Although it’s been, mostly, heaped with praise, Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” has managed to irk a few filmmakers, including Kelly Reichardt and Ruben Ostlund.
We can add Oliver Stone as a “Barbie” hater. In an interview with a UK publication, he actually goes into a full-on rant about not just “Barbie,” but also Hollywood, which he finds is devolving into a sort of infantilized fantasy land:
Ridiculous. Ryan Gosling is wasting his time if he’s doing that shit for money. He should be doing more serious films. He shouldn’t be a part of this infantilization of Hollywood. Now it’s all fantasy, fantasy, fantasy, including all the war pictures: fantasy, fantasy. Even the Fast and Furious movies, which I used to enjoy, have become like Marvel movies. I mean, how many crashes can you see?
Cue the “old man yells at cloud” meme. Then again, Stone isn’t totally off-base here either. There has been plenty of debate about what the commercialism behind “Barbie” could mean for Hollywood’s future.
Stone then goes on to shoot poisonous darts at ‘John Wick 4,’ which he saw in flight:
Oh yeah, so on the plane I watched John Wick, which is three hours and some. And I fell asleep about 778 times during it. I kept waking up and having to face him killing more people. It’s like the world has degenerated into non-logic.
A few months ago, Stone bemoaned the current state of the industry, but, in particular, the lack of risk-taking and studio execs’ obsession with the bottom line:
People in showbiz are idiots. They just go with the trend, they just go with the fashion — it’s a fashion business.
Welcome to the mind of Oliver Stone, the Oscar-winning director of “Platoon”, and “JFK.” This actually won’t be the last article about Stone — I’m currently working on something, in regards to his next film which, he claims, will be his last one.