Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films—Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director—whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror to be so white-hot they will cauterize and heal the wounds of war, and singe...
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