Cal Thomas raves about Oliver Stone’s upcoming 9/11 movie, World Trade Center:

Whatever one thinks of Oliver Stone, the man knows how to make movies. This is one of his best. It deserves an Oscar in so many categories. It also deserves the thanks of a grateful nation. Go and see it beginning Aug. 9 and make him a large profit so he might consider inspiring us again, as his predecessors so often did during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

National Review’s Jack Fowler concurs:

I attended an advance screening of the film last week. I can assure you: Cal is dead-on.

So does Kathryn Lopez. And Cliff May: “God bless Oliver Stone.”

Conservative blogger Jack Yoest also gives Stone two thumbs up after watching a special Washington screening last night:

What it was and what it was not.

It was not a conspiracy movie.
It did not bash Bush.
It was not sappy.
It was not about stupid, church-going nuts.
It did not mock marriage.
It did not blame America.
It did not support radical Islam.
It did not mock Marines.
It did not mock Jesus.
It did not mock cops.

It did not mock family, faith or freedom…

…This is a movie that you will see in a few weeks and you will be glad you did. After the viewing, there was no applause, little talking. At the end, the crowd audibly exhaled, as one.

Stone and his promotion team seem to be holding their Hollyweird noses and doing some heavy-duty courting of the Right. Jack notes that Creative Response Concepts, the conservative media firm, helped coordinated the D.C. advance screening for Paramount Pictures.

Is Hell freezing over? Could the movie be as good as these advance reviewers say it is? I haven’t been invited to any screenings, so I’ll be reserving skeptical judgement with the rest of you. The movie opens August 9.

Meanwhile, Stone is getting prepared for the publicity blitz by getting…stoned (via Rush & Molloy):

Guests this past weekend at the Park Regency hotel may have been surprised to sniff some funny-smelling smoke drifting around director Oliver Stone’s suite, but they shouldn’t have been.

“I like ayahuasca,” a hallucinogenic tea, said Stone, who’s also spoken of his love of pot. “And I liked LSD, and I liked peyote.”

The director of Platoon and JFK thinks tripping is so beneficial that he once spiked his father’s wine with acid.

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John Podhoretz gives thumbs-down. Headline of his column today – “Stone Sinks:”

It is undeniably powerful, an immensely affecting and well-meaning real-life tale of two Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble underneath the collapsed concourse between the North and South Towers.

Nonetheless, because “World Trade Center” tells a story of joyous survival rather than a story of death, it is a fundamental falsification of the meaning of 9/11 – even though the story it tells is true.

Ryan Sager’s review for The New York Sun:

Avoiding any backlash, “World Trade Center” concludes with a speech from Nicholas Cage (playing one of the rescued cops) about how September 11 showed us that humans are capable of great evil, but we’re also capable of great good.

The fact that filmmakers apparently believe Americans aren’t ready for anything more than this, five years after the beginning of the war on terror, says something about the studio system. Instead of the patriotic films of World War II, Hollywood apparently believes we’re at war with rogue Russian nationalists (“The Sum of All Fears,” “The Sentinel”) and super-intelligent jets (“Stealth”).

It’s understandable that moviemakers are fearful of being accused of exploitation. But isn’t there a way to deal with what the attacks meant, without “cashing in” on tragedy?…

…With the studios’ step-by-step recreations of September 11 – from the air in “United 93″ and from the ground in “World Trade Center” – now out of the way, perhaps the door is now open to something deeper. While it would be too much to expect from Hollywood to see any movies dealing forthrightly with Islamic terrorism and the clash of civilizations in which we are now engaged, we might at least begin to see more movies about what it means to live with the grief of that day, as opposed to simply tracing our fingers over our scars.

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