STONE COLD

Anybody know anything about the stock market?

Or, more accurately, anyone know anything about the fake stock market?

I Googled this blog because lately I've been finding people who actually saved pages from my Old Archives, and I've been tripping on what I wrote back in the day.

Anyway, I came across this site while I was searching for my stuff. IT's a virtual stock market for blogs.

I've heard about these kinds of sites, for movies and for other things, but I was a bit surprised to find that I was a part of this. I am assuming that I am now a part of it because of my links to other blogs. I certainly never did this on my own, and I'm not sure how I should read the stats that are posted.

So, someone out there, tell me-- what does it all mean?

E-mail me-- no comments until my stalker gets over himself...


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I was watching Oliver Stone's Nixon last night-- man, what an underrated movie!

I think it's funny that, when I did some Googling to find reviews of the film, most of the critics who hated it were not movie critics. They were Op-Ed columnists and that ilk.

They chided Oliver Stone for his attempts at being scholarly, mostly in the form of attacking his extensive footnotes and the annotated libretto he submitted in the movie's press junkets.

I think it's amusing because since when did a movie need political editorialsts to criticize it? Isn't a review on a show like Ebert & Roeper enough?

Same thing happened with JFK: instead of hearing Gene Shalit rave on about it, we get partisan hacks doing commentary on a movie. Don't these idiots realize that they are giving Stone exactly what he wants?

I like Oliver Stone, and I will probably rent Alexander on DVD... and I will probably like it, despite what all the buzzers tried to say about it. I like Oliver Stone because he is a shameless propagandist. He uses movies to promote his ideas, the same way that Michael Moore does but with more dramatic flair.

Critics of Stone say that he shouldn't rewrite history. They never give his movies props based on their technique-- they say that his politcal content overshadows the achievements he makes in filmmaking.

Oh yeah? On that same token, people need to stop giving props to D.W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation, another propanganda piece that revolutionized the way directors made movies.

Second only to Citizen Kane in terms of cinematic reverence, Nation is also one of the most blatantly racist, one-sided movies to ever be created by the Hollywood System. It was based on one part of a book trilogy that romanticized the rise of the KKK in post-Civil War America. The trilogy was written by an avowed bigot, and there are some horrifically brutal stereotypes of blacks in that movie. It was so racist that even the major black roles were played by white actors in blackface.

Yet, the one thing that cinephiles always mention is that it was "innovative". Having seen the film a long time ago, I can attest that, yes, in terms of Griffith's pioneering methods, it is innovative. But it's also racist.

Same as Nixon: very innovative, very one-sided.

And yet, it is not-- Stone makes us sympathetic to the character of Richard Nixon, played with superb grace by Sir Anthony Hopkins. It is no secret that Stone loathed Nixon (he is on the record saying that only George W. Bush is a worse specimen of the ultra-right-wing Establishment) and so I expected Stone to take the piss out of a man who radiated evil and corruption in his political career.

I think the reason why I like Nixon as a film is because Stone bucks all the obvious expectations. Yes, Nixon is portayed as being a little touched in the head, a bit of a wet blanket, and a deeply flawed individual... but he gives him a pass on many other facets. He doesn't implicate him in the JFK assassination, for example-- he paints Nixon as having found out the terrible truth behind Jack Kennedy's demise a little too late in the game. Stone instead opts to depict Nixon as a man who craved power and got it, only to find that he was actually a pawn in a much bigger game, with higher stakes than he could ever imagine.

Stone uses all of his tricks, the ones he's been plying since JFK and Natural Born Killers: multi-colored inserts, fast MTV edits, mixing different types of film stock, composite characters as stand-ins (to avoid libel suits from still-living persons involved in the history of his movie plots) and an interesting use of music to move the action along.

We should review his movies based on these merits, the same way that movie mavens defend The Birth Of A Nation on the exact same qualities.

I mean, it's entertainment, when all is said and done. If you don't like his message, fine. But don't commission an army of political writers to try and deconstruct, frame-by-frame, the action in a movie like Nixon. If anything, it has the reverse effect of reaffirming what Stone's fans already believe and what Stone's critics want to believe.

On antoher tangent, notice how Alexander was ravaged not for its politics (if there are any to espouse in a historical epic-- once again, please refer to The Birth Of A Nation) but for its "awfulness". If I watch the DVD and find that Stone did a half-ass job, you'd best believe that I would be the first to note that. However, I haven't seen the movie yet, and I refuse to jump on the bandwagon and bash a movie I haven't even seen yet...

...unless that movie is Titanic.


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By the way: Did you know that Woody Harrelson's dad was a convicted hitman? Yes, you probably did hear that, if you read any interviews with the actor around the time he was filming Natural Born Killers with Oliver Stone...

But did you know that Charles V. Harrelson was fingered as one of the Three Tramps arrested shortly after JFK's assassination in Dallas on Novermber 22, 1963?

Woody's dad is believed to be the tall one on the left. Charles Harrelson denied it, but it sure looks like he's at least related to Woody.

Makes you wonder what motivated Stone's decision to cast the former Cheers star as a mass murderer, doesn't it?