Oliver Stone slams ‘lame-brained’ Spielberg movie over WaPo portrayal

RT

Director Oliver Stone took a swipe at the Washington Post and Stephen Spielberg’s “lame-brained” film, The Post in a Facebook tribute to the late journalist Robert Parry on Sunday. 

Stone commended the Consortium News’ founder for breaking from the “tyranny of mainstream media conformity” and his breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Stone then pointed to the fact that the Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham, who is the subject of ‘The Post’, “deliberately ignored” that story.

“Note how she’s now being lionized in Spielberg’s lame-brained ‘The Post’,” he said of the character played by Meryl Streep.

‘The Post’ follows the period in 1971 when the Washington Post debated reporting on the Pentagon Papers after the New York Times had been prevented by doing so by a court order.

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Oliver Stone Exposes US Warmongers at Writers Guild Awards

25 things revealed about Vladimir Putin by Oliver Stone in the Putin Interviews

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran

I have now watched the first three episodes of the Putin Interviews, which is sufficient to give an overview of the series.

In my opinion it is by far the best and most interesting series of programmes which have appeared on Western television about Vladimir Putin.

I would say that claims that Oliver Stone fails to raise ‘difficult subjects’ with Putin are simply untrue.  All the usual stories about Putin – his KGB past, his reputed homophobia, his ‘billions’, his ‘murders’, his ‘aggressions against Georgia and Ukraine’ etc – are all there.

There is also one telling moment when Stone and Putin strongly disagree with each other.  This is in relation to a recent Russian law that requires Russian internet providers to store data for longer than previously, and to hand it over to the Russian security services if requested following a court order.

The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has denounced this law as a ‘big brother’ law.  Stone clearly agrees with him and tells Putin as much.  Putin predictably enough doesn’t agree.

The key difference between Stone and other Western interviewers is that Stone doesn’t try to get the better of Putin by bullying and hectoring him.

This more conventional approach in my experience invariably ends in disaster, resulting in the humiliation of the Western interviewers rather than Putin, as Putin invariably turns out to be far better informed about the facts than the interviewers are and is by now well practised in dealing with the absurdities they throw at him.  The recent Megyn Kelly fiasco is merely the latest example.

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A Documentary You’ll Likely Never See: Oliver Stone's "Ukraine on Fire"

James DiEugenio
Consortium News

Exclusive: Ukraine on Fire, a new documentary about the Ukraine crisis, might change how people in the West perceive the conflict, but it’s unlikely to get much distribution since it contests the prevailing narrative, writes James DiEugenio.


It is not very often that a documentary film can set a new paradigm about a recent event, let alone, one that is still in progress. But the new film Ukraine on Fire has the potential to do so – assuming that many people get to see it.

Usually, documentaries — even good ones — repackage familiar information in a different aesthetic form. If that form is skillfully done, then the information can move us in a different way than just reading about it.

A good example of this would be Peter Davis’s powerful documentary about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds. By 1974, most Americans understood just how bad the Vietnam War was, but through the combination of sounds and images, which could only have been done through film, that documentary created a sensation, which removed the last obstacles to America leaving Indochina.

Ukraine on Fire has the same potential and could make a contribution that even goes beyond what the Davis film did because there was very little new information in Hearts and Minds. Especially for American and Western European audiences, Ukraine on Fire could be revelatory in that it offers a historical explanation for the deep divisions within Ukraine and presents information about the current crisis that challenges the mainstream media’s paradigm, which blames the conflict almost exclusively on Russia.

Key people in the film’s production are director Igor Lopatonok, editor Alex Chavez, and writer Vanessa Dean, whose screenplay contains a large amount of historical as well as current material exploring how Ukraine became such a cauldron of violence and hate. Oliver Stone served as executive producer and conducted some high-profile interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The film begins with gripping images of the violence that ripped through the capital city of Kiev during both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 removal of Yanukovich. It then travels back in time to provide a perspective that has been missing from mainstream versions of these events and even in many alternative media renditions.

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