This has been brewing for a while; probably since I first saw this AV Club piece reviewing Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street. For those not willing to click the link, the review, which is not that favorable, basically calls Oliver Stone a one note director:

Present the audience with the simplest, least sophisticated morality tale imaginable, then throw in a line like that, just in case the point wasn’t clear.

One little sentence, writing off the entire career of a man that has made a slew of different kinds of flicks. The problem is that if you look for simple morality tales in Stone’s career, you basically come up with two flicks: Scarface and Scarface for White People, aka Wall Street. You’re not going to convince me that unsophisticated morality tales are at the root of either Platoon or JFK, his most successfully nuanced works. The majority of his other movies are also totally clean. It would be a more accurate (but still incomplete) blanket criticism to say that predictable politics are at the heart of many Stone movies than to say morality.

But hey, why don’t we get to the heart of this matter? The only reason the AV Club gave Stone a crappy review on what is typically regarded as one of his best flicks is because the man has been a complete joke for the past several years, making the harsh review seem like the reviewer’s opinion of Stone’s modern suckiness has soiled his perception of the past successes. Although Stone hasn’t made a good movie in a decade, and although he might never again make another decent flick, these factors do not take away from the effectiveness of his accomplishments in the 80s and early 90s. Before crap like Alexander happened, I have little doubt that the AV Club would have said Wall Street was one of the most defining movies of the 80s. And there would have been an American Psycho comparison.

This gets me kind of worked up. I dig the AV Club, and I dig Stone’s good movies. This hipster hating of a movie that’s actually pretty great sets an annoying precedent where in the future I have to defend Stone in conversations against asshead Wes Anderson fans. What makes the AV Club review even worse is that the blanket statement it uses to condemn an entire career is only accurate if you look at a tiny, tiny subset of his films. Feel free to hate on the man for his modern failures, but please don’t pretend like his present day crappiness is the final form of some sort of chronic disorder that’s been present since the very beginning. Please, dumbass critics, don’t bury this guy and leave him to be rediscovered in a half century. Stone is one of the good ones. He’s just overstayed his welcome a bit.