:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 11.25.2004 ::

:: Oliver the Great? ::

Will the real Oliver Stone please stand up?
By Joe Williams
Post-Dispatch Film Critic
11/26/2004

CHICAGO - Look at the evidence: The man promoting the recently opened "Alexander" is not the real Oliver Stone.

Granted, the man who greeted me last week at a Chicago hotel room is a fast-talking, tall and affable fellow who could pass for the great director, and he immediately tried to establish our ideological rapport by asking me if I think Michael Moore is going to be audited by the IRS. But when he quoted from an article of mine - an essay denouncing my peers as gutless pawns of the military-industrial complex - he revealed a familiarity with my files that's downright scary.

Then the man who's so politically engaged that he has the home phone number of Fidel Castro claimed he didn't get to follow the recent American elections because he was living in "France."

It gets weirder.

While it's no surprise that the director who made a biopic about Richard Nixon would be fascinated by a tormented figure like Alexander the Great, the man who calls himself Stone is enthusiastic in his praise for the warrior king of ancient Greece. The filmmaker says he's been studying the life of Alexander since reading a comic-book version as a kid in New York in the '50s. Val Kilmer, who co-stars as King Philip, the father of Alexander (played by Colin Farrell), has said that Stone was daydreaming about the project when they made "The Doors" in 1991.

Why the interest? "Let your mind go back to Alexander's time," he says in an infectiously animated voice. "You don't know where the end of the world is. You have these people, the Persians, who came to Greece a couple of hundred years beforehand and desecrated the shrines, and your father had been planning a retaliatory invasion all his life. But your mind is on the bigger goal. And your teacher, Aristotle, tells you that the great heroes of myth - Achilles, Hercules, Dionysius - have all gone eastward.

"You have to understand that purity. In those days, men killed with their arms and their hands and their legs. They killed with their eyes, and they could see the man they were killing. Alexander was the first king in history to weep for the men who died. And he includes those he conquered. He never wiped out anything he didn't have to. He lets the people worship local gods. He has a child with an Oriental woman. He encourages his soldiers to interbreed. And the beauty is, after he dies, the whole region prospers. Slaves are freed. Science goes back and forth. Great cities are built.

"The whole concept of the just war has been polluted and diluted. World War I and World War II were bad enough, but then there was Vietnam. My Vietnam movies ('Born on the Fourth of July,' 'Heaven and Earth' and the Oscar-winning 'Platoon') didn't do a damn thing to awaken us to what we were doing, and now we have these wars where we don't see the enemy we kill."

Stone says the parallels to the current occupant of the White House - a second-generation ruler who is waging a protracted war in the Middle East - are coincidental, but he adds that the analogy is not inherently negative. "With this American empire that we're building in Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe next Iran, who knows how it will turn out? Depending on who writes the history books, Bush may become known as 'George the Great.' "

If Stone, who fought in Vietnam, is developing a more ambivalent attitude toward power, it's not for lack of doing his homework. The big-budget "Alexander" may be the most meticulously detailed (if morally muddy) film of his distinguished career, a career in which he's specialized in large-scale biographies of powerful men.

"Critics are looking for slices of life, independence, honesty, blah-blah-blah," he says. "That's great, but there's other things too, you know?"

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 6:57:00 PM [+] ::
...