FILM

Oliver Stone Has Lost His Mind

By M-Tron

OLIVER STONE IS TRYING MY PATIENCE.

You can only eat McDonald’s so many times before you throw up all over yourself. And you can only sit through so many awful movies before you become desensitized to cinema that’s actually important.

What lingering indigestion I had from 2007’s onslaught of cinematic greasy spoons was turned into a full-blown ulcer when spring 2008’s Chinese buffet rolled into town. M. Night Shyamalan served up my first piping hot mouthful of processed gray animal matter with The Happening, which I washed down with a melting Oreo McFlurry disguised as the Saw V theatrical trailer. And now comes Stone's W.

I have abandoned all hope.

Before even thinking about W, it is necessary to divide Oliver Stone’s career into two parts: respectable and not important.

His notable films Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon are from Stone’s halcyon days. While I can’t seem to rewatch any of these, they’re not altogether unpleasant; though historically inaccurate, there’s sick pleasure in being in the courtroom as Kevin Costner guides us through the grainy Zapruder footage. You want those sneaky government bastards to pay, because for all his bringing the world this much closer to Armageddon, deep down we all liked Jack Kennedy, damnit.

With Nixon – which I actually haven’t seen – you have a figure so vile that the movie writes itself. Add Anthony Hopkins and it’s not really surprising when you’re thanking the Oscar committee for a fifteenth nomination of your cinematic achievements.

In 1996, with his career firmly established, Stone could have gazed back at the Age of Respectability with pride, content with his considerable talent as a writer and director. But he didn’t. And now we’re dealing with his mess. Leaving credibility and good taste behind, Stone dove head first into the many mistakes that marked his Age of Unimportance. 1997’s U Turn, which I rented as a kid because the trailer promised a then-attractive Jennifer Lopez in a steamy love scene with Sean Penn – retrospectively a disgusting, even unholy coupling – was forgettable at best. Besides a grizzled Nick Nolte playing himself, there was little to take away from the dull tumbleweed thriller.

Then Stone decided to try his hand at a sports movie, and what we got was 1999’s Any Given Sunday. Though by no means as bad as what lay ahead, half of this film is Al Pacino screaming blitz formations into his boom mic. The other half is Jamie Foxx trying to act. None of it is important.

Going into hiding for five years, Stone reemerged with his Frankenstein monster, 2004’s Alexander. Lasting three hours, Alexander the “Final Unrated Cut,” is what you’d expect if the History Channel decided to make an overwrought six part miniseries for non-humanities majors.

But you can’t give up on the guy who brought us Platoon for Christ’s sake. Not yet, anyway. I was willing to forgive flops like U Turn and moneymakers like Alexander because Stone was a comparatively respectable man. At a time when Bruckheimer, Bay and Emmerich reigned supreme for fueling idiots with overblown summer blockbusters, Stone stood as the old guard; a knight-errant fallen from grace, but noble nonetheless.

World Trade Center destroyed that image. Shattering the glass floor separating the miserable second half of Oliver Stone's career from oblivion, this crass recreation of September 11, 2001 plunged him forever into the murky depths of worthless genre pieces; he landed in the layer of hell just above the creators of Disaster Movie and Bum Fights. The tag line says it all: "Glorifies that which is best in the American spirit." It's telling that Nicolas Cage and his gang of back lot B-actors running wide-eyed through smoldering CGI rubble for two hours exemplifies the best of our cultural values. In terms of disregard for basic human dignity, World Trade Center is only slightly better than an episode of True Life.

World Trade Center marked the end of Stage II, Stone's laughably bad phase, and announced with thundering cannons his dangerous penultimate demise. But it would take something even more disgustingly self important to complete the transformation into UltimoStone. Something so stupid that its component parts were not included in the mathematical set of all possible combinations of cosmic matter. Something so absurdly over the top that it became sentient and perceived its own embarrassing existence. It would take something like Oliver Stone's final testament, W, to see him through to his full-throttle, straight to the fucking moon endgame.

M-Tron writes regularly about movies at Manpants. Among his favorite films are Bottle Rocket, Saving Private Ryan, and The Big Lebowski .