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.

I have started Natural Born Killers at least three times, but always at night and have fallen asleep each time. Which boggles me, because I rather like what I've seen of it. I need to put that on my to-do list.

And yet, I cannot disagree with a single word.

Woo hoo! My sister in Oliver Stone hatred!

I love Eric Begosian. Had a great time with him at a live event a few years ago. (He was smoking. I was in the front row, having an allergy attack. He used it to hilarious effect in the act.)

Seeing him live kind of gives the lie to his all-nihilism all the time persona. I get the sense he's a lot more woobie than wrathful in real life.

And hey, small role in the upcoming Blade...I can't wait.

eta: oooh sorry

Hurray for Hayden's hate-on.

As for Blackhawk Down,

This didn't bother me, because the whole film was structured to show us the war through these specific soldiers' eyes.

This is true. But I happened to watch BD for the first time a day or two after watching 28 Days Later, and the zombies were portrayed in a fashion remarkably similar to how the Somalis came across, down to the jump-cuts and the screaming. It was really unnerving, and undercut BD significantly in my eyes. My immediate instinct was to blame Ridley Scott's love for visual fetishizing, but you don't fetishize unless you've already reduced the thing you're fetishizing to an object.