Salvador

“I hate Yuppies!” is the fore cry bellowed by James Belushi’s character Doc Rock as he and James Woods exit the highways of San Francisco. I believe this is Oliver Stone’s best movie and it’s also his smashing directorial debut (he did do a much ill-fated horror movie in the 70’s that most people tend to forget). The story is about a down and out journalist named Richard Boyle and his encounters with the Sandinistas in El Salvador.

Shot on a shoestring budget, Stone displays humanity and will in a third world country driven to madness by right wing guerillas. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, a scummy journalist who’s desperately trying to stay afloat. James Belushi plays Boyle’s side kick Doc Rock, a former DJ that is frustrated with his own personal life (wife evicts him from her apartment saying that he needs to get a ‘real’ job in computers).

The movie starts out with the two friends (Doc Rock and Boyle) drinking and smoking  their way down into Salvador. Boyle (Woods) desperately tries to seek out the next big journalistic story by schmoozing his way into both political houses (liberal and conservative).

Throughout the movie, Stone displays the type of injustice that most people would revel at: the butchery of innocent nuns, the assassination of a high standing priest, and even the massacre of children. It is a foregone conclusion that Stone tends to side with a more liberal point of view, but if you can look past that and dig deeper, this movie is more about the plight of a tortured nation seeking refuge and vindication amongst its very own people. At the end of the movie, we get a chance to see the torn country that El Salvador became and why that event in that time period is something people want to forget.  A great movie with a great cast.