Batonga Batonga Batonga!

Wall of Heroes: Oliver Stone

To take a page from the Hollywood Saloon, I thought I'd build my own Wall of Heroes. Brick by brick.



Whenever Oliver Stone steps into the ring, you know you're not gonna leave without a few bruises. Or at least that's what it's been like up until Nixon. He's always one to throw in that sucker punch and follow it up with a flurry of haymakers. The problem though, is that his work from Alexander thru Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps isn't a knockout punch so much as a jab to the gut. After seeing Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I left the theatre with a feeling of emptiness. Was I entertained for the duration? Yes. He even employed his visually inventive camerawork. But the overall vibe just did not click. Blue Horseshoe did not love Wall Street 2.

All this aside, Stone is never one to step back from a controversial topic. Just look at JFK for proof of that. Employing macrocuts, historical footage, Super 8, black & white. It's a cubistic style that always keeps me on my toes. Following JFK, something happened with Stone. All the peyote & mesculine he must have been taking payed off in the form of Natural Born Killers. I remember the first time seeing NBK and having it knock me on my ass, for lack of a better word. It basically took what I thought were to be rules of cinema and blasted them out of a double barrel shotgun. Super 8? Animation? & the editing! I was wayleighed from all directions.

Looking at his body of work, one can assess that he is a filmmaker/historian. There are people that are content with having history dictated to them by a director like Oliver Stone. So, allow me to look at an even bigger picture at hand: history on film. According to a 1947 letter in Sight and Sound magazine: As far back as 1915, D.W. Griffith, director of Birth of A Nation imagined the day that citizens would obtain much of their knowledge of the past by watching movies. He also believed that movies' values in presenting stories about the past that had a greater emotional and intellectual impact on audiences than did the descriptions presented in traditional ways. Finally, Griffith, maintained that intelligently designed and well-researched films could give audiences authentic pictures of history.

History is, if anything, a look at events from multiple perspectives. & despite Stone's attempt to depict clashing viewpoints throughout JFK, it ends up funneling out to one viewpoint by the end. As witnessed in the 40 minute court scene. Presenting history from an objective standpoint is futile. A 100% accurate presentation of history is impossible because there is no single truth to uncover. There is no correct interepretation; therefore all historical explanations are constructed. Stone realizes this and takes that knowledge and infuses it with his own aesthetic.

To the average person today who sees Platoon, they base their knowledge off films moreso than actual history. As I've said before, the power of the medium allows us to go to the movies, see a Platoon and feel what it could be like in Vietnam. To go back to JFK, there are people who believe the film to be true. Others think it's crap. What Stone set out to do was make a companion piece to the Warren Commission. As far as the history vs. film debate goes, I lay in the middle. Film may not be able to view the past in the fashion of a textbook, but it does serve as a means to historical thinking.

JFK is a film that's safely secure in my top 20 favorite films and one I always find new things in. Like other procedurals, Zodiac & The Insider, it shows one man's complete obssession with finding out the truth. Even though Stone's work in the last decade is not up to par with his 80's/90's work, I still feel this fighter has a few more knockout rounds left in him.

Somebody once wrote: war is hell

(a response to Speedy McFlash)



War films in general have appealed to me for quite a while. I find myself enjoying several historical based films but this subgenre in particular is one I keep finding myself returning to.

WWII films I've found to be quite fascinating. Thin Red Line & Saving Private Ryan are definately among my favorites-- for different reasons of course. Going even further than that though is the 'men on a mission' or POW subgenre (Great Escape, Dirty Dozen, etc.) With this, you see the director smuggle in adventure genre elements into the war genre which makes for exciting fodder.

But if I had to pick one war in particular, the Vietnam War would be the one that always interested me. Just in terms of geography, military tactics and era. The whole 60's culture in general is something that peaked my interest. The Vietnam War is known as being the first true war to be televised across the nation. The efforts to address how the Vietnam War is represented in American cinema are important to understanding how the conflict affected the culture. The power of the medium has a tendency to transform people’s views on subjects like the Vietnam War. This calls back the media and how much leverage it had on public perception and opinion of the war from 1963 to the end of the conflict in the early 70’s. Seeing photos and seeing news reports of the horrors that went on during the war were enough incentive to give people a reason to protest against the war. It also is important to understand how much films were perpetuated by the media at the time. Taking all of this into consideration, it helps give the films about Vietnam a potency of legitamacy.

There's four films that are usually brought up in a discussion of films about that event: The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon & Apocalypse Now. While I love all 4, each delivers on a different level in regards to the event depicted. Deer Hunter dealing with the marine coming home, Jacket as a means of training soldiers and turning them into killing machines & Apocalypse as basically an excursion into the madness of the war. But with Platoon, it's different. Here you have a director with first hand experience. That in itself gives Platoon a level of realism and legitimacy that it was ultimately going for in the first place. One need not look any further than the scene in the village. It gives a sense of innocence being wiped away. Moreso than any other 'Nam film. Because, that was a major focal point of it. The film is drawn from Oliver Stone’s experiences in Vietnam & written by Stone to counter the vision of the Vietnam War that was portrayed in The Green Berets. While two tribes (Elias' platoon & Barnes' platoon) are clearly identified, the lead protagonist, Chris Taylor, ends up without a stable sense of identity. This type of instability would carry over into Stone’s later film Born On the Fourth of July. Despite the legitimacy heaped upon Platoon, the film still has its flaws. Its realism is compromised by following many conventions of the war film genre. There are also recognizable character types scattered throughout. We see the inexperienced youth, the father figure and the enemy who is given no character. But I'm willing to let that slide, since it has such strong points in other areas anyway.

As far as Iraq war films go, the geographical setting & general 'feel' hasn't really done much for me. The one exception to that being Hurt Locker. Something I credit to the director and the plot involving bomb disposal technicians. Here, Bigelow creates her best film with a heightened state of tension.

It's definately a genre that has its memorable hits but with a good number of misses as well. But hey, Charlie ain't always safe in the foxhole ya know?

Greed is good.

Happy 4th of July