Brian De Palma: Scarface

That Scarface enjoys a position in the pop culture lexicon that only strengthens with each passing year serves as a validation of its deliberate excesses and its transparently critical view of upper-class decadence in the '80s and the yuppie love for this outrageous lifestyle. Scarface updates Howard Hawks' 1932 original in a way few remakes do: it truly guts the original and places the update firmly within its own time period not only in its references but its aesthetics. In the process, it continues the mounting sociopolitical dissatisfaction creeping its way back into Brian De Palma's work, peeling back the veneer glossed over the whole decade and marking the start of the director's open hostility to the changing social landscape of the 1980s.

What De Palma does best with Scarface is demonstrate that those old gangster films (which his protagonist openly acknowledges as an influence on his young mind) were as much glamorizations of violence and decadence as anything being shunned by contemporaneous critics. Those pre-Code pictures came out during the Great Depression, times of hardship and desolation; yet the films showed well-dressed criminals living the high, fast life. When the film came out in 1983, America was just starting to recover from its worst economy since the depression, and De Palma films inside ritzy clubs and absurdly lavish mansions. And like the mainstream culture looking to flashy pop culture touchstones like Miami Vice for comfort, so too did the masses in the '30s enjoy those gangsters up on the screen (hell, they liked real-life gangsters like Dillinger). Scarface was De Palma's way of showing the public face of the '80s, and it's no wonder so many viewers hated being shown their cultural "values" in such harsh terms.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

The most common and enduring misconception about Oliver Stone is that his is a political filmmaker. This is true only insofar as he has made political films. But even when he chooses to focus on a political topic, he rarely rips stories from the headlines: his first two presidential movies were hardly topical, his World Trade Center movie made half a decade after the fact and, if anything, he jumped the gun on his Bush movie.

Instead, Stone is an emotional filmmaker, and if what's nagging at his soul should occasionally match up to the times -- as it did with Natural Born Killers and the first Wall Street -- then all the better. What motivated JFK was a lingering feeling of confusion and anguish, the attempt by a child to find the truth of his dad's murder. World Trade Center tried, unsuccessfully, to recapture that feeling of unity created by the tragedy of 9/11. Nixon was an inevitably Shakespearean look at our vilest president, but it also understood the creepy aura of Nixon enough to make you reach for your back pocket to make sure the oily snake hadn't swiped it. Finally, with W., Stone seemed to say that all you could do with the previous administration was laugh.

What is most surprising about Wall Street 2, saddled with the unfortunate subtitle "Money Never Sleeps," is how well it refrains from anger. With Stone relying more on his notoriety off the set in the past decade than his skill behind a camera, supporters and detractors expected him to be out for blood. The original Wall Street was more comedic than anything, though its warning was clear. No one heeded it, so Stone clearly brought Gordon Gekko out of his cage to say, "I told you so," right?

Instead, the prevalent mood is despair. Stone doesn't approach the meltdown from the outrage that came later. He taps into bewilderment and panic of the moment with more believability than he did the equalizing grief of September 11. None of the characters is even a member of the middle class; they all live in expansive New York lofts that cost more than the lifetime earnings of the average American even in peak economic years, and they all turn their considerable amounts of money into yet more money. Yet even these people, the architects of the Great Recession, do not understand the hole they've dug for themselves and, when the time comes, they seem as lost and overwhelmed as the rest of us did.

Stone opens with a clever visual gag of Gekko being released from prison just after the Sept. 11 attacks as a guard hands him his personal effects, among them a 1987 cell phone that lands on the desk with a dull, deep thud as if the officer had broken out an old family Bible. But the true genius of the scene is the linking of Gekko with his release date. It was in the wake of 9/11 that the government lowered the interest rate to encourage people to start spending again -- I can still remember my mom telling me the morning of Sept. 11 that the stock market had crashed because some loon on the TV was panicking. If Gekko was the symbol of Reagan-era greed, then his release from prison signals the rebirth of the unchecked money worship and deregulatory practices that made Reaganomics look so good on paper until anyone bothered to look into it.

Seven years later, the economy has begun to sag but has given no outward indication of collapse. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a young proprietary trader who works for the investment firm Keller Zabel. Ambitious even in his pre-teen years, Jake has already risen to a position of prominence within the company, and when his boss and mentor Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) calls the young man into his office, the partner hands him a bonus check for $1.5 million. Yet the old man's mood is troubled, and his unexplained concern finds a possible explanation when one of Jake's friends attempts to talk him out of reinvesting that money in the firm's stock based on rumors of hidden debt. Jake doesn't listen, but the next day, Keller Zabel stock begins to plummet.

If the original Wall Street was rooted in the pandemonium of the stock market floor, only occasionally moving into the backrooms where insider trading tips where issued for those desk jockeys on the floor. But the modern economic system is more complicated and more audacious; now, insider trading might as well be liquor store robbery, something for plebs like Martha Stewart to do. No, the spawn of Gekko found ways to make more and more money with even wilder schemes, and they think their Gordian knot will never been unraveled. What they neglected to consider is that someone or something could come by and simply cut the rope.

That rope then becomes a noose, and the other investment firms quickly fall upon Keller Zabel so that the example made of it will satisfy public outrage in case the rest of the banks need federal help in the future. Louis, ousted from the company he founded and shortchanged by the young, sinister leader of Churchill Schwartz, Bretton James (Josh Brolin), cannot cope with the shame, and he throws himself under a bus. As Gekko says later, he's the only person responsible for the crash to do so.

Lost without his guide, Jake gravitates to Gekko and convinces the man to take him in by telling him the truth: Jake is marrying Gordon's estranged daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Seemingly eager to reconcile with his child, Gordon starts to advise Jake. Without marking a clear point of departure, Stone sets to work peeling back the layers of false charity of both characters: Gordon carries something of a grudge for being abandoned by his own family, while Jake plies tips for getting revenge against Bretton James for Louis' death.

Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff's script comes loaded with over-the-top hunks of dialogue -- even LaBeouf has come out embarrassed by the line "Take a look in the mirror. See yourself. It might scare you" -- but Stone deftly mixes the motivations of the characters, never straying from greed as the central motive but demonstrating how multi-layered that sin can be. James bets against debts and wagers his own money behind the scenes to make billions, the gentler Louis still conceals his losses to maintain the illusion, Gordon wants to prove he can remake himself from nothing, Jake checks his idealism for clean energy by musing on how much money he'll make, and his mother (Susan Sarandon) quit her job as a nurse to make a more lucrative living on the housing market. Even Winnie has her ambition, courting investors for her left-wing blog and always searching to break a story that will win her massive page hits and bigger advertising.

In some of these cases, greed is not altogether bad. Jake's desire to find the next big bubble could break the world of oil dependency, while Winnie's quest for page hits stems from a drive to be a serious journalist and to make amends for her father's actions. Yet the bond that links them makes the economic downfall so overwhelming: greed might not necessarily be evil, but it exposes itself fully as destructive in the recession, leaving these people of various morality collectively lost as if a hive mind was suddenly broken.

The bewilderment of these characters in facing this revelation matched my own inability to believe that Oliver Stone could take such an angle. While his more earnest side was visible in the equally surprising Nixon, Stone's -- dare I say -- maturity makes up for the cliché of the script, which falls into one too many romantic drama pitfalls in the Jake/Winnie relationship and routinely changes Gordon around in ways that transcend his duplicitous nature and simply come off as writing to fit a scene instead of a character. Also helping is Stone's direction, which is more measured than his work during his '80s and '90s gold run yet more exciting than anything he's done in years. The opening credits end with a shot that spirals upward across the block of office buildings on Wall Street that makes place seem like a fortress. Later, as Louis walks in the park in a worry, children in the background blow bubbles, and Stone tracks one as it floats briefly, clearly tying this literal bubble to the metaphorical one that just burst back at Keller Zabel. As Stone tracks the bubble, you can practically see the dreams it contains, and you wonder what will happen when it pops.

Best of all, Stone finally gets back to getting consistently great work from his actors. Stories have already leaked about the director's pomposity on the set, but there's no denying that he got great performances across the board even if he should have paid attention to some of the cast's issues with the dialogue. Brolin doesn't match the greatness of his previous work with Stone, but he makes a terrific villain out of James to fill the gap by Gordon becoming an antihero. He isn't slimy like Gekko, just arrogant; to look at him is to see the change in Wall Street, where people now go to even more extreme lengths to make money that they care less for than the Gekkos of the world. Mulligan worked with Stone to make her character more than just the hang-on girlfriend and, even though she's saddled with all the worst aspects of the film's narrative, she succeeds in making something of what is still a fairly thankless role. LaBeouf shines here as Jake, emotional when he should be, intimidatingly conniving beyond his years. He just excels here and makes a fantastic case for being taken seriously as an actor and not the "No no no!" guy.

And yet, of course, the main draw is Michael Douglas. In the 23 years since the first Wall Street, Douglas' body has come to resemble Gekko's soul. His reptilian eyes are now set in a face that looks like that of an iguana or a chameleon, a leathery hide that cannot quite conceal the depths of his hatred for the world that let him rot in prison for what he maintains was a "victimless crime." When he softens at the mention of his daughter, Gordon retains his edge and hints at the ulterior motives driving him. Douglas certainly has no shortage of slimeball roles in the interim between Wall Streets, but he seems to relish being back in the character that cemented his reputation as a world-class asshole (I mean this genuinely in the most positive of ways). Watch the scene that involves a cameo by Bud Fox from the first Wall Street. It's a completely unnecessary scene, frankly, but Douglas' acting makes it into one of the most memorable moments of the film. As Fox gently derides his old boss, Gordon stands there and takes it, but when Bud gives him a mock-friendly pat on the shoulder, a muscle just above Douglas' mouth twitches, a crack in the dike holding back Gordon's murderous rage. That almost imperceptible moment gives the scene a dramatic edge it does not deserve, and it's proof that Douglas is still one of the best actors around and we should all hope and pray that he recovers from his illness.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps does not reach the heights of Stone's best work, but it shows the director finally grabbing onto the material with both hands and steering it to intriguing and thought-provoking places. With a terrific cast and a refined take on his exhilarating direction, Stone overcomes the handful of glaring problems that plague the script. Instead of shaking his fist, Stone takes to the enraging issue of the economic crisis and the causes of it with a grace he has not previously displayed. It's anyone's guess whether the director will continue this rejuvenation or if the planets merely aligned one last time, but Wall Street surely ranks as one of the most unexpected pleasures of the year. I never thought I'd be so pleased to see Stone keep his polemical side in the cage.

The Doors

Oliver Stone might have fallen to the wayside this decade, but I have already made my feelings clear on the level of talent he displayed throughout the '80s and '90s. There was one black sheep from this period, however, that I knew I had to confront some day, Stone's biopic of Doors frontman Jim Morrison. Indeed, that Stone would call his film The Doors is the first offense of the film, as he doesn't give a damn about any of the other members. Unfortunately, it is not remotely the last, and after I suffered through this empty display of fandom I wanted to run back to JFK or Platoon to remind me that Stone could mix technical flash with something, anything, of substance.

The Doors opens with Morrison at UCLA's film school, weathering both criticism and accolades from his peers over his avant-garde short film. When the professor asks Morrison for his own thoughts on the picture, the young man stands up and announces he's quitting. Later, he tells his buddy Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) that he's off movies; he wants to be a musician now. Stone goes through the motions of introducing guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) and drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon), and before we've even had time to care about any of these characters we are meant to celebrate them landing a record deal after shocking audiences at the Whiskey a Go Go in L.A.

At least the pacing of this initial segment suggests that this glorified piece of fan service will be over quickly, a fluff piece that annoys those who want something of substance but its inoffensive in its brevity. If only that were the case; no, Stone suddenly slams on the brakes to pore over the minutiae of Doors mythology, much of which, according to Manzarek, is a fabrication. He distorts infamous incidents such as the band's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Miami concert were Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure. No real reflection exists, other than the constant focus upon alcohol and its destructive influence on the singer.

Val Kilmer received considerable acclaim for his performance as Morrison, but the only impressive facet I can identify is that he sang the songs himself. Well, I should blame the screenplay, but Kilmer clearly took to it as if it was a great piece of writing, because he does his best to sell Jim as a tragic hero. Instead, Kilmer and Stone inadvertently paint Morrison as a drunken, narcissistic fool; Morrison is his biggest fan, and he buys into his own image as the Lizard King with such fervor that he not only lashes out in drunken arrogance but places himself above petty human feelings. His mounting obsession with death is not so much morbid as grating and vain.

Therein lies the ultimate irony of Stone's vision: in a quest to paint Morrison as a dreamer undone by vices, he instead created a damning portrait of the vacuity of the hippie ideology, one whose good ideas of freedom, love and peace were snuffed out by its own buried sense of objectivistic greed and drug-induced mental stagnation. Ebert compared the film to "being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you're not drinking," but that hardly scratches the surface of what makes Morrison so unpleasant. Alcohol does not turn Morrison into a monster; it is merely the monster's beverage of choice. The band, understandably, grows to resent him almost as much as we do. Their producer, Paul Rothchild (Michael Wincott), gives an obviously rehearsed spiel about how he watched Janis Joplin ruin herself and won't sit by and watch it again, but he does not follow his words with actions. One senses that the band just wants him to go away, and if he dies so be it. I must confess that I have rarely wanted a character to die as badly as I kept waiting for Morrison to finally snuff it in a bathtub.

The only moments I enjoyed involved Morrison's mistress Patricia Keneally (Kathleen Quinlan), a rock journalist who engages in various rituals of witchcraft, including drinking blood. Her weirdness cures Morrison of his alcoholic impotence -- itself hilarious when juxtaposed with his sex god preening -- if only for a moment. But this is a minor part of a seemingly endless film, and instead of this warped, off-kilter romance we must focus on the frightening one between Morrison and his partner Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan).

Stone's camera pans through the Père Lachaise Cemetery at the end are meant to enshrine Morrison as one of the key figures of his time, but as the director runs over the grave markers of such artists as Proust and Rossini, he only emphasizes the dark irony of Morrison's life that he brings to light. I have to question my own belief that Stone wanted to paint an ultimately supportive portrait of Morrison, because by the end of this film only a madman or a fool would think of Morrison as anything else than the drunken lout he detractors always took him for, a sophomoric poet whose crap lyrics made for great rock precisely because -- if we all break out our degrees from the Lester Bangs School of Rock Appreciation -- they were simple-minded, chauvinistic, and made to be played loud. Stone wanted to make a eulogy for the '60s, and instead he crafted its most damning condemnation since Gimme Shelter.

Natural Born Killers

Before a young, hyperactive video clerk by the name of Quentin Tarantino became, for better or worse, the icon of American independent cinema in the '90s, he toted around a couple of scripts around Hollywood hoping to direct them but at the very least looking to sell one. He managed, of course, to hold onto Reservoir Dogs for himself, his script for True Romance was optioned and eventually given to Tony Scott. His other screenplay, though, is what set the ball rolling for QT in the first place. Tarantino shopped the screenplay for Natural Born Killers around Hollywood in '91, caused a bit of a stir that helped him secure the capital for Reservoir Dogs, then he set aside the script as an immature work full of good ideas and dialogue but bursting with unfulfilled potential -- and he's very much right; his NBK starts incredibly but it loses steam in the second half.

Again, this was before the persona known as "QT" hit big, so this display of humility did not elicit the proper amount of gravity for Warner Bros., who bought the thing anyway and gave it to Oliver Stone. Now, if Tony Scott was a fun fit for Tarantino, Oliver Stone was a sign from God that this kid was going to ride Fortune's wheel to the top. You can argue for a certain degree of subtlety in Tarantino's scripts -- the utter genius of the "Eggplant" scene in True Romance, how Inglourious Basterds, for all its "badassery," shows a group of characters consumed by their quest for revenge, not validated by it -- but even the most cynical of haters would admit that QT is Voltaire compared to Oliver Stone. Indeed, even Tarantino's script was a bit too satirical and not not direct enough, so Stone and his writers kept most of the dialogue and reworked the story around it. The original writer disowned it, but eventually he divorced himself from his personal feelings on the tampering and admitted an admiration for Stone's choices.

That seems to be the appropriate response to this movie, regardless of how you feel about it: at least some level of admiration for it. Stone was coming off the more low-profile Heaven & Earth at the time, but he was still the man who was enjoying one of the most notable runs of any director of the last 25 years: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK. It was Stone's world, and we all just lived in it. By the time this story of sensationalized mass murderers entered post-production, the country had been positively inundated with ghastly reflections of this erstwhile piece of satire: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, hell, even Tanya Harding. That Stone could put out this damning piece of social commentary, particularly one so openly avant-garde, deserves recognition in its own right.

For my money, it deserves the attention. In some respects, no other American film of the decade was as important. Just as America's fascination with crime and violence began to openly assert itself, Stone's Killers wasn't so much a splash of cold water to the face as a sledgehammer. Its dizzying use of edits, different film stocks, color tinting and host of other tricks (including animation and flickering between images as if changing channels) reflect the stupefying disorientation of television. Much of the film's violence, so virulently debated and decried, is presented as captured footage or dramatic reenactments of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox's crimes, all of which are just as violent and exploitative as the moments where we witness them in real time.

The presentation of the film as television is a retooling of Tarantino's original verité-like documentary footage, which he abandoned in the second half anyway. Stone's choice is funnier and more relevant, and it allows him to inject some of the most ingenious flourishes of his career. The original screenplay, centered on media personality Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) and gave little background to the serial killers, which Stone rectified by making the warped lovebirds the full focus; his framing of Mallory's abusive childhood as an "aw-shucks" sitcom is possibly the singly most brilliant thing he's ever done. With Rodney Dangerfield playing the physically and sexually abusive father and an accompaniment of canned laughter, its easy to fall into the rhythm of a typical sitcom, until you realize that Dangerfield's punchlines are horrific descriptions of rape and beatings, all the more frightening in how Stone juxtaposes them with the laugh track, underlining how sitcoms in general milk laughs from some form of abuse and positing that violence is so ingrained in our culture that we find it inoffensively funny (how many of all the actions films made each year feature some death played for laughs?).

Mickey has his own childhood demons, and in this way Stone presents these characters as products of a violent society that matures into freewheeling madness just as Mickey and Mallory mature into their own. As such, society venerates them, chiefly through Wayne Gale, a Geraldo Rivera with Robin Leach's accent, whose program American Maniacs has never been more popular. His appearance is broadly satiric in the first half, where Gale plays in the background of Mickey and Mallory's rampage, gently inciting the public into accepting these two as heroes of some sort.

The third act, which actually lasts half the movie, takes place in prison following Mickey and Mallory's capture -- hilariously, Stone set their shootout with the cops to the Carmina Burana, further emphasizing it as a piece of operatic television. Many point to the second half as a letdown following the impressionistic, madcap murder spree, but just as Full Metal Jacket before it, Natural Born Killers needs the sudden shift in gear to flesh out its striking opening into a concrete message. Moving the pair to prison allows a juxtaposition against two cops: Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), a warped, misogynistic sadist obsessed with murderers after Charles Whitman shot his mother during his rampage at the University of Texas; and Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), an equally brutal warden who deals with the increasing overpopulation of his prison with violent offenders by physically asserting himself over those who dare step out of line. Scagnetti attempts to force himself on Mallory, who responds to his offer of a cigarette by stomping it out with her bare foot. McClusky, unlike the showboat Scagnetti, doesn't like the publicity coming his way and wants Mickey and Mallory simply and quietly killed. Yet he clearly works on his image, and he's too busy preening his devilish look to contemplate the full truth of his statement, "This place isn't a prison; it's a time bomb."

Gale's interview with Mickey is appropriately histrionic (on the presenter's part, at least), but the killer's cold rationality for his actions sparks a riot. Suddenly, television's role as a passive propagandist becomes an active character as Gale's ever-dwindling crew is forced to follow Mickey as he rescues Mallory and navigates through the horrific bloodbath that is the direct result of television. Up until this point, Natural Born Killers does not fully qualify as satire, as Stone leaps so fervently into the heart of the beast that the film's extreme violence is largely inseparable from the sort that it seeks to condemn. At last, though, it emerges as a piece of genius, as Gale is so consumed in his own hype that he too begins to gun down prison guards in a frenzy. As TV destroys itself in rapid montage, Mickey and Mallory emerge the evolved "natural born killers," the idols of a world that has finally come to celebrate its evil side, and they re-establish the "purity" of violence by killing the representative of that which turned it into a a product.

People always like to say of performances they love, even in films they might dislike, "Oh, if so-and-so wasn't in it the movie wouldn't have been half as good." I don't know why people say this, as it is so asinine as to warrant nothing but mockery -- The Godfather wouldn't be the same without Al Pacino; is it a bad film?. However the casting of Woody Harrelson, then known (fittingly, given the context of the film) only as dopey Woody from Cheers, and Juliette Lewis as two psychotic yet perversely endearing serial killers should remain an example until the end of cinema as an example of absolutely perfect casting. Downey, Sizemore and Jones also give incredible performances, all of them wildly exaggerated yet perfectly plausible in this disgusting world. But the real star here is Stone, whose techniques are utterly distracting, yet intentionally so. By the end of the film's two hours, he's destroyed the exploitative medium of television through sheer sensory overload, and his final blow is to the audience itself, as he ends with channel surfing through the sensationalizes murder trials of the day. In a career distinguished by visual inventiveness, even mastery, Natural Born Killers stands as his finest technical achievement. Upon seeing it a second time, I'm tempted to call it his greatest film, period; has any other mainstream film so trashed our cultural acceptance, even infatuation, with violence without resorting to preaching?

1989 Rewind: Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone may be traveling down the long slope to mediocrity -- W. was a surprising success, but even then only if your expectations have been worn down by such work as Alexander -- but there was a time when he was the most promising writer-director America had to offer. By the time Born on the Fourth of July was released in December 1989, he'd won an Oscar for his writing (Midnight Express) and damn near cleaned up with Platoon, his masterful depiction of his service in Vietnam. But Stone wasn't done with 'Nam, not by a long shot. Born on the Fourth of July, the second of three films that overtly concern the war, follows the war home, chronicling the traumatic re-adjustment of our wounded veterans.

As Stone establishes in the first half hour, Ron Kovic was the sort of young man that would make any parents proud and only seemed to confirm the American ideal of the '50s and '60s. Athletic, intelligent and a devout patriot, Ronnie wants nothing more than to serve his country like his father did in WWII. When Marine recruiters come to school and speak proudly of being the first called into an engagement, Kovic is inspired. The Marines say the war won't last long, he breathlessly informs his friends, "so if we don't sign up soon, we'll miss it." His mother is thrilled when he comes home and announces he's dropping out to enlist, believing her son to be doing God's work, but the veteran father is concerned.

Ronnie's tour of duty only occupies about 12 minutes of screen time, but Stone of course knows how to make them count. In the middle of a NVA ambush, Ronnie inadvertently shoots a fellow Marine; when he tries to confess to his XO, his superior officer simply brushes him off and assures the boy it's not his fault. In another skirmish, his platoon is surrounded, and Kovic is hit.

The attack sends him to a horrific VA hospital overrun with rats, drug use and uncaring doctors. I've heard that it's best to treat wounded soldiers as if they're still on the front lines and not to pamper them, but these men are treated with callous indifference. Ronnie, once a star athlete, must now hear the news that he's paralyzed from the mid-chest down and will never walk again.

So, he returns home, ashamed. At first, he continues to support the war on the basis of his loyalty to his country. He clashes with his younger brother Tommy (Josh Evans), now an anti-war activist, and must now face a once-proud mother who cannot bear the shame of having a disabled son. Slowly, Ron comes undone, disillusioned with the war and the military that doesn't care for him or anyone else maimed in Vietnam.

Tom Cruise may be known -- in acting terms, at least -- for his looks and his smile, but I maintain that he's a criminally underrated actor. His work in Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, A Few Good Men and a number of other films ranges from quite good to excellent, but nothing can compare to his performance as Kovic. His transitions from fresh-faced youth to terrified, confused soldier to broken vet to a figurehead of the anti-war movement never miss a beat, never feel rushed and never fail to convince. The only time you can even identify him as Tom Cruise the megastar is in the first hour when he's that handsome, innocent youth and the idealistic soldier; when he returns, he's as much a changed man as Kovic was. It's telling that the real Kovic gave Cruise his Bronze Star at the end of filming.

Through Kovic we see how Vietnam forever destroyed that postwar vision of the purity of the American family. Timmy represents those who rebelled against family and friends to protest the government, while Ron shows us how even those who fit the bill of that ideal were corrupted by the senseless conflict. You forget what a naïve kid Ron really is, until he loses his virginity to a prostitute. As he tearfully screams to his mother before leaving home, he lost the use of his penis before he "even learned how to use it." For this All-American to be reduced to awkward sex with a prostitute, which he misconstrues for true love, sheds harsh light on how he and many others who served and were wounded or killed had their futures ripped from them.

Stone's never been one for subtlety, and Born on the Fourth of July suffers at time from obvious dialogue when moments like his time with the prostitute conveys more than pithy statements. But he also knows how maintain your attention, either through the actions on-screen or the masterful way that he captures them. What makes Stone's early films so captivating is how he just never let up, hitting us with a barrage of images so quickly you didn't realize how revolutionary so many of his techniques were until the film ended and you could actually take a breath. His script conveys the outrage he feels over the mishandling of our veterans, a problem that exists to this day, but there are also flashes of pitch-black humor: while relaxing in a sort of disabled vet's paradise in Mexico, he gets into an argument with another wheelchair-bound veteran (Willem Dafoe) over whether they killed babies in 'Nam.

Stone won his second Best Director Oscar for the film, and it is richly deserved. Born on the Fourth of July, heavy-handed as it can be in spots, is one of his enduring masterpieces alongside Platoon and JFK. Cruise's performance is the finest of his career, yet we must not forget superb supporting turns from Kyra Sedgwick as Ron's high school sweetie turned college demonstrator, Dafoe's initially calm and genial Charlie and Raymond J. Barry as Ron's concerned, loving father. This is the second film from 1989 I've watched about the Vietnam War, and it's by far the best. I have a long way to go, but I'll be surprised if I find many films from the year I enjoy as much or more than this.

Wall Street

Who could have guessed that Oliver Stone, a director obsessed with the past, be it the '60s or Ancient Greece, would make a film that would one day seem eerily prescient? Wall Street certainly had its fair share of current events on which to comment when it debuted in late 1987 -- what with Black Monday and the market crash occurring around the same time -- but recent events have cast the film in an entirely new light, one that only makes the excesses of the film's businessmen seem even seedier.

What struck me about the film almost immediately was its attention to detail: Stone brought aboard several business consultants to ensure his film looked just like the real stock floors and boardrooms -- right down to the ratio of women to men in higher positions. The fat cats never rest on their laurels as peons slave away for mediocre wages while they reap all the benefits: they may not be doing "real" work, but executives and brokers move faster than Olympic athletes and wrack their brains over numbers more than engineers. Only the best survive, and they devour the ones who lag behind even for a second. Yet for all its seriousness, to these men it seem little more than a game.

Into this world comes Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a stockbroker looking for a big client to deliver a fat paycheck. He sets his sights on one of the biggest players in town, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate raider who makes no bones about his willingness to get ahead by any means necessary. Bud tries to win his favor with a box of cigars, but G.G. wants something a bit more substantial. The young broker's father, Carl (Martin Sheen), heads the union of an airline company, and so he begins to feed his potential client information about the company. Over time, Gekko takes the lad under his wing, promising wealth, women and power. He needs to stop worrying about that pesky thing called "legality," is all.

Soon, Bud flies in private jets, buys a swanky home and even scores a hot trophy blonde, the materialistic interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah). The sky's the limits. Bud sits in the middle of the rampant, free-market greed of Gekko and the moral compass of his father. Carl just wants his fair share for the union, joking with his son that "money is only something you need if you don't die tomorrow." By contrast, Gekko, in a fiery speech to a company resisting his buyout, coldly admits that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Bud only looks on with admiration.

Few directors are better suited to chart the frenetic world of trading like Oliver Stone, who nearly bounces off the wall with energy as he shuffles the corridors with the sharks. He's clearly using the camera to make a point about the pace and casualness of decisions that can put thousands out of work just to bump up profit margins, but Stone never outright condemns the system. No, he's not quite the pinko Commie we make him out to be, and a part of Gekko's infamous "Greed is good" speech isn't all evil: greed really does motivate people to do make some great breakthroughs, and there's nothing wrong with prosperity. Instead, Stone judges those who resort to insider trading and other illegal activities to fuel the unchecked excess of the '80s.

In retrospect, Wall Street reminds me of the worlds Bret Easton Ellis creates: these men aren't really prosperous, they've just buried problems under glitzy illusions. The film never treads in Ellis' dark territory, of course, but you can still practically see the cocaine dust that coats everything. Gekko's mercenary tactics are scarcely removed from the elaborate house of cards that made us all think everything was great until it suddenly collapsed.

The only real weak component of the film is Hannah as Darien: supposedly her ideology conflicted with the shallow nature of the character, but she could have always said no. Nevertheless, she can't bring down such a smartly-written, expertly paced exposé, and Wall Street ranks as one of Stone's finest achievements. Yet I can't help but look at the end, in which Bud rebels against his golden god and must face the SEC, with a certain grain of cynicism: Bud knows he's going to jail for what he's done, but we've all seen businessman after businessman walk away scot free. How strange that I thought his probable incarceration to be almost idealistic.

W.

I wish I had been in the room when Oliver Stone announced he was making a biopic on George W. Bush and that the goal of it was not to demonize him, if for no other reason than to see if his pants caught fire. Of all the insufferable celebrities who use every moment of press to give us their unwanted political opinions, Stone is up there with the worst. The fact that he started shooting the movie in May and made sure he released it before the election didn’t inspire much confidence either. Then again, his two previous films about presidents or events directly concerning them, “JFK” and “Nixon,” were bold, revisionist, even-handed dramas, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Surprisingly, he made a pretty great film.

“W.” chronicles the President’s life from his early days at Yale to shortly before his second presidential election. The film is structured out of chronological order, preferring instead to show the growth of W. as a person and to draw parallels. When Vice President Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) convinces Bush to approve “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the President calls to mind his fraternity initiation, in which he and other pledges sat in a tub of ice water while being force-fed alcohol and generally disoriented.

As with Stone’s previous presidential dramas, “W.” often returns to a theme in the form of an obsession of the protagonist. In “JFK,” it was Garrison’s attempt to prosecute Clay Shaw seemingly because of his homosexuality. In “Nixon,” it was the juxtaposition of Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Here, the defining conflict Bush’s relationship with his father; Junior wants to escape his father’s shadow, but only gets jobs and diplomas on his family name. Even as president, his decisions on Iraq must inevitably be compared to Poppy’s. Junior’s desire to measure up to his family name drives his life; in his youth, he drinks and blows off multiple jobs just to frustrate his father. Even when he runs for Congress, it’s more to prove that he can than an attempt to get into politics.

The turning point in W.’s life is his cold turkey sobriety and his Born Again Christianity. These events save his life, but they also shape his attitude as President. Recovered addicts and Born Again Christians fundamentally believe in a clean slate. The term itself, “born again,” denotes a rebirth, resetting the clock to year zero. They acknowledge the past but must not dwell on it. This psyche might explain why he has stuck by so many bad decisions over his tenure.

Stone has always been a director capable of handling a large cast, and for the most part he succeeds here. Elizabeth Banks plays Laura Bush- who doubles as the film’s conscience- as a supportive, loving woman who reassures her husband even as she chastises him. Jeffrey Wright and Dreyfuss are likewise marvelous, with Wright capturing Colin Powell’s cautious wisdom while Dreyfuss embodying Cheney. Stone draws a parallel between Powell and Cheney; both are men who speak their mind and know their business, but Powell knows the human costs and expresses hesitance while the disconnected Cheney pushes for war in Iraq to open up oil lines. Toby Jones and Scott Glenn play Rove and Rumsfeld as one-note villains who show no consideration for the consequences of their actions. The worst is Thandie Newton’s absurd portrayal of Condoleeza Rice as a screen-mugging parody. Her presence alone hurts Stone’s claim that this isn’t some joke.

Surprisingly, the film portrays Bush sympathetically. Stone paints him as a good man who, though not necessarily simple, is easily manipulated by advisors into the public face of their machinations. What the film lacks in historical perspective, it makes up for with a human element; Bush genuinely believes he is doing God’s work and, as such, cannot question his own decisions. By stopping the film’s timeline in 2004, it avoids the extremities of the Bush administration’s failures and thus is able to make these people seem more relatable, or at least the Bush family.

Stone’s films never strive for absolution for their characters, but rather for understanding. He does not pardon Bush’s actions because he was manipulated, but neither does he condemn any member of the administration. The film is too rushed and lacks Stone’s usual visual mastery, and as such holds little of the replay value of “JFK” or “Nixon.” He also should have fired Thandie Newton after the first rushes came in and recast Rice. However, this is a gripping and entertaining film that blends the facts of Bush’s life with his usual fantastical elements. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but it’s one of the better films of the year.