A Thread about the film JFK

never would've allowed that man to open an umbrella!

The generals in the smoky room is like Patriarchy's finest minute!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYmyMJ0H6DQ

I saw that a few months ago, I think. Is Sorensen in it?

hitchens and cockburn (still buddies at the time) both loathed jfk: cockburn went on to write some very funny stuff abt how all the conspiracy theories are garbage (and also how conspiracy theory is an intrinsically reactionary mindset), plus an excellent description of the type of comrade oswald actually was, a type anyone wd recognise from the marxist* subculture (a "trotskyite dweeb" who made an obsessive pest of himself in meetings, causing them to overrun and everyone secretly hating him; then suddenly there he was on TV and they were all frantically burning their address books and pretending they'd never met him)

*actually most cultures which require AGM's have someone like this, tho they don't always go on to shoot someone

Well Hitchens talks about how conspiracy theorists are a kind of democrat in this.

Is Sorensen in it?

No. Salinger (former press sec) is.

Hitchens' ability to make people completely lose it on TV is in full show here. Salinger just wanted to smash his face in.

democrat or Democrat?

democrat as in a supporter of democracy (nothing to do w/the Democratic party)

wait, is he pro the film or just trolling?

Hitchens argues his way around conspiracy theory as a viable erm activity, just doesn't like the film - mainly because it tries to show Kennedy as a white knight (and thinks the actual conspiracy depicted in jfk is bollocks)

btw I gotta say James Wolcott is so wrong on Mr.X scene. Its the best thing in the film and not too long at all.

idk enough about the Garrison summation, kinda lose interest by the time the trial starts.

ah ok -- yes actually i vaguely remember him taking a less sharp line on CT in general come to think of it, viz that it was some kind of dissident counter to Very Serious Peoplethink, which is probably the start of his slippery slope tbh

(bcz cockburn was correct on this point)

james wolcott is wrong about everything, it's his thing

also he's the worst writer in america

now i knew allen dulles very well; i briefed him many a time in his house.

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour),

the way Sutherland throws this line away = master acting class

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, May 15, 2016 3:03 AM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm btw

and I gotta read Harlot's Ghost. ffs.

xp = I found it...sorta convincing - as, well, CT as a kind of hyper-cynicism that could fucntion as keeping instituions in check. I wouldn't blame ppl for more than questioning the Warren Commission.

The problem is the people who get into it are almost always...not about being a democrat and its pretty destructive in the way it operates and poisons. xxp

the whole movie despite being a ridiculous fiction has a very sinister and creepy edge, it crescendos with this scene and Sutherland really elevates it (compounded by the music and editing.)

i shd watch it in the cinema, my line on stone used to be the world's most brilliant film-maker who's also an idiot, but i liked W (and for neither of those reasons)

no one shd shut up more *talking* abt his films tho

(cockburn noted that gary oldman didn't know how to play oswald, which iirc is true and a good point)

Oswald is the movie's least flashy and most convincing performance -- Oldman plays him as a cipher.

Yeah, the whole mood of thing up to Mr. X is so well done - as for those 20 mins...just when you think the monologue could be losing puff (not that it even threatens to) the scenes around the Pentagon are just marvellous.

None of the commentators -- apart from maybe Wolcott -- really talk about it as a film. Everyone has their own different agenda.

xp to nomar

they don't talk abt it as a film bcz stone had been charging around the place announcing it was a new way of recounting history (bcz he's an idiot)

Oldman plays him as a cipher

this sounds bad not good

not necessarily! I'm not sure how else you would direct an actor play him. In Libra he's got modest abilities but no will, and that's how Oldman plays the part.

as for the Sutherland-DC section: most of that account of post-WWII dirty tricks is true! Young me reading about the CIA and Guatemala would hear the PEEEOWWW and Sutherland's voice as I learned about Arbenz, the Dalai Lama, the attack on Adlai Stevenson, etc.

Best use of those John Williams orchestral swells too; they sound like manipulated street traffic (JFK motorcade echoes?).

no will

this seems a weird read on who and what he was tbh: the entire story of him becoming a soviet citizen and then de-defecting suggest someone p wilful

also libra isn't very good (bcz delillo): the mailer book is much better, gives a much better sense of what a weirdo quite-smart crank-loser he was (and cockburn's "trotsykite dweeb" wd also be an interesting and historically plausible way to play him)

modest abilities

he decided to assassinate the president of america BY HIMSELF and did so

I prefer Mailer's book too.

tbh it's hard for me to think Kennedy was actually killed. He was shot, there were people around him, pillbox hat, LBJ, PWWWOMMMM the Vietnam War.

I think that's one reason the Sutherland/black ops stuff is so effective; fundamentally people are suckers for the truth. And the truth was (at least there) on Stone's side, Bubba.

garrison was the louise mensch of black ops

(not that this affects the film)

"Let's cast Garrison as Earl Warren then!"

james wolcott is wrong about everything, it's his thing

also he's the worst writer in america

― mark s, Thursday, 11 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lmao there is a piece by him in the LRB today!

(btw if I see a screening I'll let you know - I've never seen this in the cinema)

haven't seen the ollie stone film since i was a teenager but the alex cockburn line on conspiracies cited above by mark s itself seems lazy and reactionary to me, ignoring all of the actual reasons ppl doubt the warren commission version of the kennedy assassination. i.e., oswald's murder by mob-connected jack ruby (ppl always say "i think oswald acted alone" as if that settled it when what they actually ought to say is the clunkier and actually-this-sounds-kinda-shady-doesn't-it line "i think oswald acted alone and i think ruby also acted alone), oswald's complete lack of a plausible motive and insistence to his dying breath that I DID NOT DO IT I AM A PATSY, which makes little sense coming from any assassin let alone a guy who supposedly did it to be famous or did it for a cause, oswald's very peculiar career involving a "defection" that may have been part of a cia operation, the endless unsolveable debates over who shot from what direction, and the HSCA's conclusion that jfk had been killed by a conspiracy. the warren commission was also basically run from behind the scenes by allen dulles, prob one of the worst americans of the 20th century. so as silly or unpersuasive as most of the conspiracy theories are it's not like there's definitely nothing there.

also cockburn's line about conspiracies seems especially lame to me given that he was a fuckin' *climate-change denialist*, literally the most dangerous type of conspiracy theorist in the world, a hundred times worse worse than every bonehead 9/11 truther put together.

lol, clearly i felt so worked up about that i felt the need to throw in an extra "worse" for good measure

"I extend to you, and your families, my best wishes for a happy Easter."

You said a Sunday, Jim, not EAST-AH Sunday!"

<3

"Come hunt for Easter eggs."

"That's the kids' job. You know I don't like these tribal rituals, anyway."

That is precisely the point of a long dining table. The splendor of the meal adds to the enjoyment of it.

... Where is this leading to, Mr. Garrison?

After dinner, you paid him to have sex.

in my dream Oscars TLJ would've taken the Oscar away from Donald Sutherlandd.

*Sutherland

the single-d explanation

The splendor of the meal adds to its enjoyment.

Everybody likes to make themselves out to be something more than they are. 'Specially in the homosexual underworld.

^^^ some days my absolute favorite

SHAW: "Never having met Mr. O'Keefe, I couldn't have met Mr. Ferrie."

(Flashback to gold paint-covered Clay Shaw being slapped around by David Ferrie)

FERRIE: "You're mine, Mary."

I know that this is for ILX what Sweet Smell of Success is for me--the most quotable movie ever--but after once putting it on a decade-end Top 10, it gets worse and worse every time I go back to it. (Most recently prompted by a reading of Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's Dallas 1963). The biggest problem, as I mentioned somewhere above, is Costner (not just him, but what he has to say)--he's like this wide-eyed simpleton, and you want him throttle him every time he opens his mouth. But this time, with the book as a backdrop, I started to think that Stone doesn't even capture half of the craziness that that had been building since Kennedy's election--I found the H.L. Hunt and General Walker and Ted Dealy of the book much more compelling than what Stone conjures up. In fairness, I guess, the movie's set in New Orleans, not Dallas.

Reading this piece by Seymour Hersh in Mr."X" voice. Try it sometime!

well you're the policeman; you work it out

may I go

you really have me consorting with a sordid cast of characters, don't you!

Son of a bitch there he goes again he's got his hands on the chicken switch