Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Listen to these guys, and you may suspect that Platoon is not so much a movie as a Rorschach blot. But that is part of the caginess of Stone's approach. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that when a good film is also a popular film, it is because of a misunderstanding. Platoon could very well be misunderstood into superhit status. The army of Rambomaniacs will love the picture because it delivers more bang for the buck; all those yellow folks blow up real good. Aging lefties can see the film as a demonstration...
...dichotomy was bred in him. Stone was born in 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker and the French Catholic girl he met just after V-E day while serving as a colonel on Eisenhower's staff. Lou Stone wrote a monthly newsletter about economics and politics; his son describes the style as "right-wing Walter Lippmann, a view of the world every month. My father believed that life was hard. The important thing was to make a living." Jacqueline Stone was just the opposite: inexhaustibly sociable, the original bete de fete. "My mother loved movies," Stone says...
...Stones lived in Manhattan town houses and Stamford, Conn., homes; Oliver went to Manhattan's tony Trinity School and the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.; he summered with his maternal grandparents and spoke French before he learned English. (From Viet Nam, Oliver would write his grandmother versions of the letters that Chris reads in Platoon.) At five he composed skits for a marionette show, casting his French cousins in the parts. At seven he wrote stories. To earn a quarter for a Classic comic book, he would write a theme each week for his father. And at nine he started...
Temperatures in Paris dropped to 10 degrees. At midweek a 5 1/2-inch snowfall turned the French capital into a winter fantasy land where students waged impromptu snowball fights and cross-country skiers trekked across the Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower. Following the lead of President Francois Mitterrand, who deployed army troops to stricken areas across the country, French Premier Jacques Chirac mobilized some 1,800 soldiers to help remove the snow from Paris streets. The government ordered two Paris Metro stations to stay open all night to help shelter an estimated 15,000 homeless men and women...
Although conditions were less harsh in France than in some other parts of Europe, the cold snap there caused a death toll of at least 31. One potential French victim of the cold was saved in the northern city of Amiens when a vagrant discovered a newborn girl abandoned at the city dump. He called for help, and the girl was rushed to the hospital. Doctors rated her chances of survival excellent and named her Violette because of her purplish complexion when she was first brought...