Tag: Oliver Stone

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Born On the Fourth of July’

Hey kids and kittens. Chug is absolutely booked solid with work this week. As such he’s running a MasterChugs flashback to tie in with this coming weekend’s events. Enjoy.

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July is not an adaptation of the memoir by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, though that’s what the credits indicate. It’s most certainly based on it, but it’s not necessarily an adaptation of the memoir. It’s an indulgent style showcase for Stone, who, with his longtime cinematographer Robert Richardson, employs every act of film trickery imaginable that doesn’t involve CGI effects. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Born On the Fourth of July’

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Any Given Sunday’

As a cinematic flasher of not-so-secret mass culture fantasies, Oliver Stone is Hollywood’s R-rated answer to P. T. Barnum. Instead of clowns, aerialists and lion tamers, he parades his own hyper-macho vision of modern American life as a primitive bread-and-circuses carnival of power, greed, lust, fame and violence (especially violence). And in Any Given Sunday, his viscerally charged, razzle-dazzle ode to professional football as a blood sport, he comes up with some quintessentially zany Oliver Stone moments.

Using the film, Stone dissects the glory and decadence of football, as seen through the stunning victories and stinging defeats of the fictitious Miami Sharks. Stone presents the players of the NFL as modern-day gladiators who do battle before bloodthirsty crowds in multi-million dollar coliseums, where on any given Sunday, you either win or lose. And while the veteran director has assembled some top-notch talent for this ode to the American past time, the film’s potential for being one of the great films of 1999 ends up being sabotaged by Stone’s own directorial indulgences, which almost make it unwatchable. Almost. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Any Given Sunday’

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Born on the Fourth of July’

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July is not an adaptation of the memoir by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, though that’s what the credits indicate. It’s most certainly based on it, but it’s not necessarily an adaptation of the memoir. It’s an indulgent style showcase for Stone, who, with his longtime cinematographer Robert Richardson, employs every act of film trickery imaginable that doesn’t involve CGI effects. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Born on the Fourth of July’