Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today.  "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened.  Couldn't Stone have waited a few years?  After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him.  Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him.  As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man:  that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle.  With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way.  So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter.  It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt.  Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it.  But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone:  he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

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Warner Brothers is fending off reports that they are keeping promotional materials for the November 11 release of the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton on DVD under wraps rather than using them to stir up interest in the movie rather than advertise any connection to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. The movie, which was released during the same wave of Reagan-era Vietnam films that included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket (as well as such gung-ho popcorn entertainments as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films), is a sympathetically intended treatment of the American presence in Vietnam that is set among the prisoners of war being held at the Hoa Lo prison where McCain served his time as a P.O.W. (The movie is not meant to depict any actual person's experience. However, it does make room for an appearance by an idiotic American movie star and war protester, played by Gloria Carlin, who is called "Paula" but is obviously meant to be Jane Fonda.) Earlier this year, McCain filmed an interview about his own prison experience which was to be included on the DVD. Now, reports Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Warner Brothers has "moved quietly over the last few weeks to block any promotional showing" of any part of that interview, for fear that it "might embroil the project in electoral politics." A spokesman for Warners' home enterttainment division describes its decision as "just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.” In response, Lionel Chetwynd, the British-born Canadian-American writer-director of The Hanoi Hilton, has fired back that "Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel.” And you thought that British-born Canadian-Americans never got off any good ones!

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Stanley Weiser, Oliver Stone's co-writer on the 1987 Wall Street, has just published his apologia for his part in the creation of the popular image of the morally shifty, massive-balled financial insider as American hero. (Weiser also wrote Stone's forthcoming W. as well as other politically crusading movies and TV films such as Murder in Mississippi, Freedom Song, Rudy: The Rudy Guiliani Story, and 1987's Project X, in which Matthew Broderick fearlessly rescued monkeys from The Man.) Wall Street, which starred Michael Douglas as maverick financier Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen, who had already done time as Stone's youthful fantasy alter ego in Platoon, as his corruptible protege. Douglas, playing a role designed to click with moviegoers' memories of the kind of charismatic heel role that his father had all but taken out a copyright on decades earlier, had his star heightened by the movie, for which he won an Academy Award. (As for Sheen, he can now be seen rotting before the viewer's very eyes on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The other representatives of the show's title are played by Jon Cryer and some kid. I think somebody's math is off.) Meanwhile, Gekko's showboat moment, the "'Greed is good' speech", has become not just a one-scene highlight reel of Douglas's career but a signpost moment in 1980s culture, a phenomenon that's been challenging the 60's status as The Decade That Refused to Leave. (Oliver Stone, of course, has a foot solidly in both.) A recent critics' symposium on the possible effects of the Wall Street crash pointed to that speech as a choice example of satire that was adopted by people who steadfastly refused to get the joke.

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15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)



This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

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Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford’s think piece about recent U.S. foreign policy, sounded like a pretentious, humorless slog. Rendition: ditto. No End In Sight and about a zillion other well-reviewed documentaries about the current Middle East mess popped up at my local art house for about a week, only to disappear before I got out to see them (though, to be honest, I probably never tried very hard). In The Valley of Elah is # 71 in my Netflix queue, and United 93 haunted my TiVo for months before I finally admitted that waiting 'til I was in the right mood to watch it probably wasn’t something that was likely to happen for years.

It’s not that I want to keep myself ignorant about the truths and half-truths of the War On Terror. It’s not that I can’t handle dramatic subject matter. And it’s not that I don’t support the troops. But, like many Americans already saturated with information about the infuriating incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy misadventures since 9/11, the past seven years have been such a demoralizing downer that spending my free time deliberately subjecting myself to fresh, Hollywood-inspired fits of impotent rage seems like the leisure time equivalent of driving around in rush hour traffic for kicks. And yet, somehow, after numerous box office failures, Hollywood has finally managed to get the War on Terror right...on the small screen, at least, with HBO’s seven-part adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, based on his observations as a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion during the early days of the current Iraq war.

Are you watching this show?

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Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

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You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce

Baseball season is nearing an end, which means that so, too, is my chance to watch TV commercials. I’m not much of a television watcher (well, I watch a lot of TV, but mostly on DVD), and about the only time I get a chance to see mainstream commercials is before a feature at a movie theatre, or during baseball season. That’s just fine with me; the things rarely live up to the standards of either high art or low camp, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Imagine, then, my surprise when a commercial for Traveler’s Insurance cropped up during a Red Sox-Cleveland playoff game featuring one of my all-time favorite character actors: this week’s That Guy!, Richard Edson. It’s actually a pretty good bit of casting, for a commercial – who better to embody Risk, the very personification of bad luck, than the laconic, hangdog Edson? His long, weary face (almost always sporting a mustache of one kind or another) and perpetual look of a wheedling cajoler has made me a longtime fan of his infrequent movie roles; he’s not the most prolific actor out there, but he tends to steal the show whenever he shows up.

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