Oliver Stone

HOLLYWOOD -- Aubrey Rike is a former funeral parlor worker, the man who, in November 1963, put President Kennedy's slain body into the casket at Parkland Hospital. Today, he is a Dallas policeman who was recently hired as a consultant on Oliver Stone's latest project "JFK" -- a dramatic exploration of the assassination, which the director calls "the seminal event of our generation."At one point, Rike recalls, he pointed out a couple of minor factual errors in the way Stone was setting up a scene: Mrs. Kennedy had not been in the emergency room at a given time; her clothes were less blood-stained.

When, at long last, will people understand that the left is boring? The question came to mind as I was dipping in and out of Oliver Stone's miasmic 700-plus-page tome. I'll never read the whole thing, and not because it's a left-wing screed full of slimy distortions about the evils of the United States (though that doesn't help). It's that it's boring. Mr. Stone and co-author Peter Kuznick call their book "The Untold History of the United States," except, again, it isn't. This story has been told countless times before.

Half a year after his "JFK" opened in theaters, Oliver Stone still feels the heat.The director behind "Platoon," "The Doors," "Wall Street" and "Born on the Fourth of July" was in Florida to receive the John M. Tiedtke Award for artistic achievement at last week's Florida Film Festival-Orlando, and to take his mother and 7-year-old son to Walt Disney World and Universal Studios Florida.In his red-and-white flowered shirt, the 46-year-old Purple Heart recipient looked a lot like any dad with a binge of theme parking ahead of him. Mr. Stone's wife of 11 years, Elizabeth, who was supposed to come along on the trip, became sick at the last minute.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone will be in Baltimore Thursday, screening his new documentary and fielding questions about it. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States," a series that re-examines American foreign policy, is now airing on Showtime. Stone was lured to Baltimore because the documentary's key researcher is University of Baltimore historian Eric Singer. The 10-part documentary that delves into everything from the Cold War to the fall of Communism, to Vietnam and terrorism, is getting a lot of buzz in history circles -- even actor John Cusack, who saw it the other day, called it "really excellent," tweeting: "Stone's new doc series is measured powerful and serious - if not the untold at least the largely ignored history of crucial periods.

Oliver Stone is the Elmer Gantry of the American left, selling that old-time religion of conspiracy and victimization by dark forces. But even as he's booming so majestically from the pulpit, he's stealing your wallet and trying to make time with your wife.Thus his new movie "JFK" is a work that's easy to like -- I defy anybody to deny the hypnotic grace and slickness of its 3 hours and 10 minutes -- but hard to trust. In fact, I don't trust it any farther than I could throw it.Who killed JFK?

Guests this past weekend at the Park Regency hotel may have been surprised to sniff some funny-smelling smoke drifting around director Oliver Stone's suite, but they shouldn't have been. "I like ayahuasca," a hallucinogenic tea, said Stone, who's also spoken of his love of pot. "And I liked LSD, and I liked peyote." The director of Platoon and JFK thinks tripping is so beneficial that he once spiked his father's wine with acid. The gonzo filmmaker tells Chris Heath in the new GQ magazine that he was just trying to help -- like the time his father lent him one of his favorite French prostitutes for the young director's first sexual experience.

IF OLIVER STONE produced children's classics:* "Three Little Pigs" -- Weird vibes in Pigland. Two-thirds of the population has mysteriously chosen to live in inferior housing. Now there's a renegade Wolf on the loose, Cuban-trained, a veteran of four years with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.When the Wolf creates an unearthly wind tunnel that destroys the flimsy straw and stick houses of two terrified Pig brothers, they flee to the home of a third brother, an ex-Vietnam vet and low-level aide in the Nixon White House.

Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no denying that the films of Oliver Stone comprise a formidable cinematic autobiography of the director told through the prism of his -- and his generation's -- obsessions, from Vietnam to the media."

"Nixon's" not the one.Rumors of its greatness have been exaggerated by a suspiciously pliant national press. In fact, the new Oliver Stone psycho-bio, which attempts to re-imagine the late president as a Mad King, a Republican Lear bleeding passion, greatness and hubris at once, turns all too swiftly into just another Watergate Wallow, lost in the arcana of obscure, undramatized detail, crackpot theorizing and White House soap opera.Stone's worst problem is his own titanic ego, which compels him not to begin afresh but to see this film as a continuation from and a validation of "JFK."

Unfolding mostly in a jagged-edge cave of earth, steel and concrete, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center looks at Sept. 11 not just from the ground up, but from underneath Ground Zero. Stone and screenwriter Andrea Berloff pay heartfelt tribute to Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), Port Authority Police Department officers who maintained hope while caught 20 feet below the rubble of 9/11. World Trade Center (Paramount) Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Michael Shannon.

Unfolding mostly in a jagged-edge cave of earth, steel and concrete, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center looks at Sept. 11 not just from the ground up, but from underneath Ground Zero. Stone and screenwriter Andrea Berloff pay heartfelt tribute to Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), Port Authority Police Department officers who maintained hope while caught 20 feet below the rubble of 9/11. World Trade Center (Paramount) Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Michael Shannon.

MARYLAND Child tracking system flawed A test run of a new state computer system designed to track the nearly 10,000 Maryland children in foster care has uncovered serious flaws. Dubbed "Chessie," the system is nearly three years behind schedule and its original price tag of $26 million has ballooned to $67 million. pg 1b Victim's family plans to sue Relatives of a Brooklyn man who was fatally shot by a Baltimore police officer as he fled a suspected drug deal contended yesterday that police used excessive force.

BOSTON -- Apart from his undeniable boldness and virtuosity as a filmmaker, Oliver Stone has a genius for promotion. He's interpreted his fellow baby boomers' peak experiences as paradigms of America's lost innocence -- and sold them with passion to a large and engaged (or enraged) audience. Like Spike Lee, he's been his own best publicist, using political controversy to grab the media spotlight for causes that he's made his own. He's often mixed documentary detail with speculation or melodrama -- most daringly in 1991's JFK, which implicated Lyndon B. Johnson in the cover-up of a conspiracy to kill the president.

Guests this past weekend at the Park Regency hotel may have been surprised to sniff some funny-smelling smoke drifting around director Oliver Stone's suite, but they shouldn't have been. "I like ayahuasca," a hallucinogenic tea, said Stone, who's also spoken of his love of pot. "And I liked LSD, and I liked peyote." The director of Platoon and JFK thinks tripping is so beneficial that he once spiked his father's wine with acid. The gonzo filmmaker tells Chris Heath in the new GQ magazine that he was just trying to help -- like the time his father lent him one of his favorite French prostitutes for the young director's first sexual experience.

Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Goldhil, 1995) - Made to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this documentary about nuclear testing is back for the 60th. While old film of atomic-bomb tests set to classical music is somehow both beautiful and frightening, it gets tedious. There's nothing else here except the narrator and a few experts dryly reciting the history of nuclear tests. There's a 3-D short (glasses included), but it's strictly a gimmick. Not rated.

SUN SCORE : * Alexander the Great still conquers the known world of antiquity in Oliver Stone's Alexander, but, dramatically, absolutely nothing seems to happen. This nearly-three-hour feature plays like the most extravagant educational filmstrip ever made. The imagery merely illustrates the running - make that stumbling - commentary of the narrator, Alexander's one-time supporter Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), who relates the Greek king's story 40 years after the monarch's death. Alexander (Colin Farrell)

With bone-crunching, ear-pounding intensity, Oliver Stone brings the world of professional football to the screen in "Any Given Sunday," a kinetically charged gridiron drama that is enormous fun to watch through most of its nearly three-hour running time.Indeed, as long as Stone and his prodigious cast and crew stay on the field, "Any Given Sunday" is as good as movies get for generating you-are-there heat and adrenal energy. If the film's off-field drama flags a bit under windy speeches and some questionable casting, it still offers some of the most exhilarating cinema to be seen on screen in an otherwise turgid season.

Ever since producer Darren Star backed down this summer -- changing one of the characters in "Grosse Pointe" because his former boss, Aaron Spelling, felt she was too much like his daughter, Tori -- the question has been whether his new series had the wicked edge it takes for great satire. The episode titled "Devil in the Blue Dress," which airs Friday, ought to go a long way toward answering that question: It's smart, very funny and seems not at all shy about leaving teeth marks on its targets.

Fidel Castro and Oliver Stone - together again. And this time, it looks as if HBO is actually going to air their meeting. Looking for Fidel, which premieres at 8 tonight, is a sequel to an interview titled Comandante - a documentary based on interviews Stone conducted with Castro in Havana. Don't remember it? It was pulled from HBO's schedule last year. Now Stone, the Academy Award-winning director of such controversial films as JFK and Nixon, is trying again. While Looking for Fidel, still has more in common with propaganda than it does journalism, its timing is better than Stone's last effort.

The Hollywood producers and director of the controversial miniseries The Reagans reacted angrily yesterday to CBS chairman Leslie Moonves' explanation as to how and why his network chose not to air the film about former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy. In talking to reporters yesterday during a separate CBS news conference, Moonves compared the miniseries directed by Robert Ackerman and produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron to Oliver Stone's JFK. He characterized it as "interpretive" and lacking "balance" in the way it presented a political "point of view."