Well, we definitely know that Tom Cruise helped the Shogun defeat the Emperor … or something.
I can’t wait to see a movie in which it is shown how a previously unknown Chagatai mercenary and military genius (and a teen-aged girl!), who just happened to be travelling through the United states in 1865, was really responsible for Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Actually, I forgot the part in which she ran into Abraham Lincoln a couple of times, giving him cruicial advice on the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.
And the only reason that the war lasted so long in the first place was because of the key strategic advice given to Robert E. Lee by a pygmy warrior, who one day was chasing his pet dog and ended up in Richmond, Va.
Cite for Oliver Stone having any particularly egregious tendency to distort or exaggerate history? Aside from JFK, I mean.
I don’t really get where this meme comes from that Oliver Stone’s career is all about conspiracy theories, etc. He’s made exactly one (1) film in his career that propagted a conspiracy theory and it happens to be about the one event in US history where a belief in a conspiracy (right or wrong) is fairly mainstream.
Other than JFK, Stone’s movies have been pretty reasonable in their presentations of history (Platoon] (which was widely lauded as one of the most accurate movies ever made about Vietnam), Nixon, The Doors, Born On the Fourth of July and even World Trade Center have all been straightforward depictions (at least by Hollywood standards) of historical people and events. He’s also made a lot of movies which are straight entertainments with no real historical or political pretensions at all (Wall Street, Talk Radio, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday.
The guy made one conspiracy-oriented film. It is not an accurate representation of his entire filmmaking career.
Sorry for the rant, but this is a minor pet peeve of mine.
That’s the movie I had in mind. It’s pretty egregious all by itself.
I will resist the temptation to comment further on JFK assassination conspiracy buffs and their foibles. Stone’s movie grates in part because of the hero-role assigned to Jim Garrison, whom history more accurately depicts as an egotist and grandstander who presided over one of the worst injustices in the history of American jurisprudence (the Clay Shaw prosecution). Good reading on the subject: James Kirkwood’s American Grotesque.
I wasn’t defending JFK theories, just objecting to the popular characterization of Oliver stone as a director who specializes in conspiracy-themed films.
If it’s any consolation, Diogenes, Oliver Stone is far from the only director whose body of work has been stained by a wildly inaccurate portrayal of history.
A worse example is D.W. Griffiths’ Birth Of A Nation, whose racism and glorification of the K.K.K. overshadows his other accomplishments. For me, anyway.
I don’t hate America. I just want all its institutions destroyed and its people enslaved (cept Anaamika and gigi under my heel, and servicing my every whim.
Do I need to tattoo "Evil Overlord Aspirant on my forehead or something?
Wouldn’t it be awesome if they really did give him an F-14? But don’t make it part of the plot, or anything. Nobody in the film even mentions it. It’s just there, blowing up German planes left and right.
