Word: stoning
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...Stone, a Yale dropout who had taught school in Saigon, volunteered for the infantry in Viet Nam. Suddenly the preppie was surrounded by guys he never would have met back in the "world." Urban blacks were importing tactics of street survival to the jungle; Southern farm boys were digging foxholes that might be their graves. You established camaraderie with your sergeant by taking a whiff of marijuana that he'd blow through a rifle barrel. And too soon you were inside the madness of frontline patrols, a captive of the heat, the exhaustion, the insects, the hatred of men whose...
...boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power?over themselves, their men and the enemy...
...righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study of a wily man tiptoeing through fatal corruption. Just like Hollywood, Stone might...
...close, Rich, to get the truth," a photographer tells the correspondent in Salvador. "You get too close, you die." Sometimes Stone gets and stays too close. Much of Platoon is strong meat, indifferently prepared. His script is over-wrought?fine, the material virtually demands excess and excrescence?but it is also overwritten, with too much narration that spells out what has already been so eloquently shown. As a director, Stone does not yet have the craft to match or mediate his passion. His film works in spurts: a scene that sputters with bombast will be followed by some wrenching fire...
...Pickton's tale unfolds in court in a local suburb, the streets outside throng with police and sheriffs, panhandlers and patients released from a local mental hospital, college students and office workers who line up at local coffee shops. A stone's throw from the court is a strip joint advertising, in neon, "Mugs and Jugs." Nearby, a shop displays garish Valentine's Day wares: a larger-than-life knight in shining armor standing tall beside a Queen of Hearts. It's a costume shop, of course. Vancouver, in these dark days, has a dearth of real-life romantic heroes...