NATURAL BORN THRILLER

WILD, WEIRD AND UNIQUE, OLIVER STONE SERVES UP A HOT-BLOODED FILM AND A CRAZY-COOL NEW NOVEL

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Let's trip into Oliver Stone's brain. It's a jungle in there, luscious, overgrown, drenched in sensuality and high seriosity, alive with death. The Vietnam of his mind is "waisthigh in vegetation," as Stone writes in his novel A Child's Night Dream (St. Martin's Press; 236 pages; $21.95). "Green with wet."

Stone the filmmaker is always on a weird trip, is ever on the edge of wetness; that salutary quality endears him to souls more timid and judicious. It is as if we had chosen him as our Designated Liver, to be our recording angel and exemplary fool, to be the '60s adventurer, to go to Yale and war, do drugs, have sex with all classes and colors of women, to make scenes and movies, to be the gonads and guilty conscience of his generation. And if we hadn't drafted him? Then Stone, as he did for Vietnam infantry service in 1967, would eagerly have volunteered.

Unlike today's breed of safe-bet directors, Stone is the guy who tries things. He works fast and hard: U Turn, the dark, barking melodrama that opens this week, is his 11th feature in 11 years. He godfathers other films (The People vs. Larry Flint, The Joy Luck Club), dabbles in TV (Wild Palms), keeps stoking his legend. A Child's Night Dream should do that: it's a big, toxic dose of undiluted Oliver. But don't take his word for him. Check out Jane Hamsher's funny, true-sounding Killer Instinct (Broadway Books; 288 pages; $25), about her experience as producer of Stone's Natural Born Killers. The book paints Stone as a holy freak--part Ahab, part Ken Kesey--who'll drive everyone nuts to get a film made his way.

We'll have to wait for a tell-all book about U Turn, which John Ridley adapted from his novel Stray Dogs. The movie dwells in the dry heat of Superior, Ariz., a town halfway between Phoenix and Hades. As Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) speeds through in his '64-and-a-half Mustang convertible, a vulture picks at the carcass of a canine that looks meaner than the bird; even the victims here wear a scowl. That's Bobby: a part-time tennis player, full-time weasel who kicks cats and isn't much nicer to humans.

And he's the hero! When his car breaks down, Bobby is at the mercy--make that the whim--of "an ignorant, inbred, tumbleweed hick" car mechanic (good ole, evil ole Billy Bob Thornton); a slut-siren (Jennifer Lopez, reeking lubricity) who invites Bobby home and purrs, "I'm tired a hangin' drapes--now what shall we do?"; and her grizzled husband (Nick Nolte in the goat-patriarch mode perfected by John Huston), who has a business proposition for Bobby: Kill my wife, please.

Stone calls U Turn a scorpions-in-a-bucket movie; deadly critters snap at one another until only the strongest (or the top billed) survives. It also honors the familiar tropes of hombre films, from the requisite convenience-store holdup and multiple murder to a strident Ennio Morricone score (with the banshee harmonica from his Sergio Leone westerns). There's also a waitress named Flo. Stone swathes all this menace in his patented white-hot style: slo-mo, echoing voices, flashbacks that flick like lightning, cartoon sound effects (when the Mustang is mentioned, you'll hear a horse whinny). A streetwise Indian (Jon Voight) tells Bobby, "Your lies are old, but you tell 'em pretty good." Same with the film--a wily, parched comedy of really bad manners.

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