Lost Causes on SNL

Sarah Palin, who has yet to Meet the Press or Face the Nation, showed up on Saturday Night Live tonight minutes before Oliver Stone rose from the audience to plug his lost cause, the movie, "W."

The juxtaposition was no more bizarre, or funnier, than Alec Baldwin mistaking Palin for Tina Fey, badmouthing her to her face and, when set straight, ogling the VP candidate and telling her, “You are way hotter in person.”.

There must be something profound to be said about all this confusion of reality and fantasy in today's world, but life hasn't been the same since Richard Nixon appeared on "Laugh-In" endlessly mouthing the show's punch line, "Sock it to me?"

N-O to W.

Oliver Stone came back from Vietnam, he has said, "very mixed up, very alienated, very paranoid," and, for a quarter of a century, has been creating movies to make us all that way.

As George W. Bush ends his eight-year effort to do the same, the last thing we need is a Stone biopic to "explain" how and why he did it. Thanks, but no thanks.

With his "JFK," Stone managed to muddle the truth about Kennedy's assassination for several generations of Americans. Now, judging from reviews, he is wedging Bush into his one-size-fits-all autobiographical theme of a wastrel son with a hard-hearted father.

It will take a long time to recover from what George W. Bush did to the American psyche, but the worst place to start understanding it all is with an Oliver Stone hyped-up Dr. Phil's-eye view of it all.

Stone is reportedly working on a remake of the worst movie ever made, Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," a project that seems much more suited to his talents.

Ahmadinejad, Oliver Stone Trade Barbs

The movie-maker who never met an anti-American he didn’t want to film has met his match. The president of Iran has refused to cooperate with Oliver Stone, his flack saying that Stone may be “considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but he is still part of the Great Satan."

A friend of Fidel Castro who is unaccustomed to being turned down by tinpot dictators, Stone responded with the unkindest cut of all, comparing Ahmadinejad to George Bush.

"I wish the Iranian people well,” Stone said, “and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."

Then again, Ahmadinejad may be a film buff who has seen JFK, Nixon and other paranoid biopics of Stone’s. On his blog a while back, the President praised “Iranian filmmakers who refused to participate in a Denmark film festival in protest at the blasphemous caricature published by a Danish newspaper against Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) last year.”

The man is a tough critic.