Word: ued
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unlike today's breed of safe-bet directors, Stone is the guy who tries things. He works fast and hard: U Turn, the dark, barking melodrama that opens this week, is his 11th feature in 11 years. He godfathers other films (The People vs. Larry Flint, The Joy Luck Club), dabbles in TV (Wild Palms), keeps stoking his legend. A Child's Night Dream should do that: it's a big, toxic dose of undiluted Oliver. But don't take his word for him. Check out Jane Hamsher's funny, true-sounding Killer Instinct (Broadway Books; 288 pages; $25), about...
...have to wait for a tell-all book about U Turn, which John Ridley adapted from his novel Stray Dogs. The movie dwells in the dry heat of Superior, Ariz., a town halfway between Phoenix and Hades. As Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) speeds through in his '64-and-a-half Mustang convertible, a vulture picks at the carcass of a canine that looks meaner than the bird; even the victims here wear a scowl. That's Bobby: a part-time tennis player, full-time weasel who kicks cats and isn't much nicer to humans...
Stone calls U Turn a scorpions-in-a-bucket movie; deadly critters snap at one another until only the strongest (or the top billed) survives. It also honors the familiar tropes of hombre films, from the requisite convenience-store holdup and multiple murder to a strident Ennio Morricone score (with the banshee harmonica from his Sergio Leone westerns). There's also a waitress named Flo. Stone swathes all this menace in his patented white-hot style: slo-mo, echoing voices, flashbacks that flick like lightning, cartoon sound effects (when the Mustang is mentioned, you'll hear a horse whinny...
What's missing in U Turn is a window into Stone's '60s obsession, which begat his Vietnam trilogy, The Doors and JFK. But all that and more are in A Child's Night Dream, an autobiographical fantasy written in 1966-67. The book's Oliver follows the road of Stone's busy young life and often guns into the overdrive of desire (a meeting with Julie Christie) and horror (vivid images of a war he had not yet fought in). With punch-drunk punctuation and verbs-a-poppin' prose, Stone imitates Joyce, Kerouac, Mailer...
...moved forward by a week the deployment of the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Persian Gulf, TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson believes the move is primarily a publicity exercise. The move came after the Monday attack by Iranian warplanes on exiled rebel bases inside Iraq, which violated the U. no-fly zone. But, says Thompson, ?these cross border spats have been going on since the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988.? Although rushing the Nimitz to the region makes clear that the no-fly zone will be enforced, ?it?s mostly a PR exercise, because the military has to justify...