoganda that stone produced counter-intuitive to what I believe to be his own personal opinion.
I saw it (Natural Born Killers) at the theater on initial release and was really excited (I was a Stone fan then – still am, in some ways, at least of several of his movies). However, as the movie progressed, I began to feel more and more beat up, and by the end, I was ready to scream, enough! It wasn’t the violence for me so much as the noise…
NBK would have been an excellent film if Stone had finally decided not to beat the audience over the head with a hammer to emphasize his points. Pauline Kael said it best of Stone: “He’s a pounder.” He was always an excellent filmmaker -if only his polemics had evolved to a more subtle edge today, he might have been considered in the same league as Scorsese.
I still like watching “Salvador,” though. Woods is usually worth watching, regardless of the screenplay or direction.