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Opening the Box
With the holidays come opportunities to explore DVD gift sets of some of cinema's masters. Here's a look at three examples.
By Shala Carlson
WHAT: The Ultimate Oliver Stone Collection: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday
DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
STARRING: James Woods, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Cruise, Anthony Hopkins
Warner Home Video (www.dvdwb.com)
GRADE: A
Actors love Oliver Stone. Angelina Jolie has called him the god of chaos (a serious compliment coming from her unruly highness). On Inside the Actors' Studio, Kevin Costner spoke of him with obvious professional affection and great personal concern. The Doors' Val Kilmer might have fought him the first go-round but made nice in time for Alexander. James Woods and Tommy Lee Jones return to the insanity and intensity of his sets again and again. So what do these actors know? Something the October-released Ultimate Oliver Stone Collection confirms: This Oliver Stone guy is worth the trouble.
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It's obvious listening to Stone's commentaries and the eight or so documentary features sprinkled throughout the DVD set that he prides himself on seeing a bigger picture, both literally and figuratively. His films can be monsters -- the director's cut of Nixon runs about three and a half hours, and JFK is an encyclopedic record of assassination conspiracy theories, a magnificent marathon of images and information all moving faster than a speeding bullet.
But it's never bigness for the sole sake of bigness; more so than almost any of his contemporaries, Stone is driven by ideas, theories, possibilities, subtext. His visual unpredictability is the perfect conduit for his intellectual combustibility, a marriage that makes him probably the most interesting moviemaker of his time. Yes, his oeuvre is imperfect -- sometimes he goes a bit too far (Natural Born Killers); sometimes he falls just short (U-Turn). But who else can make eye candy so smart your brain hurts (JFK)? And who else makes technically brilliant movies that ping-pong so perfectly around the screen (Any Given Sunday)? The director's cut of JFK serves as this collection's spiritual and literal centerpiece. In the commentary, Stone refers to the 1991 film as his Godfather, and he couldn't be more right. The opening sequence alone is masterful, combining John Williams' amazing score, Martin Sheen's contextualizing voiceover and Oliver Stone's flawless visual sense. He feels no need to establish flow in the usual sense, creating small snapshots instead and weaving them together in an impressionistic triumph. As shots ring out (don't believe anyone who tells you they know from where), pigeons fly from their rooftop roost on a downtown Dallas building -- a simple, violent movement that perfectly captures the mayhem of the moment yet circumnavigates the physical gore of the assassination, which will be introduced later. (It also happens to be an immaculate visual metaphor for the myriad threads of conspiracies that raced from Dealey Plaza that day.) JFK is just one example of how Stone's mastery of his medium frequently gets overshadowed by the provocative nature of his messages or the excesses of his personality; the film's radioactivity grew from questions about its historicity and Stone's creative condensations. Cultural arbiters -- media, audiences, critics -- mistakenly believed Stone thought he was providing answers when really he was just raising questions. And suddenly the conversation shifted from Oliver Stone as filmmaker and artist to Oliver Stone as paranoiac and historical revisionist. (In much the same way, the upset surrounding 1994's Natural Born Killers ignored the fact that it was a film once novelist John Grisham had spun it as a murder weapon.) Placing all of his films next to each other, though, makes it impossible to ignore Stone's prowess behind the camera. Perhaps Wall Street wears thin (although it does still claim a few great greed-is-good moments), but even the diarrheic verbosity of Talk Radio continues to play interestingly if not necessarily well. JFK and Platoon stand as the masterpieces that they are. Nixon remains a fascinating experiment. (To Stone as well, apparently, who provides not one but two separate commentary tracks for the film.) U-Turn and Natural Born Killers (glory hallelujah, Stone at long last gets a chance to explain those blasted slo-mo bunnies at the end) are frenetic, nihilistic crazy trains. The woefully overlooked, elegant and elegiac Heaven and Earth finally assumes its rightful place as one of Stone's most beautifully filmed works. And then there are the extras. Oliver Stone's America is a nearly hour-long sit-down with the man himself for a wide-ranging conversation about his life and his work; the disc also includes his haunting black-and-white, French-language student film Last Year in Viet Nam. Looking for Fidel and Persona Non Grata are documentaries produced for HBO about Cuba and Israel, respectively. Neither redefine the genre; both are absolutely mesmerizing accounts of the filmmaker's encounters with world leaders.
Aside from a chance to see Stone's almost-entire directorial body of work together (minus The Hand, whose absence disappoints this diehard), the collection's greatest gifts are the commentaries; Stone speaks at length about every movie except Talk Radio, and to hear his passion for the layered themes of JFK is to rediscover him as an artist. This is a man who understands the literature of film and teaches us well. If there's a common theme that emerges from diving into The Ultimate Oliver Stone Collection and all its toys, it's that Stone -- ever the artist, ever the provocateur -- makes it his business to throw things at the wall and just see what sticks. Lucky for us, his wall happens to be our movie screen. -- Carlson
Other Stories This Week in Movies:
Balcony Seats
Inside Joke
Film Review
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Film Listings
Other Stories by Shala Carlson and David Lee Simmons:
Film Review 12 14 04
Film Review 12 07 04
Cover Story 11 30 04
Shala Carlson and David Lee Simmons Archives
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