Posted on 07/24/2006 1:16:47 AM PDT by goldstategop
Hollywood director Oliver Stone dropped by Toronto’s Varsity Cinemas this week to premiere his new movie, World Trade Center, about two of the last police officers who were pulled alive from the World Trade Center rubble, post-9/11.
With him was Scott Strauss, one of the real-life police rescuers. Stone says Strauss and the other 9/11 families kept him in check. That’s quite the feat, given that Stone has called the Cold War “irritating”, says nationalism and patriotism are “evil forces”, considers Fidel Castro a personal friend, and mused that if he was George W. Bush he would “shoot himself”.
With this film, Stone has created a historically accurate, riveting human interest piece—a Hollywood rarity nowadays.
Every strong political leader in the movie is Republican. The caption at the bottom of TV newscasts repeatedly reads “Attack on America”—a handy reminder for liberal moviegoers who may have forgotten why we’re still fighting.
One character is a former Marine who leaves his civilian office job to help with rescue efforts, saying to his colleagues, “Don’t know if you guys know it yet, but this country’s at war.” He later says that the U.S.A. will need “a few good men to avenge what happened here”, and we’re told in the epilogue that he reenlisted in the military and served two tours of duty in Iraq—you know, that place where terrorists are being killed every day, even though liberals constantly tell us that it has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.
It’s a welcome departure from recent self-indulgent Hollyweird pap. Stone’s movie about Alexander the Great was basically soft gay porn. Apparently, this great warrior got about as much action in the sack as he did on the battlefield. And this was supposed to be a war movie?
Why stop there? How about remaking Patton from the perspective of the general’s “privates”? Or maybe redo Full Metal Jacket, showing why straight soldiers might have really needed one.
Legendary cowboy, John Wayne, would never have put up with Brokeback Mountain’s director telling him, “Okay, John, there’s really no plot or bad guys. You’ll just be riding around the countryside with Tonto, stopping periodically to erect a tent and have a sausage toss, if you get my drift.”
Brokeback wasn’t exactly a box office smash, but was considered “groundbreaking” by Hollyweird standards—perhaps because they took George Bush’s people (cowboys) and had them screw each other. Men making out with men, and people watching it unfold on a big screen—how daring! Haven’t they heard of Pride parades, or World Cup soccer?
Actor/director George Clooney fancies himself a rebel, too. Last year, he made two politically skewed flops, ignored by everyone except in Hollyweird.
In Good Night and Good Luck, Clooney sought to demonstrate how U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy ruined people’s lives by targeting communists in America—but failed to show a single innocent person whose life he actually ruined.
And no wonder the Hollyweird left loved Clooney’s movie, Syriana. It was like a Noam Chomsky lecture: boring, nonsensical, and driven by themes like “America sucks”, “oil companies are evil”, and “terrorists are poor, misunderstood schmucks”.
Maybe studios are just tired of losing money on narcissistic flights of celluloid fantasy that the bore the rest of us “unenlightened” folks? No one wants to watch a feature length PowerPoint presentation by Al Gore about toasty weather and melting ice. The penguins are happy and have lots of ice—I saw that in the March of the Penguins documentary that beat Al Gore’s at the box office.
;-)
;-)
True brainy babe. She should tour south of the border.
X (CONT'D) - "Only four days after J.F.K. was shot, Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Memo 273, which essentially reversed Kennedy's new withdrawal policy and gave the green light to the covert operations against North Vietnam that provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In that document lay the Vietnam War.
Hollywood has a sliding scale for success, Brokeback simply wasn't targeting the $100 mil domestic mark. It was an arthouse movie by a company who's previous highest grossing film was Lost in Translation at $44 million. Brokeback was a huge financial success. Sure it wasn't a massive blockbuster, but that wasn't the goal, you don't judge arthouse movies on the Star Wars scale, every movie has their own target market and target revenue which BBM acheived.
"It does seem strange that Oliver Stone made the movie. Maybe he just liked the story."
- I suppose I'm just a cynic, but if Stone has made a movie which portrays Republicans in a positive light and 9/11 as a national tragedy, then I suspect he's just trying to make a "popular" box office success to offset his previous string of flops and not because he believes in any of it.
Not exactly the whole truth.. The gross boxoffice success story is greatly exaggerated, the real profit numbers are hidden and unnoticed by the great unwashed.. It's TV Licensing Revenue that rings the money bells.. and Brokeback only made studio money because it was part of a package deal with real money makers..
Alone, Brokeback was a disaster, of biblical proportions, considering it was freely (and FREE) touted by every known media outlet to the exclusion of all the other really worthy films released last year.. Brokeback, broke more hearts and pocketbooks than any other feature film in recent history..
That was pretty ridiculous. I did like the qb throwing up before going in though.
Hope I didn't ruffle any feathers by admitting I'm conservative. - (joking)
What Oliver 'Stoned' did in those films was rewrite history. You can't rewrite history without including/blending historical facts with fabrication, and presenting both equally. One can't take 'artistic license' with facts. Of course, the fantasy in "JFK" was extrapolated from hard facts and theories. It wasn't all fiction. But the end result was virtually the same, once cleverly polluted by Stone's active imagination.
My only beef with it is the 'danger' of rewriting history in a movie. It can mislead young viewers, preferring to get their history lessons from entertainment, to trust everything in a well told story (which is also the mark of a good director, as master manipulator.) For the same reason, I wonder if liberals will admit they don't buy into every word uttered in an Oliver Stone film just because it suits some idealogy, or a frustration over distrust of authority. I know, conspiracy theories are often tempting and hard to resist.
Anyway, I still enjoyed "JFK" and I thought Stone's "U Turn" was a pretty good flick.
What really ticked me off about that stupid movie, as I'm watching with my wife and some other people, was the gratuitous FULL frontal nudity of some stand-in black dude. It should have been rated X for that little maneuver.
Finally. Some improvement up north.
>>"Any Given Sunday"? You've GOT to be kidding. <<
I bought this on DVD for $5.00 at Movie Trading Company.
What a waste of five perfectly good dollars.
First, the camera work was terrible. Everything was handheld (I know, I know...to give it a sense of urgency)...and the editing between shots was choppy and amateurish.
The sound was mixed so you would say, "Hey! Look what Oliver Stone did with the sound!" In other words, it was completely distracting from the story.
So much attention was paid to the crappy editing that the dialog was cartoonish and thoroughly unbelieveable.
And one thing you can say about Al Pacino: although he is a fine actor, the guy sure knows how to overact when he wants to.
Sort of like Joe Pesci in the amateurish "crack-up" scene before he was killed in JFK.
All in all, I give it three thumbs down.
Should have had Mandingo do the shot. Shock and awe.
Nothing is more irritating than the giggly camera. The movies shot in near darkness aren't quite as bad, but it is close.
I quit watching movies right about the time this came out for those reasons. It was later that I came to despise them for the cultural void that is hollywood.
I do give credit to Pacino for his role in Devil's Advocate, one of my favorite movies of all time.
Not sure who Mandingo was, but the guy they had was a complete freak of nature, which was the point of the whole scene. Grotesque.
Brokeback Mountain was also beat out by March of the Penguins. It wasn't exactly a smashing success.
Ummm, lets put it this way one might think his body was standing on a tripod.
Just wondering......... why do you think JFK was killed?
Yes, a $14-15 million investment bringing back over $170 million at the box office "isn't exactly a smashing success". Also, I don't understand how a movie that's made $122 million worldwide "beats out" one that made over $170 million worldwide.
I hope you stay far away from the accounting business.
Where do you get this information, and if have a line that we, the "unwashed" don't where is your evidence for the real numbers you claim the rest of us aren't privvy to? The movie was made by a consortium of investors; worldwide receipts BEFORE video or TV money comes to $172 million, so your claim about it making "real" money because it was part of a package is untrue. Anything it makes from now on is pure gravy--unless you don't think making over ten times its original investment means it's a hit?
Alone, Brokeback was a disaster, of biblical proportions, considering it was freely (and FREE) touted by every known media outlet to the exclusion of all the other really worthy films released last year.. Brokeback, broke more hearts and pocketbooks than any other feature film in recent history..
LOL You're out of your mind. Show me the evidence for this--not rhetoric, evidence. A cheap movie that makes $170 million BEFORE it gets sold to TV, as part of a package or alone (your information about how movies make money is completely wrong) is closer to being a success of Biblical proportions (hate to use that term in connection to this but...).
Let's see your "facts".
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