Any Given Sunday

Oliver Stone has enough talent as a filmmaker that his dramatic capabilities can sometimes come with lesser expectation or even lesser concern. Any Given Sunday is one of the best examples of that.

The film delves into the corruption and nature of business in the National Football League. Since the story isn't personal, it tries to make up for an across the board perspective of the nature of the world. That means extensive scenes of drug abuse and debauchery. The film has some dramatic arcs and allows for the characters to make generic speeches on winning and what not. This story has been told for thirty years and seems to have evolved very little.

What Oliver Stone injects into the story and filmmaking is what makes it commendable. As a filmic dramatist, he dissipates enough of the standard narrative ploys to allow his camera to become a voyeur in this world. The film flaunts the excesses of the world to relate the experience of highs and lows that the players deal with. As far as storytelling goes, experience is one of the most important words for Stone. He wants his audience to experience the world he is trying to capture. This adrenaline kick allows the actors to work at a high speed and better relate authenticity.

The most underrated aspect of his filmmaking is the fluidness of his imagery. Stone is known as a filmmaker in command of intense speeds, but he mixtures high amount of symbolism and lyricism into his filmmaking. The first football game has to include some of the best editing I've seen in any recent film. Later scenes that show Pacino in the bowels of his despair trying to convince Cameron Diaz of his needs show images in the background to relate the heightened drama. Lesser filmmakers would think it was enough to show these symbolic images into the story, but Stone intensifies the imagery so it flows along with the drama like they were all elements of music.

It's trendier for filmmakers to be masters of tones and angles but I believe Stone's interest in symbolism and high doses of editing to attain lyricism is much more interesting. The reason is because what Stone does require more layers to the production while tones and angles are so simplistic that duplication is easy to bring about. Stone looks better because no major filmmaker has come to resemble him, but a new filmmaker every year seems to be called "Kubrickian" with his or her film.