Amazon.com video review:
While this monumental retrospective of Oliver Stone's directorial career
doesn't include Salvador or Platoon--Stone's early,
acknowledged masterpieces of history and remembrance--it certainly sheds light
on the more controversial arc of his work ever since.
Beginning with 1987's Wall Street, Stone's barbed tragedy about
corporate raiders and blinding greed during the Reagan years, this
cinematic 10-pack represents a curious odyssey of generational
touchstones, outright obsessions, and feverish experimentation. The minor, 1988
Talk Radio, for instance, introduced Stone's then-evolving critique of
inflamed media in a society of hapless onlookers. But it was 1994's
Natural Born Killers that exploded the theme in a wildly ambitious
farce concerning two lovers who defy manufactured perceptions by becoming
notorious murderers. Killers pushes the limits of screen violence,
visual literacy, and the mixed-media technique (juggling film stocks,
incorporating video, etc.) that Stone introduced in JFK. If the result is
cold and forced, it's also brazen.
Most significant is the way this collection underscores Stone's drive to
fuse historical drama with lingering emotions about the past. Stone, a
Vietnam War veteran, revisits that haunting debacle here in the masterful
Born on the Fourth of July and the moving Heaven & Earth.
Yet some of his most famous efforts still draw heaps of scorn for narrative
hubris and factual recklessness. (Does anyone really believe John F.
Kennedy was assassinated during a Lyndon Johnson coup d'état?) But
time is on Stone's side. Eventually, JFK, The Doors, and
Nixon will be seen not as a failed objective history, but as the
experience of a tumultuous era in the imagination of a man who lived
through it all and can't shake it off.
The collection concludes with the flawed contemporary noir U Turn and the
unexpectedly entertaining football saga Any Given Sunday.
Stone bided his time following this extraordinary body of work, until the
humanitarian relief drama Beyond Borders (not included) found the
director on familiar footing. As Stone's legacy continues to grow, there is a
remarkable career here to revisit with these 10 films. --Tom Keogh
