Samuel Smith writes:
 
>>>At the risk of being literal here, what Riccardo just told us is that
Oliver Stone made a movie glorifying mass murder.  Glorification =
promotion, right?  So Ollie wants us to all go out on killing sprees.
 
I believe there is an important difference between what he wants and what he
gets. In other words, his PURPOSE, which I totally ackowldege as an
indictement of media and of a perverted system that thrives on the monsters
it creates, is not necessarily the only possible reading of the film. My
posting was just a reply (although a probably overstated one) to the
statement that 'no audiences could possibly miss the point'. I do believe
that a lot will. That has obviously nothing to do with the artistic merits of
the film, which, BTW, I thoroughly enjoyed.
 
I also think that a similar approach can be valid for Stone's Viet-nam films.
In answer to:
was PLATOON a glorification of the Vietnam War? (as Samuel Smith wonders) ...
I don't think so, but I know people who DO think so: when I was in the army,
a met a number of officers who considered 'Platoon', 'Born on the 4th of
July' (and Full Metal Jacket) as the best celebrations of war ever made.
 
I still have to see a film that makes its points so unequivocally that no
audience, no matter how biased, will miss the point (Spike Lee's films are
another case in point). But again, at risk of being redundant, ambiguity is
not a flaw, and I personally found the ambiguity in NBK very fascinating (we
don't really need a film to tell us that mass-murder is wrong ... if we do,
then I think we're in trouble).
 
PS I'm preparing a posting with a few comparisons between the original script
Y Quentin Tarantino and the film. QT didn't like the film, and gave up the
Screenplay credit, taking only a Story by credit. The script is more clearly
a Nietzschean statement, and also includes a few scenes that remind of Man
bites Dog, which, if included by Stone in the final film, would have probably
helped make the point that M&M are in fact two vicious murderers (if that
Riccardo De Los Rios
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