in re: the claim that operas provide a paradigm against which oliver stone's cinematic revisitings of history might be measured, please to observe that opera composers for sure [and my guess is shakepeare as well] USED history as the premise for military choruses and love duets [or engrossing drama and flights of language] but were NOT concerned with revising history stone surely IS concerned with revising history . . . his movies care as much about what kenneth burke called the "psychology of information" as about the "psychology of form," what we--in more innocent days--used to refer to as the aesthetic the conventional western is really the kind of film that does to [usa] history what verdi did to [italian] history . . . stone is doing something quite different . . . . . . this is not to criticise stone's work at all, merely to point out what standards ought to be applied if one wants to criticise it mike frank ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]