Stone revealed his secret admiration for the Republican presidential hopeful in an interview for this month’s edition of RockCellar Magazine, in which Stone confessed:

There’s no way that we can continue this spending spree. In fact, I think in many ways the most interesting candidate – I’d even vote for him if he was running against Obama – is Ron Paul. Because he’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the simple fact that both Paul and Stone are isolationists who think the United States is wrong every time it uses military force to stop tyranny, torture or oppression in foreign countries.

In fact, later in the interview Stone said:

Why is it necessary for every candidate — except for Ron Paul — to pay obeisance to this hypocrisy that the U.S. is a good force in the world, and that it is the dominant force, and can be the policeman of the world? Since when? What gave us that right?

But many in the mainstream media missed the isolationist connection that Stone and Paul share and instead expressed shock over the fact that Stone is supposed to be a liberal. The Hill reported the story with these little reminders:

Filmmaker Oliver Stone, known for his liberal political views, said he would vote for GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul over President Obama should Paul win the Republican nomination.

Stone was a vocal supporter of the president in 2008, and wrote an editorial in the Guardian saying that Obama could be the “heir to John F. Kennedy.”

Stone is also known for embracing some of far-left’s most notorious figures, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Okay, Chavez and Castro may be the only far-left notorious figures Stone embraced. Let’s not forget his almost apologist portrayal of Adolph Hitler in the 2010 Showtime docudrama that he directed, “America’s Secret History.”

Upon the release of the film, Stone told the Sunday Times in England: “We can’t judge people as only bad or good . . . Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

In a scathing response I penned for FOX News, I wrote:

Under the false pretense of putting Hitler “in context,” what Stone is really saying is that even the good guys like America and Great Britain helped him, which means he couldn’t have been all that bad.

That’s pretty hard to believe since it was the United States and Great Britain that heroically charged the shores of Normandy in 1944 and crushed the Third Reich into pieces, striking so much fear into Hitler’s heart that he abandoned his country, and in one of history’s greatest acts of cowardice, killed himself.

So, Oliver Stone didn’t really see just how evil Adolph Hitler really was. Now check this out:

In December of last year I broke a story on Big Government about a personal conversation I had with Ron Paul in September 2009 when I asked him whether or not he would have sent troops to save the Jews from the Holocaust if he had been president during World War II–even if Nazi Germany presented no threat to the United States.

Paul’s Response was simply, “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t risk American lives to do that. If someone wants to do that on their own because they want to do that, well, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t do that.”

This doesn’t mean that Paul or Stone are anti-Semitic or sympathetic to the politics of the Third Reich. What it does show however, is that the two share a total disconnect from reality about how dangerous and how incredibly evil the Nazis were.

Obviously, neither one of them see what the overwhelming majority of Americans see, which is that if the United States had not stopped the Nazis when we did it only would have been a matter of time before they threatened the survival of the free world–not to mention the moral imperative of stopping the genocide and torture of what was happening in the death camps.

Ron Paul and Oliver Stone–an isolationist match made in heaven.

Loud, brash and in your face, this collage of film stocks, styles and sensibilities made some critics squeal with delight during its 1994 release. Call that a chance to hop on the hip bandwagon, but looking back it’s clear “Killers” marked the start of Stone’s slow slide toward mediocrity.

“Killers” follows the infamous Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis) as they morph from amoral killers to media darlings. The two start out as lovebirds eager to taunt and terrorize the innocent, always leaving one person alive to spread their legend. They aren’t the most well thought out criminals, and before long they’re behind bars for their atrocities.

Even violent criminals can pick up celebrity cache if they play the media just right.

“Killers” came of age during the O.J. Simpson case, the Menendez trial and the clown-like antics of Long Island’s own Joey Buttafuoco. So we can forgive Stone for feeling less than charitable about the state of media. But “Killers” is such an over the top affair, so bloated with stylistic excess and Pacino-esque ranting that nothing resonates beyond an overwhelming sense of “ick.”

A media satire by design can’t be done with a sledgehammer approach, at least if that’s the only tool being applied to the screen. Even the best action films have quiet spells, solemn moments when the audience can catch its breath and prepare for the next stunt-filled extravaganza.

“Killers” is all exclamation points and bold type. Attempts to humanize the murderous couple fall hopelessly flat. Can we really feel Mickey and Mallory’s pain just because they both suffered at the hands of abusive parents? Rodney Dangerfield appears in the film’s lone flash of brilliance. He plays Mallory’s lecherous papa, sequences arranged like a sitcom pilot from hell complete with laugh track.

Harrelson transcends the noise long enough to carve something novel out of Mickey’s wicked ways. The actor’s brutish charisma holds the film together, just barely, while Stone asks the rest of his cast to perform as if a pack of firecrackers had just invaded their skivvies. Those intrigued by Lewis’ bad-girl performance should rent the severely underrated “Kalifornia” for a better look at her curious screen presence.

“Killers” began as a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, the pop culture junkie who later distanced himself from the production. We’re left to wonder what the “Pulp Fiction” auteur might have said differently than Stone, since very little of Tarantino’s patented wordplay made it into the final draft.

Robert Downey Jr. arrives mid-film to personify the soulless media vultures who thrive on tabloid trash. The future “Iron Man” nails the Steve Dunleavy accent – the Aussie reporter from “A Current Affair fame directly influenced Downey’s character. In a film teeming with one dimensional players, Downey’s reporter emerges as even more detestable than the titular “Killers.”

One can easily accuse Stone of glorifying the kind of violence he detests in the media as well as for letting Mickey and Mallory survive with their black souls unscathed.

“Natural Born Killers” arrived on Blu-ray two years ago along with scenes excised to ensure an R-rating. Such a bloated enterprise hardly needed more shock value. What’s left out here is the sense that Stone had something truly original to say other than, “I wish the media didn’t treat the Tonya Harding affair with the same intensity as the first Gulf War.”

It doesn’t take an Oscar-winning filmmaker to remind us of that.

Sigh:

Speaking mostly in French at a press conference in Algiers yesterday, Stone said he was shocked by the global financial crisis and “to see how money was venerated by America”.

Its middle class “is the biggest victim” said the US director, though nothing could be done to change a system that he called “undemocratic, even after the arrival of Obama”, he added.

But the 65-year-old had little sympathy for his compatriots.

“Americans are not really interested in problems abroad,” he said. “They have no empathy.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement would do better to move to “Washington and not New York, to have more impact”, said Stone[.]

[...]

Dirty Harry could be both a hearty conservative slap to the Warren Court and also the only thing between democracy and a group of vigilante fascist cops.

“J. Edgar,” released today, is no different.

But to gauge Eastwood’s achievement in examining a controversial figure, virtues as well as warts and all, one should look at previous cinematic portrayals of the FBI director. In “Chaplin,” Hoover is depicted as a prissy anti-communist who does not forget the silent film star slighting him back in the twenties. His decades-long vengeance is complete when Chaplin gives him the sword to fell the actor with, courtesy of Charlie’s peccadilloes.

“Citizen Cohn” played down the vengeance theme and instead portrayed the director, played by the very masculine Pat Hingle, as an avuncular figure. Hoover, a master of blackmail via wiretaps, has the tables turned on him because of his homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson. Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” was perhaps the most flagrant attempt to out Hoover. In the film, Hoover (Bob Hoskins) reveals his sexual preferences by having a servant boy orally remove a piece of fruit the director placed on his aged lips. But Stone, in true fashion, isn’t content to rest on this one controversy.

His Hoover is the closest thing we’ve had to that gay Nazi Ernst Roehm; in a scene with Nixon, he speaks of the “establishment fighting back,” promises to help Nixon win the presidency via his enemies lists, and thus exudes such evil that animals won’t come near him.

Eastwood humanizes the director, showing how such a figure was shaped by both his formative experience (the Palmer Raids of the 1920s) and his mother, whom he lived with until her death. As played by Judi Dench, she is a Mommie Dearest, demanding both subservience and a rigid morality impossible to fulfill. Crippled with guilt and an accompanying voyeurism, Hoover can experience love but never act on it.

Eastwood subtly accepts that Hoover was probably gay, activated by his lifelong friend and live-in companion, Clyde Tolson. Rather than hit the viewer over the head with Hoover’s predilections a la Stone, Eastwood very cleverly rigs the game. His Clyde Tolson doesn’t physically resemble the real life beetle-browed hair-receding figure; he instead casts Armie Hammer, an actor of golden boy handsomeness that recalls Jude Law in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (another figure pined after romantically by a man) shows audiences why Hoover would be attracted to Tolson.

But the attraction is only evident by the sweat on Hoover’s upper lip when meeting him, or in Eastwood’s camera angles of Hoover and Tolson in the elevator in which both look like they are laying side by side in bed. Eastwood also allows that there might have been actual terrorists in the sweeping deportations young Hoover made while apprenticing under the notorious A. Mitchell Palmer.

He also shows there was indeed a gangster threat in the ’30s as well as a communist one in the Cold War. Then Eastwood the civil libertarian kicks in, and he shows how Hoover’s dirt-digging and moral vanity marred how he viewed Martin Luther King and the peaceful sections of the anti-war movement.

All in all, “J. Edgar” is the fullest portrait of this character we have yet on film. An old saying is that it takes a paranoid to recognize a paranoid. But Eastwood’s film is so balanced that it should be amended to read it takes a libertarian to recognize a historical figure in all their complexity.

Clint Eastwood is a different brand of director. He’s more nuanced, more reasonable, and he won’t let his knee jerk while telling a complicated story.

—–

Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is all richer for the director’s cautious instincts. We re-learn why Hoover is both celebrated and mocked thanks to a powerhouse turn by Leonardo DiCaprio as the nation’s longest-serving FBI director.

“J. Edgar” ultimately seems disinterested in Hoover as a law man or rule breaker. The film trots out a series of arguments for and against his hard-line tactics, not bothering to weigh in on either side of the ledger. Instead, it frames a love story between two men who cannot act on their urges – or even admit them out loud.

“J. Edgar” opens with the hoariest of storytelling devices – Hoover himself dictating his life story to a typist drone. We flash back to Hoover’s first few years with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, a time when the Communist movement was first commanding his attention. Right away, Hoover sees the infiltration as a movement that must be snuffed out, and it doesn’t matter how many rules must bend to make that happen.

Hoover rises up the FBI ranks with impressive speed, the only roadblock coming when a dainty FBI peer (Naomi Watts) rebuffs his clumsy advances. From there, we get a dollop of American History 101 – from the Lindbergh baby theft to Hoover wrangling with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Even better, we see how Hoover dragged the bureau into the modern age, focusing on fingerprint research and other forensic tools to serve the public good.

The film’s chronological time line gets tortured by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black of “Milk” fame. Some flashbacks make sense, while others keep us at a distance from the subject at hand. That leaves a series of clipped but rewarding sequences, all held together by DiCaprio’s impressive transformation into a man incapable of giving lawbreakers an inch. Yet “J. Edgar” ignores some ripe chapters from the 20th century, like Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Communist hunt.

“McCarthy was an opportunist, not a patriot,” Hoover huffs.

Hoover pours all of his energy into his job, but he’s gobsmacked when he meets a fellow agent named Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Their bond matures over time, and it’s here where Eastwood takes the utmost of care not to overstep his duty to history. Those who refuse to believe the FBI chief led a closeted life won’t like the bigger picture rendered here, but even in a scene where Hoover and Tolson fight, and then briefly wrestle, Eastwood keeps a steely grip on the proceedings.

“J. Edgar” strips the screen of any color that might distract from Hoover himself, leaving a muted palette full of dark blues, browns and gray. He stages a few tense stand-offs to pump up the storytelling volume, including incidents when Hoover wanted to show he was as tough as the agents who broke down doors to nab the bad guys.

Such gimmickry can’t hide how poorly the screenplay illustrate Hoover’s evolution from young crime fighter to FBI chief willing to smash laws to get the job done. The best Black can do is paint Hoover’s mother (Judi Dench) in uniformly cruel tones, handcuffing the Oscar-winning actress in a role ill-suited for her talents.

Hollywood routinely tries – and fails – to convincingly age actors to tell tales that span the decades. Here, DiCaprio is burdened with layers of latex, and yet both the presentation and the actor underneath are darn near flawless.

For all of Hoover’s accomplishments, his life story doesn’t translate into a sweeping epic of consequence. Instead, “J. Edgar” is like a Merchant/Ivory romance, one told with furtive glances, the occasional caress and the knowledge that love isn’t enough to beat back societal expectations.

]]> http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/cftoto/2011/11/09/j-edgar-review-eastwoods-ode-to-an-fbi-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/feed/ 57 http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/rcapshaw/2011/10/31/on-20th-anniversary-of-jfk-facts-have-invalidated-stones-conspiracy/ http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/rcapshaw/2011/10/31/on-20th-anniversary-of-jfk-facts-have-invalidated-stones-conspiracy/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:16:00 +0000 Ron Capshaw http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/?p=530392 Twenty years ago, Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ was released and was less a film than a Molotov cocktail thrown at the “establishment.”  Stone called his film about the 20th century’s most infamous Presidential assassination “a history lesson” (a characterization he quickly withdrew) and hoped to be vindicated by the passage of time.

Stone’s thesis in a film designed to appeal to middle America is as follows: the military-industrial complex, allowed free reign under Eisenhower, killed Kennedy because he was trying to end the Cold War, especially in Cuba and Vietnam (the latter extremely important to the obsessed Stone).  Their point men were apolitical snipers, vengeful anti-Castroites, and a manipulated Oswald.  Far from being an angry leftist loner, Oswald was in fact a perpetrator for the more dovish elements of the American government’s schemes.  The low-level plotters included Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, and David Ferrie, a member of the Operation Mongoose team, a CIA operation in constant efforts to kill Castro.

Like all history lessons, the yardstick is whether further evidence has proved him correct.  On Shaw being a CIA agent, Stone was on sure footing: CIA Director Richard Helms admitted that the New Orleans defendant was an agent.  On Shaw and Ferrie knowing each other (a charge Shaw denied under oath at his trial in New Orleans), evidence in  the form of a car loan for Ferrie co-signed by Shaw has vindicated Stone.

But other revelations have not been so kind.  Far from being a patsy four  floors down from his supposed sniper perch, Oswald was shown in documents released after the film by the Dallas Police that his fingerprints were on the trigger of his Manlicher Carcano.  Re-created shooting by world-class snipers has shown that the head-shots did in fact come from the Sixth Floor Depository.  Computer analysis applied to the grassy knoll reveals that in order for a shot to have come from there the sniper would  have to have been on a forty-foot ladder (a stance that would have attracted notice).

Stone made much of the hobos rounded up by the DPD as being part of the assassination team (he even has the leader of the plot walking by and signaling them).  His evidence for this was in how they were never booked and were quickly released, but documents released by the DPD after the film revealed that the men in question were, in fact, hobos.

On Kennedy the dove, Stone has been invalidated.  He makes much of the American University speech in which JFK called for a reexamination of American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, but he says nothing about the bellicose anti-communist speech months later  in the “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” address.  Regarding Cuba, Kennedy was following a two track policy in the last days of his life.  On one hand, he was using intermediaries to seek normalization with Castro.  On the other, he had intensified efforts to kill the dictator (one congressman in the loop was shocked at how matter-of-fact Kennedy was when he told him).  And Kennedy had authorized the military to begin preparations for an invasion of the island in December 1963.

Stone, in his effort to hammer home his thesis, omits certain key elements known at the time.  Nowhere in the film is there any mention of Oswald’s efforts to kill the far right military man, General Edwin Walker–odd, because Oswald missing him from a grassy knoll-type perch would have bolstered Stone’s portrait of him as poor shot.  To do so would have shown Oswald’s ability to plan an assassination.  He never shows Kennedy’s complicity in allowing a coup to remove South Vietnam leader N’Go Diem–proof that the president was seeking a more receptive leadership in order to secure the conflict’s key goal–to win popular support.

In a key moment in the film, Stone has a Deep Throat-esque journalist character pose the real questions that should be asked about Kennedy’s death: (1) Why was Kennedy killed? (2)Who benefited? (3)Who has the power to cover it up?

In light of recent evidence, the answers are as follows : (1) Not only the frustrated anti-Castro Cubans, but also target Castro, his sympathizers, including Lee Harvey Oswald;  (2) Beneficiaries were  Castro (especially since the new president, Lyndon Johnson, horrified at Kennedy’s “goddam murder inc. in the Carribean,” turned Mongoose off; (3) The American government, but they could have done so less from their participation in the assassination and more from their participation in using the mob to kill Castro or fears of nuclear war should the truth come out.

Similar questions could have been applied to Stone.  Why did he make this film?  Answer: to continue his cinematic efforts to exorcise his Vietnam demons.  Who benefited?  Answer: The Hollywood Left, with their love affair with Castro and the aged Camelot mythifiers.  Who had the power to cover up alternative theories of the assassination  and ones at political odds with the film?  Answer:  scriptwriter Oliver Stone.

Like most Camelot propaganda merchants, Stone laments what might have been had the assassination failed.  His “American Gorbachev” might have stymied the right-wing madness of the sixties.  But Kennedy’s pattern was to assure the worst of all possible worlds.  Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, he assured Castro’s position by promising Kruschev that he would never invade and horse-traded away the US missile defense for Turkey.  He then continued assassination efforts, and his plans for a December 1963 invasion would have violated his promise to Kruschev and triggered an even more dire reprise of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  With Vietnam, he allowed a coup to remove Diem in order to continue the doomed US support of the South.    Because of Kennedy’s risk taking, “what might have been” might have been worse than under Johnson.

The trouble with propaganda masquerading as film is that facts keep up with and invalidate it.  The documents keep on coming, says George Orwell.  In the case of JFK they did, but without an equally skilled director, they may never filter into the consciousness of moviegoers.

I’ve experienced several historical events, but nothing quite like 9/11. I lived in D.C. when 9/11 happened and I used to drive right past the spot where the American Airlines jet crashed into the Pentagon. That particular day I passed by twenty minutes before it happened. I still remember the morning DJ joking about “some idiot who slammed a Cessna into the World Trade Center” (“how can you not see the World Trade Center?”), and I remember the horror in his voice when he learned it wasn’t a Cessna. Then there was actual panic and confusion and people talked about the Capitol being destroyed and the White House. It took me six hours to get home, fifteen minutes away, as they closed the bridges and soldiers set up road blocks.

I also remember the shock and disbelief that this was happening in our country. And I remember feeling sick upon seeing people jump to their deaths in New York. All of this is vividly etched in my brain as it is for so many of us.

When I heard that Oliver Stone would do a film about 9/11, I had high expectations. Stone is a leftist nut, but he had undeniable talent at one point. Platoon was brilliant, as was Wall Street. Platoon was so good it literally broke the Vietnam spell in our country and ended the tension between the public and the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Wall Street (ironically) inspired an entire generation of kids to become Gordon Gekkos. Heck, even The Doors was great and turned me into a fan of the group. So I expected something pretty incredible from World Trade Center, even if it was likely to be liberal.

In fact, I expected something that would mirror the shock, the disbelief, the panic, and the horror that people felt. I expected something that highlighted the selfless bravery we saw on our televisions that day. I expected something that caught both the grand scale of what this meant to the country and also something that captured the personal effect this had on so many people and so many families.

Instead, I got a remake of The Towering Inferno.

It’s not that World Trade Center is a bad film as far as disaster films go, but it completely lacks context and it has nothing like the impact it should have had. It is a small film. It follows a small group of first responders, a brave group of Port Authority police officers, who arrive at the WTC after everything has already begun and it never moves beyond them. There is no doubt their story is heroic and deserving of being told, but this came nowhere near capturing the emotion of the moment. There’s never any sense of how shocking these events were, or how far ranging. There’s little attention given to the three thousand other people who were killed that day or the tens of thousands more who came close. Nor are the characters given much chance to become personal to us before they are thrown into the action. This is like doing a film about Pearl Harbor by focusing on a small group of firefighters aboard one of the battleships and starting the film after the battleship has already been hit without even explaining that the attack was a sneak attack and the country was at peace moments before.

For a guy with the talent of Oliver Stone, this was a total failure. For a film about an event that remains so raw in so many people’s minds, this was a total failure. For a film about a great national tragedy and outrage, this was a failure.

Obviously, I can’t read Stone’s mind, but I think he was afraid of this topic. Stone has tremendous talent, but he’s also got a horrible reputation. I think he feared that anything he did beyond the very narrow confines of this small story would result in a backlash by one side or the other, and he apparently wasn’t prepared to experience that backlash. But in succumbing to this fear, Stone blew his chance to do something truly inspired and that is the real shame here.

To this day, I think 9/11 still waits for THE film that will give Americans closure because something this horrible calls out for our culture to digest it and explain it to us in a form we can contemplate. But that film will take a lot more courage than Hollywood has shown in quite some time, because such a film will require showing real people and real suffering, and that will anger people and hurt feelings.

And admittedly, it might not even be possible for a film to compete with reality, now that reality comes with its own video images. Could a film really show the raw horror of people jumping to their deaths? I don’t honestly know. Seeing actors pretending to die certainly doesn’t have the same impact as seeing the real thing caught on tape. But Hollywood has some advantages. It knows what images have endured in the public consciousness and it can manipulate the story to be more coherent. And it can bring us closer to people we never actually met, but whose fates we know. I guess we won’t really know if this can be done until someone gives it a genuine try. But Vietnam was the first televised war and there are miles of footage about every aspect of it, yet we remain so fascinated with it that we still watch the movies about it.

I think 9/11 needs a definitive film. And if liberal icons like Stone can’t or won’t do it, maybe some young conservative screenwriters or directors should give it a try?

Thoughts?

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975.

If I speak with some hostility about the Boomers’ failings and excesses it’s partially because that’s my nature as a Millennial/Gen Yer. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books each generation acts as a check on the excesses of its parent generation. As young adults in the ‘60s and ‘70s the Baby Boomers declared war on the cultural institutions of their GI Generation parents. The GIs (born 1900-1924) are what Howe and Strauss describe as a “civic” generation; they were driven toward creating social harmony. The Boomers (an “idealist” generation) were a check on that, fomenting greater individualism in the 1970s and culture wars in the 1990s. That our electoral maps are so split today is their fault. When the Civic GI President Ronald Reagan won in 1984 it was almost a solid red map. My generation – also a Civic generation – is a reaction against Baby Boomer extremes and will seek to create greater social harmony. This will become much more apparent as the younger Gen Yers in junior high and high school now start to make waves in 10 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (born 1957) has been emblematic of the divisive Boomer paradigm for his whole career. His plays and films are famous for the “Mamet style” of short bursts of memorable dialogue and the mainstreaming of casual profanity.

And so in his book detailing his rightward shift away from a “Brain-Dead” Hollywood leftist, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, the reader finds this same mindset applied to the political essay. The need to divide the world into clear cut categories of Liberalism and Conservatism pervades the text. Mamet even capitalizes them to Emphasize the Great Importance of the Political War between Boomer Liberalism and Boomer Conservatism. Gone is Simon’s sense of skepticism in Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine.

The Secret Knowledge is a collection of 39 short essays. Mamet has crafted an experience like the signature Boomer film “Forrest Gump.” Life is like a box of chocolates – and devouring the delicious morsels of Mamet’s book is an addictive treat, filled with surprises. Who cares if it’s just a political sugar rush? Most conservatives are familiar with the bibliography Mamet cribs his ideas from: Sowell, Hayek, VDH, Friedman, etc. Thus they won’t learn anything life-changing but will still enjoy the thrill of Mr. Mamet’s Wild Ride. And if that sentiment doesn’t summarize the Boomer cinema of Lucas-Spielberg-Bruckheimer-Moore-Stone then what does?

The endowment of the Baby Boomer Hollywood Apostates is the call to fight, the drive to confront with big special effects, and the need to divide ourselves from the intolerable. This makes for satisfying blockbuster popcorn films and effective (James Carville-Karl Rove style) political warfare. While there is plenty to critique in the failings of the Boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush credit must be given: the Boomer political strategists were masters. Too bad they wasted their brains on winning the electoral fights while ignoring (and sometimes exacerbating) the more vital policy fights.

In Part 4 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll see how the Gen X leader Andrew Breitbart is reinventing this confrontational spirit – what he calls Righteous Indignation — and redirecting it in a more pragmatic, effective way than the Boomers ever could.

My wife, however, was interested in the experience for another reason. She lost a brother in combat over there and wanted to better understand what the final months of his life had been like as a new recruit. And this is where the film memorably succeeds. In-between all the cinematic drama and leftist politicking, the story of Charlie’s Sheen’s Chris, a green recruit who volunteered, is the story of a young young man who loses his innocence while grappling with an impossible choice. Will he choose survival in the form of the devil Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) or will he openly defy the seemingly indestructible Barnes and side with the Christ-like figure of Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe).

This classic theme along with the sure-handed direction of a young director who himself volunteered and earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Vietnam, gives the story an authentic feel thanks, in large part to the many day-to-day details that ring so true. Because we’re Chris and therefore experience Vietnam through his eyes, everything from the incessant bugs and foul-smelling latrine duty to the awkwardness of not knowing your peace among the men and the cold terror of hearing movement in a pitch-black jungle, feels both visceral and immediate. Long after Stone has had his political say, these are the elements that stay with you.

It’s no secret I’m an unabashed fan of both Oliver Stone and “Platoon.” Earlier this year I ranked the film as #7 on my all-time greatest left-wing film countdown. Seeing it again on Bluray, however, is an entirely different experience. The crispness of the picture, the detail, the sound – in may ways it was like seeing it again for the first time.

The extras are well worth the price of the DVD alone. Actor and military advisor Dale Dye is featured prominently with his own commentary track and as a vital part of the documentaries — one that looks at the making of the film and another that involves a discussion with a dozen or so veterans after a screening.  Nothing goes so far as to challenge Stone’s political viewpoint of the war, but the director himself is also featured and is nowhere near as partisan as you might expect.

This is how I closed my earlier review:

On a pure storytelling level, Stone’s pacing is exceptional, the individual battle scenes are all memorably staged, and the tension that builds throughout is perfectly calibrated. Even better are the three central performances, but there’s not a single false note among the many familiar faces in the supporting cast (Johnny Depp, Kevin Dillon, Forest Whitaker, John C. McGinley). A real standout, though, is the great Keith David as King, a world-wise, charismatic grunt with a beautiful singing voice, a way with words (even if he can’t spell), and a personal code that’s hard to nail down, though you know you definitely want him on your side.

“Platoon” is also the film that gave Capt. Dale Dye his start, and with a single line of dialogue about making sure those who commit war crimes are punished, the retired Marine Captain turned technical advisor not only moves the plot and characters to the final breaking point, he reminds us of the unshakable honor that has always guided the real-world men and women who protect this country.

He is our Elias to Stone’s talented but damaged Barnes.  

It’s almost impossible to believe 25 years have passed since the film’s release. Part of the reason that’s hard to fathom is due to how well “Platoon” holds up. Nothing about it has aged, which is the only test of a true masterpiece.

Stone was the guest of pro-Hugo Chavez, anti-tea party professor, Miguel Tinker Salas, according to the student newspaper. When answering a question about Chavez’s support for the Iranian dictatorship and Hezbollah, Stone curiously leaned over and whispered with Tinker Salas. I guess he was looking for the party line.

Even the left-wing newspapers think Stone’s film is propaganda. “South of the Border” was savaged in the New York Times. The Washington Post said Stone lobbed softball questions to Chavez. NPR said Stone treated Latin American leaders with “kid gloves.”

Stone, who says that he “liked what we saw” in Latin America, never met with any dissidents while there.

Here’s the transcript of an exchange with Stone and a Pomona college student. You can watch the exchange here…

Student: Chavez considers the dictatorship of Iran great for its people and fully supports the government. He also considers Hezbollah to be heroic and legitimate. Do you agree? And Danny Glover got money from the government of Venezuela; did you? And who financed this film?

[Leans over, and whispers to pro-Chavez professor Miguel Tinker Salas]

Stone: We did not get any money from the government of Venezuela for the film. We made this movie outside that domain, and we were critical, if need be, but we liked what we saw. As you can see from the movie, we were trying to balance what we see as an extremely negative picture, so we were not going to go into a ‘he-said-you-said’ kind of documentary because I think it would have taken far longer and we would not have been able to cover the general movement of change in South America. This is truly a first look, a 101 type course, on South America. On the issue of the Middle East, on Iran, I heard, and on Hezbollah, I’m not going to get into that argument, but I will say Chavez trades with us in oil and Iran is a standing member of OPEC and has been for quite a few years and all, not just Chavez, but Saudi Arabia, all the members of OPEC, Russia, and have quite a lot of [business dealings] to Iran, so does the United States, too, by the way.

A huge amount of (business  dealings) as we know. Something like 250 firms are doing business with Iran, so what you read in the media is, again, you know it’s very distorted about Iran. There are some many problems, but a lot of that is bullshit. So re-examine your sources on Iran and on Hezbollah too because Hezbollah keeps getting re-elected in a very strange sort of balance in the Middle East, so I, I just, you know, let’s get off the American view of the Middle East. Just get away from it.

Student: Okay, thank you.