Word: salvadors
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...must certify that the first installment of the $100 million was properly spent before voting on the second in February. Says a contra official in Central America: "They could cut us off then, if the decks are still running with blood in Washington." U.S. allies in Honduras and El Salvador would be profoundly disappointed by any such move, if only because it would prove that there is no continuity to Washington's policy in the region. At a time when the U.S. is trying to repair its foreign policy, that is hardly the message the Reagan Administration wants to send...
Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films?Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director?whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror...
...same fiery ambiguities marked Salvador, which opened early this year and has found welcoming bunks in the rep houses and on videocassette. There the path to wisdom led not from innocence but from noncommittal hipness. James Woods, the movies' definitive Sidney Sleaze, plays a renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller...
...close, Rich, to get the truth," a photographer tells the correspondent in Salvador. "You get too close, you die." Sometimes Stone gets and stays too close. Much of Platoon is strong meat, indifferently prepared. His script is over-wrought?fine, the material virtually demands excess and excrescence?but it is also overwritten, with too much narration that spells out what has already been so eloquently shown. As a director, Stone does not yet have the craft to match or mediate his passion. His film works in spurts: a scene that sputters with bombast will be followed by some wrenching fire...
DIED. Augusto Pinochet, 91, Chilean general turned dictator who oversaw the torture of some 28,000 and "disappearance" of 3,200 perceived adversaries during his 17-year rule; in Santiago. After ousting Marxist President Salvador Allende in a bloody 1973 coup, the cunning, right-wing Pinochet banned political parties but also instituted free-market policies that stabilized Chile's economy. His 1998 arrest for war crimes as well as his subsequent house arrest offered some comfort to victims of his regime. But he always managed to evade trial, claiming illness and never expressing remorse. In 2003 he said, "I feel...