h, Oliver Stone. You were once the most scathing and politically astute filmmaker in Hollywood. What happened? You went from the grunt-eye Vietnam realism of Platoon and the governmental conspiracy theories of JFK to the boring excess of Alexander and the syrupy melodramatics of World Trade Centre. We used to be able to depend on you for providing movies that went against the political grain and sparked heated debate. Now you only make visually compelling but intellectually numbing projects that are forgotten before they're released. You need to get your act together.

If I'd met Oliver Stone before this morning that's the rant I would have loved to unleash on him. While I find it quite unlikely that the man would listen or even care, I needed to get it off my chest. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s Stone released ten films, each of which boldly stated the director's opinions and challenged societal norms. Then sometime during the Clinton administration he seemed to lose interest in political filmmaking. He seemed to lose his backbone and put together a handful of spineless movies about such empty topics as football. You'd think that the myriad of evil deeds and lies that defined George W. Bush's reign of terror over the U.S. would have provided enough fuel to ignite Stone's flames, but the only film set in American that he made during that time was the propagandistic World Trade Centre. It was a sad time to like Oliver Stone.