Savages
Directed By:
Oliver Stone
Written By: Oliver
Stone, Don Winslow, and Shane Salerno, based on a novel by Winslow
Starring: Taylor
Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Blake Lively, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, Salma
Hayek, Demian Bichir, and Emile Hirsch
Director of Photography: Dan Mindel, Editors: Joe Hutshing, Sturart
Levy, and Alex Marquez, Production Designer: Tomas Voth, Original Music: Adam
Peters
Oliver
Stone’s cinematic sensibilities are equivalent to a sledgehammer to the face—Subtlety
is not his forte. His camera is constantly moving, changing shades of colors
and hues, flashing between them, and his soundtrack filled with a mix of rock
and roll as well as intense classical, all to pummel you into submission. When
Stone goes off the rails, most notably in films like JFK and Nixon, it brings
you into the paranoia and intensity of the characters he focuses on. When he
pulls it back, even just a little bit, it reveals the shallowness of his
filmmaking. Wall Street and Platoon have not aged well to say the
least, and dear goodness let’s not remember World
Trade Center, which turned 9/11 into a Lifetime movie.
So
perhaps we should be happy that in Savages,
Stone has returned to the intense filmmaking that has made him an auteur (Would
he be Expressive Esoterica or Strained Seriousness?). Or perhaps not. Based on
a Don Winslow novel, Savages is a
drug movie, which could be a good ol’ summer shoot-em-up if it wasn’t for Stone’s
operatic sensibilities. It begins with a draining voiceover by Blake Lively,
whose name is Ophelia but goes by the name O (The other Hamlet reference is all the dead bodies). She explains that she’s
the lover of Chon and Ben, who provide Laguna Beach with the world’s finest
marijuana (“The THC levels are 33%” they exclaim, which means nothing to this
non-smoker). O uses a little of each for both—Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is the
brawny, military man who has “wargasms,” while Ben (Aaron Johnson) is the
hippie free spirit who wants to help the world with $10 laptops and solar
panels when he’s not getting rich.
