Oliver Stone: From My Lai to Ahmadinejad
After ingratiating the Right with his last film “World Trade Center,”
even going so far as hiring the Swift Boaters to
promote it, Oliver Stone now has proposed a couple of new projects that look
like he’s trying to fuck with them. Or maybe he’s stilll fucking with the left,
who have already been feeling somewhat betrayed by his political inconsistency.
Or just fucking with us all.
Certainly his proposed film “Pinkville,” his re-enactment of the
My Lai masacre, isn’t going delight his former Republican benefactors, not
after President Bush informed us that Vietnam IS like Iraq, and
that’s a good thing
So a reminder of an atrocity in which 400 plus unarmed civilans including women
and children were systematically executed by GIs isn’t going to help the cause.
Not when two new films about Iraq
suggest that when an immoral govern puts decent American soldiers into a brutal
and confused war environment for repeated tours of duty with no goal and sight
and tacit authority to use whatever means make sense at the time, stuff happens.
After seeing Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” yesterday, though, all I can say is the “Crash” master’s
graceless manipulative hand remains the same and he should score political
points with the already converted and earn Oscar nominations from the
aesthetically clueless. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” on the other hand, which
wowed them at the Venice Festival, is a different story. Based on a 2006 incident in which U.S. soldiers were accused
of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killing her and her family, it
looks it might have some of the intensity of his Vietnam War-set “Casualties of
War" (1989), one of his best and
clearest-headed films.
Back to Stone, however, whose second project might prove even
more irritating to some than the first. After his initial offer to make a
documentary about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were rebuffed with him
being denounced as part of the “great Satan” and Stone retorting “I wish the
Iranian people well, and hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue
president goes better than ours,” cooler heads apparently have prevailed and
the movie buff Iranian spitfire has given the green light. All I can say is
that they better get a move on if they want to start shooting before the
bombing starts, or maybe that’s the kind of scenario Stone is hoping for.
All in all, though, I must admit I’ve been disillusioned with the
effectiveness of movies making any difference in the overall scheme of things
-- that is until I read this item in “Variety.” It seems that an Israeli website
called “Ratuv” (Hebrew for “wet”) has won a lot of fans in Arab countries, some
hostile to Israeli, with its politically savvy porn flicks featuring soldiers
and Mossud agents engaged in non-violent undercover and undressed activity.
This is clearly taking the slogan “Make love not war” at its word. Personally,
I feel vindicated, since the last time I checked out the Internet Searches log
for this site it consisted almost entirely of headings like "sexiest scene," "blow-job non pornographic,"Tim Allen nude," "tom hanks urinating scene," "blow jobs," and "sexiest sex scene."