Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) Any Given Sunday was a movie I saw in the theaters in 1999. While I saw bits and pieces on cable television over the years, my second watch of this film wasn’t until 2019. So first, it doesn’t feel like this film is 20 years old. Second, except for a few technology pieces (mainly cell phones), it felt like this movie could have been released this year and still give the same message with a nearly identical look and feel. The movie holds the test of time; sometimes, that’s one of the best things you can say about a film. Unfortunately, that is the best thing about this movie.
Category Archives: Oliver Stone
The Doors (1991)
Consistent with many of the most successful biopics about the greatest of American songwriters/bands (i.e., Walk the Line, Ray, Love & Mercy, La Bamba, What’s Love Got to Do With It, 8 Mile, Great Balls of Fire, Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody) in the last 30 years comes Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) distant, unsteady, and unapologetic story of Jim Morrison and his band in the 1991 movie The Doors. Liked more by audiences than critics, the Val Kilmer (Top Gun, Heat) led movie takes us through the formation of the band in the early 1960s to Morrison’s mysterious 1971 death in a Paris bathtub at the age of 27. One of the founding members of the infamous 27 Club, Morrison was an energizing performer whose limit-pushing love of drugs and alcohol led to his early death.
Snowden (2016)
I did not see 2015’s Citzenfour documentary about Edward Snowden. Had I, I might not have appreciated Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) biopic as much as I did. Part of the reason I was such a big fan of Snowden was that I knew very little about it before my viewing. I knew of Wikileaks and learned much from the news but didn’t pay. Snowden went from your everyday no-name to one of the most controversial figures of this century. If you think this movie will be completely neutral, you don’t know Oliver Stone very well. Heck, this was the same man who directed JFK.