I liked Platoon a lot. Some of his other '80s movies I liked but they also annoyed me. Natural Born Killers I also liked a lot, but it annoyed me a lot so I haven't seen it since.

I'm still wondering about the DVD/VHS differential pricing -- were VHS cassettes so expensive because of the cost of production? And DVDs avoided that initial high charge to rental because it's just cheaper media?

I think that for small runs of VHS, they are expensive to produce. I know that you can still find non-fiction video put out by small companies that cost $100's of dollars for one tape. I believe that the initial cost of printing one DVD is more expensive than creating one VHS, but then the price of multiple copies is way cheaper.

I hated Platoon, although I also think I was born too late for its cultural moment. Ultimately, it's the sort of movie that glorifies what it is trying to interrogate, and loses its point without noticing.

Actually, in a similar way to the fact that, halfway through Blackhawk Down, I realized that the Somalis were being portrayed as just a half-turn away from zombies, all mob-like and Other and unknowable. I don't think that was intentional subtext of that movie, but whoops! Made me respect the movie less, and that was before I even counted the unnecessary flag-waving.

I hated Natural Born Killers with a white-hot passion. I think Stone could have gotten the same reaction by driving to people's houses and smacking them repeatedly in the face while saying "People are bad, mmkay?" Scrappy's right: the man is a dick.

Stone at his worse is pretentious and way too preachy. His whole complaint about DVDs sounds like he's upset that the increasing number of filmmakers and films is spoiling his exclusive auteur's club.

Talk Radio and Salvador both just knocked me out. Platoon and Wall Street also worked for me.

I wanted to love Oliver Stone's auteurness, but outside these 4, I find my self trying way too hard for the payoff.

Director's foibles fascinate me for some reason. Terry Gilliam, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder...these men are characters with a capital Ku. Some of that shows up on screen and I eat it up like a slutty tabloid skank. Can't say why, except that people's motivations are interesting.

These days, I am more interested in the closer to normal auteurs like Robert Rodriguez and Spike Jonze.

edited because missing words only make sense to me

His whole complaint about DVDs sounds like he's upset that the increasing number of filmmakers and films is spoiling his exclusive auteur's club.

Basically, "All y'all newbies, get offa my lawn!"?

the Somalis were being portrayed as just a half-turn away from zombies, all mob-like and Other and unknowable

This didn't bother me, because the whole film was structured to show us the war through these specific soldiers' eyes. We didn't see any real countrysaide, we didn't get much of a sense of the history of the conflict, we did learn about the soldier's backgrounds, we didn't even get any info about what any military peronnel who weren't in Somalia thought or intended. It was a very limited viewpoint, but I though it worked well in what it set out to do. I could have wished for a more in-depth and well-rounded approach and I would certainly see that movie, but this worked for me in what it did. I've never been in a modern battle, I was interested in the chain of good and bad decisions and heroism and boredom and misunderstandings that played out in the film.

OK, I liked Talk Radio, but I like Eric Begosian. I think Stone at his worst is an anvil-handed, overly macho, misanthropic, lowest-common-denominator-pandering, not-just-revisionist-but-anti-historical, dead-eyed sorry excuse for a director with few, if any, redeeming qualities. I don't know why the guy gets to make movies in the first place.

It's possible that I may just have a slight hate-on for the guy.

Ya think?

And yet, I cannot disagree with a single word.