This quote that comes at the end of Oliver Stone's political drama Nixon is one of the best lines in the film - Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, about to resign from office, looks at a portrait of John F. Kennedy and says that statement, realizing that he could never be the man that JFK was, and seeing the faults of the world laying onto him from all that he did in his years in the White House. This statement also gave me an interesting thought about Oliver Stone himself and all the controversy he engenders with his political histories - but yet he remains a director whose films are very popular and he remains a director who receives critical acclaim with almost every movie released. I think the reasoning is this...When we as an audience watch an Oliver Stone film, especially one which looks deep into the political system of the last few decades, we look at Stone's vision and we yearn for the truth (JFK) - we hope for the ideal of the American political system. But on the same token, those who criticize Stone are usually protectors of the establishment, and when they look at Stone's films, and because these films show the deep secrets of America, it becomes a threat, and they criticize Stone as someone crazy who is misusing the cinema to tell falsehoods about America's recent history. I think they do this because these movies hit home - they tell the larger truths, the ones we might not want to face, but have to in order to become a better country - as a famous writer wrote, to not learn from the past is to be condemned to repeat it.

I consider Oliver Stone to be our greatest film director because of the way he handles huge and important topics, because of the style in which he makes his movies, and most importantly, because he is using the cinema for its best purpose - to entertain, to inform, and the most important one of all, to move people. Stone has been labelled as a historic dramatist, but I think he is much more than that. Because of my interest in cinema, I look first at his achievements as a director of film, to see the way he uses the canvas of film to tell the story, and even if that's the only thing you would look at with Stone, that alone would be enough to say he is a director with a unique vision and remarkable talent.

Oliver Stone, is, first and foremost, a filmmaker, and he is far ahead of any other directors today, with the minor exceptions of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg who are advancing the cinema in some remarkable ways as well. In JFK, Stone began to use a style which has become almost a trademark for him - that of using differing film stocks, such as 35mm, Super 8, etc. as well as mixing color and black and white film, mixing sound and music - all in an effort to tell a story in a new and unique way - to emphasize or overemphasize when necessary - to contrast history and conjecture, past and present. It's a style that is uniquely Stone's, and requires a lot of work to pull off successfully. That's why some criticized Natural Born Killers, because the contrasting styles of film created an overblown effect, which was necessary for the telling of that story.

His style is also one that overloads the viewer with visceral imagery and/or dialogue, to make a point very strongly, to evoke very strong emotions which have moved individuals so much as to change the way they look at things. JFK was a real eye-opening film for many, in that it opened their eyes to the real workings of government, the problems with history and who is responsible for teaching our kids the proper history - I consider JFK to be Stone's masterpiece not only for its considerable film merits but for the fact that it showed how truly powerful the film medium can be - invoking an entire nation to reexamine its history and demand that the government release crucial documents related to the JFK assassination. Oliver Stone is becoming this nation's main dissenter, communicating his views through the popular medium of film - because of the American public's love of film, they see these movies, learn more about their history, and naturally want to research and learn more. Books on the Kennedy assassination sold briskly after people saw the film - people were moved to learn on their own about these important issues of our times.

I think it's very important that we carefully study our history and look deeper into the motivations of individuals, not only in government but everywhere. And that is what Stone is doing with his movies - to probe deeper into the motivations of people and to lay bare the souls of these people and the soul of our country and political system. In Nixon, Stone is simply trying to understand the motivations behind Richard Nixon to show why things happened as they did. In JFK, Stone lays bare the the dark soul of the Kennedy assassination, in an effort to come to some new understandings about what really happened on that dark November day in 1963. Even in his fictional works, he lays bare the souls of characters and our the establishment to show new truths and motivations - in Talk Radio we looked at the tortured soul of a radio talk show host and the listeners who called in - in Wall Street, we looked at the world of the stock market and saw the pitfalls - in Natural Born Killers, we looked at the media and saw ourselves in a mirror - what reflected back was our own problem of losing touch with reality, to promote a serious murder case such as the O.J. Simpson trial into an entertainment, and all Stone did was push the issue to an extreme with the portrayals of the media and the two killers in the film.

And we haven't even mentioned yet what he has contributed to the discourse on the Vietnam War, with a trilogy of films which have made us look real hard at that war, to learn its lessons and never forget them. Platoon took us to the front lines, Born on the Fourth of July, showed us the war at home and the mistreatment of the veterans who came back from the war, and Heaven and Earth, although being a weaker film, showed us the war from the other side, and war's effects on the minds of people.

I think Stone's films touch so close to home and evoke such debate and controversy because they are so powerful, in the way they combine images and music to bring out such powerful emotions on such politically difficult issues. Stone's films make us look at ourselves, they make us examine our history more closely and with much more scrunity, they strongly tell us that something is wrong and things need to be changed. They do all this while at the same time being packaged in a type of film that is so revolutionary and unique that Stone does so many things with just one film - he is nothing but a film genius, and his body of work, which I hope continues with as much success as we have seen up till now, will be one of the landmark achievements that cinema historians will look back on in future years. So yes, when we look at Oliver Stone, we see ourselves with all of our faults and weaknesses, but we also see what we want to be, with the hope that if we learn something from the experience and change what we do tomorrow, maybe things can change - one individual can change things.