What's New?

Rating: 6/10 (13 May 2012)

I've tried to get through this several times and always find my attention drifting -- when I'm not being a little irritated.
Basically, Oliver Stone's movie is telling me things I already know, and it's telling them to me in a way that suggests I never knew them before. I don't know about anyone else but I resent it when a director assumes I'm stupid. Flawed, yes. Perverse and debauched even, but not stupid.
And I find I'm also compelled to wonder about the sources for some of these events. The Mexican whores are infinitely believable but the rats in the VA hospital are not. The VA has been my primary health care provider for years and the facilities are clean as a whistle, although things may have changed considerably since the flood of wounded that were returned from Vietnam.
These irritants interfere with my appreciation of the movie itself, which is far more coherent than much of Stone's other work, especially the hallucinatory "JFK."
Stone is intelligent and a man of principle but he ought to watch himself otherwise he's in danger of becoming another Allan Dershowitz. If the authorities say it's so, it isn't so.