Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You

Film: Nixon
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

If you go into Nixon without knowing it was directed by Oliver Stone, you’d know it was an Oliver Stone film within a few minutes. I’d seen pieces of it before, but only pieces, but I remember those pieces well, much of that coming from Stone’s style. What I find interesting here is that the Stone movie I am most reminded of when watching Nixon isn’t Platoon or JFK but Natural Born Killers. There’s a great similarity in style here—the fragmented narrative, the montage pieces, the shifts to archival footage that unites those two films in particular.

The version of Nixon I located was the director’s cut, which adds almost half an hour to a film already hitting north of three. The main benefit of the extended cut of the film is the inclusion of Sam Waterston as CIA director Richard Helms. I like Sam Waterston, but I’m not sure he was worth the extra 28 minutes.

Sacrifice

Film: Born on the Fourth of July
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again here—Tom Cruise can act. Admittedly, the typical go-to Tom Cruise role is more along the lines of Top Gun or the Mission: Impossible movies, but when he’s given a good role, the man knows what he’s doing. I’d love to see him play against type more often because when he does, he’s really, really good. Collateral and Rain Man are my Exhibit A and B most of the time, but I think I might start using Born on the Fourth of July from this point forward.

Born on the Fourth of July is the biography of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), an average American who signed up to fight in Vietnam and who happened to be literally born on July 4. We get a bit of Kovic’s youth in Massapequa, including the speech by a Marine recruiter (Tom Berenger). Tom and some of his friends, particularly Timmy (Frank Whaley) sign up and head off to the war, although not before we get to see Ron run through the rain, break into his prom and dance with Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), the girl he’s always been in love with.

Greed is Good

Film: Wall Street
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I mentioned yesterday the abrupt rise and fall of Alicia Silverstone’s career. I could say the same thing about Charlie Sheen. The difference is that Alicia Silverstone’s career vanished because she took a role in a movie that killed it (and that of Chris O’Donnell as well). Sheen’s career imploded because he went insane. Still, before he was living on tiger blood and became a bitchin’ rock star from Mars, Sheen made some pretty interesting movies. Platoon might have been the flavor of the Sheen month for some time, but I think his early career is much more dominated by Wall Street.

I have a relationship with this film. From early 1991 to early 1996, I worked for a magazine publisher. Our company produced magazines dedicated to a number of entertainment industries. I worked on the computer game magazine. We also did a movie mag, a Wired-style internet magazine, a comic magazine, and a video game monthly, which was our flagship. After a few years, the owner of the company hired a few of his friends to create software. They are the source of my relationship with Wall Street, and it’s not a positive one. A couple of the software guys worked outside my office for 6-9 months. They were obsessed with Wall Street and watched and quoted it constantly.

Dire Wolf

Film: Natural Born Killers
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I’m not sure that Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers can be fully explained. It’s the sort of thing that needs to be experienced, and it’s entirely possible that a true understanding of the film requires being in an altered state. In fact, I might argue that the entire film is something of an altered state. Stone plays with film stock, genre, camera movements, animation, and any number of experimental techniques to present a bizarre and disturbing story that is half hallucination and half indictment on American media and culture.

Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) are the central characters on a cross-country killing spree. They massacre the workers and patrons of a truck stop, leaving one potential victim alive to tell the tale, something that proves to be their signature. From this opening, we discover something about their first meeting and Mallory’s past. Her mother (Edie McClurg) is ineffectual and weak and her father (Rodney Dangerfield) is abusive both physically and sexually. When Mickey steals the family car, Mallory’s father calls out the law and Mickey goes to prison. But the two are united in spirit. When a tornado strikes, Mickey escapes from prison and returns to Mallory, and the two kill her parents before starting their cross-country murder spree.

Photo Realism

Film: Salvador
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s almost a cliché to make a movie about a journalist in a war-torn area of the world. It’s a pretty easy story to dream up, really in part because it’s almost a meme, in part because it’s the sort of exciting job that people like to think about, and in part because there are plenty of true stories to use, so there doesn’t need to be a lot of imagination in coming up with a story. That’s certainly the case with Oliver Stone’s Salvador. There’s tons of bloodshed and human horror and exactly the kind of high-level conspiracy that Oliver Stone seems to thrive on.

Richard Boyle (James Woods) is a photojournalist who has produced a good amount of great work in hotspots around the world in the past. Unfortunately for him, he’s also burned through any good will he might have every earned by being a grade-A shit. He’s a drunk, a drug addict, and has pissed off so many people that no one will hire him or lone him any money. He and his wife are about to be evicted from their crappy little apartment. But he has an idea—El Salvador is turning into a complete hellhole, and if he can get there, he might be able to get some pictures and get back on top of his game.

Breaking the Costner Rule

Films: JFK; The Untouchables
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library (JFK) and personal collection (The Untouchables) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

So what’s the Costner rule? Simple. Kevin Costner films that are Westerns (Dances With Wolves, Silverado) or sports movies (Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Tin Cup) are good. Other Costner films (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Postman, Waterworld), not so much. Today’s films break the mold—Costner doing something other than swinging a bat or riding a horse (kind of), but still producing a vastly entertaining piece of cinema.

Few events in American history have had the sort of lasting impact and caused more controversy than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was inevitable that Oliver Stone would eventually give us his take on the assassination. That take is JFK, in many ways the definitive artistic statement on Kennedy’s death and the several years afterward. JFK details the only time in American history that charges were brought to trial in the Kennedy case.

But before discussing this film, I need to include a bit of disclaimer. A number of years ago, I worked as a freelance copy editor. I was subcontracted to do the final copy edit and proofread for a book on the Kennedy assassination that came out under the imprint of the Library of Congress. The intent of the book was to give a (sorry to use this phrase) fair and balanced look at all of the evidence on every side. It was a glossary of sorts, an encyclopedia of the assassination. And I read every last entry multiple times. Because of this, because I saw both biased and unbiased information, opinion, and detailed facts on the assassination, I have a fairly informed (I think) opinion.

Essentially, I think Oswald acted alone. However, Oswald had connections to the Soviet Union, the marines, the CIA, communists, the mob, and people on both sides of Cuba. And when it turned out that Oswald was the guy, all of those groups with connections to him panicked and started covering up their involvement with him. So the cover up and conspiracies happened after the fact from what I see. Anyway…

Knowing that, it’s very much my opinion that Stone’s film is filled with vague notions, innuendo, half truths, and whole cloth. So rather than look at the film in terms of historical accuracy or its reflection on reality, it makes more sense to judge it as a film. Even this isn’t that easy to do. Stone’s film is necessarily long for the sole reason that a great deal of the film is exposition, repeated exposition, and new exposition and versions of the truth.

What this means is that in many ways, JFK plays like a pseudo-documentary. Standing at the center is not Kennedy, but Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the District Attorney of New Orleans. Several years after the assassination of Kennedy, Garrison begins to see a connection between some local people in New Orleans and everything that happened in Dallas. Using this as a starting point, Garrison begins to investigate and discovers an unending web of deceit, betrayal, and deeper and deeper intrigues. Watching the film, it is difficult not to consider the truth of Stone’s vision.

JFK is blessed with one of the deepest casts around. In addition to Costner, the film features Sissy Spacek, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Vincent D’Onofrio, Gary Oldman, Brian Doyle Murray, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Laurie Metcalf, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Walter Matthau, John Candy, and Donald Sutherland. Seriously, wow. In fact, the actual Jim Garrison shows up in the film as Earl Warren.

Throughout, Garrison is painted as an underdog and the victim of the same sort of conspiracy that he claims killed Kennedy. It’s an interesting idea when a District Attorney is viewed as the heroic loner working against the system.

Stone’s style is interesting here. He goes on long tangents that in any other film would kill the narrative, but here becomes something that spirals the audience in deeper. The scene with Mr. X (Sutherland), for instance, is nothing more than an extended piece of conspiratorial background and fancy. The closing courtroom speech seems eternal; it goes on and on, but is a masterstroke of scripting in that it never gets dull. It builds and builds, creating a case that is both compelling and built on a foundation of sand and conjecture.

What it also is, though, is proof that Costner can do more than sports films and Westerns. Hell of a film, even if it is all conjecture, conspiracy theory, and Stone’s paranoia.

Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables is a similar film in many ways. Both films essentially deal with a small group fighting against long odds and people who want them dead, and, of course, both feature Kevin Costner in the role of main fly in the ointment. The Untouchables is a hyper-violent, completely non-historical and totally Hollywood-ized version of Eliot Ness and his band of treasury men going after Al Capone in 1920s Chicago.

Ness’s team was called “untouchable” because they couldn’t be bribed. This, of course, was in a time when anyone in Chicago could be bought and anything could be had for the right price. Ness’s job was to find a way to take down Al Capone. Ness, of course is played here by Kevin Costner, and his rival, Al “Scarface” Capone, is none other than Robert De Niro.

Capone’s first foray into the life of trying to bust bad guys doesn’t go over well, but it does help him assemble a team for himself. He gets Agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) from the FBI. Wallace isn’t a field agent, but an accountant, and it is he who first puts the idea of getting Capone for tax evasion into Ness’s head. He also recruits long-time beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery), who has the knowledge and street smarts to be a real asset. Rounding out the team is George Stone (Andy Garcia), a dead shot with a pistol.

And so the team immediately starts trying to mess with Capone’s business, and they do so with various success. They score a major coup when Capone attempts to bring in a shipment from Canada. This also gives us a good look at the men who make up The Untouchables. Stone and Ness are relatively cool under fire. Wallace, though, has never been shot at before. When Stone takes a round, Wallace becomes mildly unhinged. But the true moment belongs to Jim Malone. With one of Capone’s bookkeepers captured, Malone threatens him. Then, to get him to talk, he puts his gun in the mouth of an already dead Capone soldier and pulls the trigger. It’s a moment of pure, brutal genius.

Naturally, Capone fights back, knocking off two of Ness’s men, both in brutal and painful ways. By this time, though Ness has agreed that tax evasion, while not very sexy, is a way that Capone can be had. And Capone knows it, too. This means that Capone is moving his accountant out of town, leaving Ness and Stone to capture the guy in a train station. While the train station scene is not the end of the film, it is in many ways the most key scene. De Palma took this scene in no small part from Eisenstein’s Brononosets Potyomkin, and the influence is evident. It is one of the great scenes of its decade. Ness and Stone draw weapons on the accountant’s bodyguard, who draws a weapon as well. And as gunplay goes off in slow motion, a baby carriage tetters through the melee down a set of marble steps. It is nearly damn perfect, and made all the better by being almost entirely in slow motion.

Of course, that isn’t the actual end, which happens in court with Capone, and which ends in something cinematically awesome but completely illegal. But so what, right? It’s a movie.

I would be remiss without bringing up a couple more characters. The first is Ness’s wife, Catherine (Patricia Clarkson). She’s not in the film much, but she brings a nice bit of warmth to the film that is otherwise almost nothing but violence. The second is Billy Drago, who plays Capone’s go-to hitman, Frank Nitti. Drago is blessed or cursed with a face that gives him a feral look that makes him perfect to play villains. And that’s exactly what he does here—there’s nothing nice or pleasant about Frank Nitti.

The Untouchables is hardly historically accurate, but it also doesn’t pretend to be. What it is is almost pure action, and it’s damn good at being that. It had been a long time since I had watched The Untouchables, and I had forgotten just how good it really is. It’s worth a watch. Really.

Why to watch JFK: Oliver Stone at his conspiratorial best.
Why not to watch: As compelling as it might be, it’s mostly hokum.

Why to watch The Untouchables: This is what we like to think the Roaring ‘20s were like.
Why not to watch: The reality almost certainly wasn’t this cool.

Post #100

Film: Platoon
Format: DVD from personal collection on itty bitty bedroom television.


When it comes to war in the movies, the granddaddy for sheer numbers and numbers of great films is World War II. The winner in terms of realism, though, is Viet Nam. There are a number of possibilities for this. The most likely is that the great Viet Nam films were made by filmmakers who were there, and who were far less restricted in what they could show then the veterans of World War II were allowed to depict on the screen.

The greatest of the Nam films will depend on whom you are speaking to. Opinions vary, but in any group of people, it won’t be long before someone mentions Platoon. Certainly, by any standards, Platoon should be mentioned in the same breath with other Nam films.

It had been years since I’d seen this. In fact, while I can’t pinpoint the date I saw this movie, I can pin a rough time on it. I saw it in the theater in 1986 with my mother. In retrospect, I’m not sure Mom was that comfortable watching this movie with her teenaged son. It’s plenty violent, features copious amounts of language, and makes a number of references to sex that aren’t so much fun in the company of one’s parent.

Like any good war movie, Platoon is about much more than just the war, although it’s certainly about that as well. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen, back when he still had a career that didn’t involve hookers and a bad sit-com) has enlisted in the Army because he no longer appreciated his privileged life back in the States. He’s quickly disabused of his patriotic notions, however, when the war shows up to slap him across the face almost as soon as he gets there.

We’re introduced to a number of characters including Big Harold (Forest Whitaker), King (Keith David), the gravel-voiced Rhah (Francesco Quinn), Bunny (Kevin Dillon), and Junior (Reggie Johnson). Most importantly, we are introduced to Bravo Company’s sergeants, the spiritual Elias (Willem Dafoe), the scarred and terrifying Barnes (Tom Berringer), the terminally paranoid O’Neill (John C. McGinley), and the addicted Warren (Tony Todd).

Bravo is divided into two groups: Barnes’s group are drinkers, fighters, and psychotic killers existing only to destroy as much of the VC as they can. Elias’s group, on the other hand, tend to spend time in an underground bunker getting as stoned as possible. Chris initially fits in with neither group until he is wounded mildly in combat and comes back from the hospital. King takes him to Elias’s bunker, and Chris has essentially chosen his side.

The difference between the two groups is made manifest when the platoon investigates a Vietnamese village. Chris locates a mother and her disfigured son hiding under a floor in a hut. Chris torments the boy, but leaves it at that. Bunny, on the other hand, brutally kills the boy with the butt of his rifle, and then leaves the hut bragging about the splatter he created. Shortly after, Chris protects a young Vietnamese girl from what would likely have been a serial rape at the hands of Barnes’s crew.

The battle between the two sides of the platoon intensifies and finally culminates in a battle that goes badly. While chaos reigns on all sides, Elias runs off to flank the enemy. Barnes tracks him down and pumps three rounds into his chest, then makes for the evac helicopter, telling all who survived that Elias was killed. But, as the helicopter takes off, Elias breaks through the trees, only to be gunned down by the NVA as he attempts to flee. Chris is convinced that Barnes killed him, but can’t really prove it.

And that’s the movie, or at least the most obvious parts of it. Of course, there’s a lot more, which is what anyone watching an Oliver Stone movie should expect. Platoon is about choices, and the value of those choices we make. Here, those choices are represented by Elias and Barnes. Elias is a tremendous soldier. He’s smart, cunning, quiet, swift, and effective. But, he doesn’t kill needlessly. He’s as peaceful as a soldier can be, killing only from need and because he must. Barnes, however, lives for the killing. He kills out of hand simply because it’s what he does. There is something mystical about him as well—his severely scarred face serves as a constant reminder of his near-immortality. One member of the platoon comments that Barnes has been shot seven times, and that the only thing that can kill him is himself.

At this point, you can choose your dichotomy. Elias represents good, Barnes evil. Elias represents God, Barnes is Satan. Elias is humanity, Barnes is inhumanity. They’re probably all correct, although I favor the reading that Elias is a Christ figure. The first time we see him, he’s in the classic crucifix pose, rifle over his shoulders, arms slung over the top. Chris receives one of his first drug hits courtesy of Elias “baptizing” him through the barrel of his rifle. Finally, he dies and comes back, however briefly.

It’s a straightforward allegory, but that’s really the only thing straightforward here. Everything is confused by a haze of characters and personalities. That sounds like a criticism, which is unintentional. The movie is confusing because the war is confusing. Everyone shifts and positions change and mutate. Chris chooses, and so must we in the audience.

Why to watch Platoon: Realistic war and sweet, delicious allegory.
Why not to watch: Violence that will stick with you for a long time.