Throughout his legendary career, Oliver Stone has been able to describe The United States under every point of view. He spoke about music in the documentary The doors, about sport in Every bloody sunday and last year he spoke about the internet world with Snowden. Although is hard to just talk about three movies, let’s find out three masterpieces from Stone that were able to talk about the United States’s recent history: Platoon, Wall street and W.
Platoon, 1986: “The Vietnam”
Oliver Stone’s consecration as a director. After some great performances as a writer, he imposes himself also as a director. This is a movie he made in order to dispel the heavy and unpleasant consequences that the “ ‘Nam” had on him. The plot is actually similar to the experience that the New York’s director had: a young and naive american drops out of college to join the army and fight in the Vietnam war. What the movie talks about in this movie is one of the darkest side of the war: that is pointless. The young Chris Taylor will soon realize that he is completely useful for his platoon because he doesn’t know how Vietnam works and he is not prepared for the war, The really fight, is actually the domestic one in the platoon. The risk of getting sick and the wilderness of the environment lead to an abuse of drugs that, with the brutality and pointlessness of the war itself, have tear this men down.
Stone honored them with the final caption:
“Dedicated to all the men that fought and died in the Vietnam’s war”
Wall street: “the stock exchange”
Charlie Sheen, the son of the great Martin, is for twice in a row the first choice to play the protagonist. The two Sheen play a father and his son in the 1987’s movie that was made a “cult” due to the “Gordon Gekko” character played by Michael Douglas. Bud Fox is a young, ambitious “Stockbroker” who is ready to do anything to get to the top. Stone decides to talk about greed more than about capitalism, but most of all, he really wants to talk about the second coming of the “The gold rush”, where the “Gold” is the “Stock market”. Earning money is easy and Gordon Gekko know it; you just need not to be sentimental, trust nobody and being scared of nothing. The movie is also famous because it is told in a precise and technical way, using many truly “economic” expressions. Gekko and Fox talk like two stockbrokers would, with technical terms, something impossible to understand but are necessary to really “enter” in the “Stock Options”’s world.
Expensive cars, drugs, women: This is the new american dream as told by Stone.
W., 2008. “ Politics”
Rarely has a biopic been more fascinating, funny, irreverent, problematic and realistic than this one. To describe W., a marvelous biopic about George W. Bush, greatly played by Josh Brolin, si sufficient to say some “facts”. More than the bad “Box Office” result, which everyone kind of foresaw, we can think about the episode of the Rome’s film festival. The movie was supposed to open the festival but apparently the back then prime minister Berlusconi did manger to take it off the market, given his good relationship with the president; No one of Italy’s major distribution companies was brave enough to distribute it, till a small company got the rights and showed it in just a few theaters.
