Oliver Stone finally loses it altogether

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2004)

Up until now, Oliver Stone was the film-maker I hated to love. He could be annoying, polemic, and distractingly 'filmic' for no reason. I think the perfect example of this hate-love relationship for me was 'JFK', which was basically an annoying, opinionated recreation of 'history' presented as fact, but which had enough narrative drive, great characters and generally good film-making and excitement to be really enjoyable anyway.
On any Given Sunday is the movie where, for me, the style runs away with the substance.
Changing the film stock; going from an overexposed scene to a grainy scene, suddenly changing the camera angles, moving the camera around for no apparent reason, cutting to insert shots of unrelated material, having the camera show the listener rather than the speaker - these are all techniques which have their place, and which, on the whole cause the viewer to be distracted from the narrative and more aware of the fact that they are watching a construction. Unless used carefully, they interfere with the suspension of disbelief.
Now, Stone will use all of these techniques in the same scene, and it will be a scene where two people are standing in a room arguing about football.
I'm sorry, but WHAT'S THE POINT?
If it's not enough that a simple scene looks like it was shot by four different directors and film crews, all of whom were drunk, we have to have these absurd cuts to scenes from the chariot race from 'Ben-Hur'.

Stone has the virtue of being one of a dying breed which I suppose you could call auteurs. Movies like this make me wish he could just tell a damn story properly.