The famous Dilbert line “Must… restrain… fist… of… death…”, that is. I’ve never seen it in real life before, but by the end of this Ann Louise Bardach interview of Oliver Stone (via Sullivan) the sentiment is so obvious it’s almost crystallizing off of the screen. So much so that I’m admitting to suspicious thoughts about the interview, truth be told. Stone can’t be this much of a tool:
ALB: Let me ask you about the part [in the film] where Castro’s in front of eight prisoners charged with attempting to hijack a plane [to Miami]. He says to them, “I want you all to speak frankly and freely.” What do you make of that whole scene, where you have these prisoners who happened to be wearing perfectly starched, nice blue shirts?
OS: Let me give you the background. He obviously set it up overnight. It was in that spirit that he said, “Ask whatever you want. I’m sitting here. I want to hear it too. I want to hear what they’re thinking.” He let me run the tribunal, so to speak.
ALB: But Cuba’s leader for life is sitting in front of these guys who are facing life in prison, and you’re asking them, “Are you well treated in prison?” Did you think they could honestly answer that question?
OS: If they were being horribly mistreated, then I don’t know that they could be worse mistreated [afterward].
ALB: So in other words, you think they thought this was their best shot to air grievances? Rather than that if they did speak candidly, there’d be hell to pay when they got back to prison?
OS: I must say, you’re really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn’t feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.
ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?
OS: No, I didn’t.
ALB: So you don’t know if they’re any different than, say, the prisons in Honduras then?
OS: I think that those prisoners are being honest.
OK, granted that I encounter people this abjectly stupid every single day, but that’s just, you know, online and stuff. Hollywood trusts this man with their money, for Jeebus’ sake; that has to indicate a limit to idiocy, right? Surely this was just a put-up job, a belated April Fool’s Day joke, an opportunity for freaking the mundanes, right? He must have at least one clue rattling around inside his head, right?
Right?
Moe
Stone is a brilliant, if over-the-top, and hardly flawless, director, and an excellent writer.
That hardly means he has to have sense about anything else in life.
Quite a large percentage of the many writers and artists I know lack sense in much else of life.
(I linked to that story hours before you did, haha!)
I think JFK is tripe history, but it’s excellent movie-making. (Nixon, on the other hand, is fairly faithful to fact, and a far deeper film; it was Natural Born Killers that really gave me a headache, though (literally).)
I’ve never seen a soruce, but even if apocryphal, Einstein’s quote rings true: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
Unless the interview was given on April 1, there doesn’t seem to be another choice than to argue about just how much of a tool he is, not whether he is.
“The will to be Stupid is a powerful force.”
-Miles Vorkosigan quoting his mother
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
I’ve typically seen it quoted to my friend, Harlan Ellison, but I have no reason to be sure he originated it.
Gary, I’m given to understand that Ellison’s line is similar but not identical:
“The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”
(For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen your version attributed to Einstein.)
…which I would know had already been said, had I read more comprehensively. D’oh. >_<