How to make an Oliver Stone Movie.
You'll need:
1 pinch of plot
6 kilos of mixed film stock
4 tonnes of anger at Vietnam
11 hours of "Back in my day…" dialogue
3 porno actresses
Some Big Corporations
26 music videos
1 smartarse "spring chicken" who thinks he knows it all
1 grizzly "old-timer" who has lost his way in the modern McWorld we live in
1 football
How to Cook:
Find a good bottle of vodka. Drink it. Find another bottle of vodka. Drink that too.
Take all the ingredients and put them into one of those industrial sized blenders used for mincing whole horses into meat pies. Flip the speed switch to "metaphor" and blend for 45 minutes.
Drink a bottle of vodka.
When blending is finished, serve fresh with a few lines of cocaine and garnish with a loud home cinema system.
For Dessert:
Take thirty aspirins and go to bed.
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Anyone that tells you that this movie is about American Football has completely missed the point. Actually, asides from the fact that they show quite a lot of football in it, and it revolves around the internal battles of a struggling football team, while big business conspires over the future of the team, it doesn't have anything to do with football at all.
Oliver Stone films aren't about sport, or war, or the act of murder. They're all about "…what the hell happened to our once great nation?" Big business is ripping the heart and soul out of everything that made us so happy, all in search of another buck to add to their already overflowing piggybanks. The Government is sticking its face in where it doesn't belong and taxing the taxes we pay on our taxes, telling us what we can and can’t do while secretly not giving a damn about us as long as we re-elect them. Television has turned us all into mindless zombies, sitting in front of radiation spewing boxes awaiting the next corporate funded commercial break telling us what to eat, how to breathe, what type of toilet paper to use, why we're old and ugly and how to be young and beautiful again.
Worse than that, our children are growing up stupid and cocky -and that's a dangerous combination. We're losing the simple ideals that may seem naïve, but at least they were honest and we really believed in them. In short –nothing is simple anymore.
I think that's what an Oliver Stone movie is about.
But then again, what do I know?
As Homer Simpson would say "mmmmm…dvddd…"
The picture is simply excellent as far as I'm concerned. The detail is excellent, with a real "reach out and touch it" look. The colour throughout is fantastic with brilliant saturation and vibrancy.
When the action revs up on field, the transfer easily keeps up with the blur of motion and colour. You'd be hard pressed to pick out flaws in this transfer, and if you did I'd say you were simply looking way too hard.
Even in the slower moments with more head shots, skin tones come up warm and healthy looking with oodles of clarity on show and plenty of depth in the darks.
Oliver Stone has a very definite creative vision of what he wants to achieve stylistically in his films and this dvd transfer has not let down his vision in any way.
THUMPPTHUMPPPTHUMPPPPPCRASHHHHCRUNCHHHHARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I never would have thought it possible, but I do believe I actually felt pain watching these crazy-ass 400 pound Americans running into each other at 60 miles an hour. On a scale of 1 to 10, this soundtrack rates a 30 for bringing the awesome audio violence of a contact sport to your home cinema. Mix in the loud bombastic soundtrack backing the action footage and you have a two hour music video on steroids. Lots and lots of steroids. A very good clean and dynamic range with a tonne of bass will rattle your foundations, wake the neighbors and scare the bejeesus out of your pets.
The dialogue sounds naturally rendered so that it blends in with the environment -not artificially standing out from it for listener clarity like some dodgy ADR job- but when Al Pacino starts his speeches and begins screaming at everyone you will feel as though you're there copping a sermon. In the end though, the dialogue qualities just seem inconsequential when they get back to the stadiums with the roaring crowds and thumping music and hammering of body on body.
If you can imagine how a whole football team of steroidal homicidal maniacs taking on the T-Rex from Jurassic Park -and winning- would sound, then you know how cool this dvd is.
Bloody brilliant stuff!
Loud, violent, dynamic and introspective. Oliver Stone has come up with the goods once again. An absolute corker of a film on a ripper twin DVD set. I really looked forward to seeing this after missing out on the theatrical run, and I'm happy to say that both the film and the dvd package have made the wait worthwhile.
