Oliver Stone

Persona Non Grata, a new HBO documentary by Oliver Stone, claims to be a "thought-provoking, first-hand look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict." But what we really have here is a mind-boggling example of Hollywood hubris on the part of Stone - an exercise in ego that reveals absolutely nothing that hasn't been already shown and told in other documentaries and news programs like PBS' Frontline. I am not a Stone hater. I admire films like JFK and Nixon for the very reasons that many of my journalistic colleagues condemn them: the ways in which Stone mixes fact and fiction, myth and history until you can't tell which is which.

NICASIO, Calif. - Oliver Stone stared in disbelief. Here he was, sitting in a velvet seat in George Lucas' private screening room, listening to the Star Wars director foretell the death of film. To Stone, director of such films as Platoon and JFK, Lucas' vision of digital moviemaking sounded like blasphemy. Around him, other A-list directors, including Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Zemeckis - fidgeted as Lucas challenged a century of tradition, warning his colleagues to embrace the future or be left behind.

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.

ATLANTA -- Suggested new slogan: "The Cobalt Lounge -- Where we almost completely guarantee that you will not be stabbed or shot or roughed up by NFL players or anyone else either." OK, maybe that doesn't quite get the job done, but it brings up a point. What do you do when you're a relatively new nightclub and you achieve sudden national renown -- for all the wrong reasons? Say, if someone, probably one of your patrons, kills two other patrons in the street, and right after that a star NFL linebacker and part of the still-roiling crowd bundle into a stretch limousine the size of a missile silo that screeches off in a hail of gunfire?

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.

WASHINGTON -- The release of the movie version of "Primary Colors," the roman a clef based on President Clinton's campaign for the presidency in 1992, has come at a most propitious time for its maker, Mike Nichols, if not for the president.The not-even-thinly-veiled character of Mr. Clinton is played with mirrorlike similarity to the real thing by John Travolta, as a folksy smoothie with his eye not only on the prize of the presidency but also on sexual targets that come his way.Only the names are changed, as they say, but viewers familiar with the 1992 cast of campaign characters will have little trouble identifying the actors with the politicians and aides they portray, including Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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."

WASHINGTON -- Even before its public release, a new Hollywood-made docudrama about former Alabama Gov. George Wallace has generated a mini-controversy about the liberties its maker has taken with the facts.In "George Wallace," by veteran director-producer JohnFrankenheimer, a black convicted murderer named Archie who has become a prison trustee working for Mr. Wallace at the mansion takes an ice pick from a kitchen drawer and contemplates stabbing him, but in the end decides against it.The incident never happened and Frankenheimer acknowledges it. He defends the scene as a dramatic device to convey the anger of black Alabamans toward Mr. Wallace, who at the time was a leader of the cause of racial segregation in the Deep South.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- It was a rough piece of land, 2,000 acres or so, too rocky to farm. After the big trees that once covered it were logged off, its owners mostly left it alone. Thick second-growth forest soon returned, and trails led through it, but they weren't heavily traveled.Wildlife was abundant, and because it was a deserted place, a certain amount of illicit activity went on. My guess is that whiskey's been made there, and a little marijuana grown. Poachers jacklighted deer, couples came by to park and local people found it convenient to dump old appliances in the woods near the road.

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.