You got that from the trailer? I’d guess it’s a sympathetic angle from what I saw.
TBH, I didn’t even watch the trailer. I’m not nearly so concerned whether it’s sympathetic or not; I care how much it distorts the truth and people’s understanding of the truth. Stone’s style is to take an actual historic event and then fictionalize it to make it a better story, and in the process he causes people who understand those historic events through the lenses of his cameras to completely fucking misunderstand the situation. At which point, it’s impossible to have an opinion on the situation that isn’t tainted by Stone’s extremely lax attitude towards historical accuracy.
For example, in the film The Doors, Stone depicts the band’s performance on the Ed Sullivan show. What probably would have been great is to license the actual footage from the Ed Sullivan show. Instead, he re-enacts it inaccurately, apparently directing Kilmer to play up the “girl we couldn’t get much higher” line as if it was done to piss Sullivan off intentionally. The film also interpolates a conversation that never happened between the band members agreeing to this course of action.
The reality is that Jim Morrison sang the line completely straight, and claimed afterwards that it was an accident because he was really fucking nervous singing in front of a huge TV audience (he was actually a pretty shy guy despite his stage persona).
The film is great storytelling, but it gives a grossly misleading account of what kind of person Jim Morrison actually was.
You can make similar complaints about JFK – Stone valorizes a homophobic asshole who used the assassination to further his own career. Probably worse, the JFK film contributed to the conspiracy mongering around the assassination and made it even more impossible than it already was to make plausible conjectures about the causes and meaning of the assassination.
Stone’s films would be much more honest if he stuck to fiction.
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Ugh. Looks like great casting and overwrought direction. Sigh.
I really liked Oliver Stone’s movies in the past. I wish he knew how to take it down a notch, but I guess that’s just not in him. The story has no need for this kind of exaggeration.
Like in other cases, at least I do have to credit him for making the movie at all.
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Platoon was a long time ago, my friend. Have you seen “Savages” or “W”?
If he plays Big Daddy or Terence McDonagh, I’m in. Or might be.
I saw both, and thought they were both a waste of my time.
And just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Stones oeuvre, though perhaps the most egregious.
Yeah. Natural Born Killers made nauseous. And didn’t he do Midnight Express, that piece of Orientalist garbage?
Bringing us back to my original question; they still let this guy make movies?
On the strength of “Platoon,” really? One good movie in an entire well financed career of crap. Not only does he get funded but people occasionally ask him what he thinks about stuff, go figure.
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Fuck, no. The drugs haven’t been invented yet to make that fun. And I’ve taken some weird drugs.
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I recall watching an old interview with one of the band members in the late 1980s (I can’t recall which) who claimed the band had indeed agreed among themselves to sing the song unchanged. So true or not, that basic telling of events does predate the Oliver Stone movie.
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