So- I just saw "JFK" again.

[Guaranteed]

On TNT.

What's the deal with this movie? Seriously- is it factual? Or was Stone making up stuff/playing games?

[Dookus]

1. He played a lot of games

and I thought it was dishonest, especially the mixing of real documentary footage with his own black and white footage, meant to LOOK like documentary footage.

I also thought it was pretty boring.

[DemBones DemBones]

2. Are you old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination?

I am, was 16 at the time, and thought the movie was very effective. I didn't see it as dishonest for mixing actual footage with film Stone made but of course I could distinguish the two easily. As for the plot ideas, I don't think Oswald was the lone assassin and would love to know the real truth someday, about that event and quite a few others in my lifetime. Arlen Specter and the magic bullet is a bit much.

[Dookus]

3. barely

I was 2.

But I maintain that it was fundamentally dishonest to make SOME footage appear archival. He could've presented his thesis more honestly.

[DemBones DemBones]

4. That could make a difference in how you view it.

The only reason I bring up whether or not you remember it happening is that a friend of mine, who's older by ten years, saw "JFK" for the first time not long ago and was as impressed as I was. I first saw it perhaps two years ago and was mesmerized.

Next time I watch it, I'll see if I agree with what you say about the faux-archival footage. It may be that you are correct that it is dishonest when viewed by people who don't know from memory what's historical footage and what isn't. It's obvious we view it from different perspectives. Do you have any clear memories of the events or do you think you just remember what you were told later?

[Guaranteed]

6. In reality there's very little real footage in the movie...

I don't feel like I had a hard time picking out what was real and what wasn't. The real stuff was grainy, and shitty.

[mrbill]

8. very little real footage in the movie??? How much do you expect???

By that standard the film would only be ten minutes long - some parade footage, Zapruder film and a few stills. What's wrong with the concept of poetic liscense and story telling? Stone never said that it was a documentary.

The conspirators didn't have video cameras back then.

Any student that has taken JFK assassination 101 can distinguish between the real footage and the "grainy and shitty" stuff.

Only caught the last fifteen minutes or so this time, Garrsion/Costner's summation and the verdict.

Learn something new every time i watch this movie. Oswald entered the Texas Theatre without paying the 75-cent admission even though he had $14 in his pocket when arrested. The ticket window person called the cops. Google sez that's in the Warren Report.

Oswald's landlady testified that shortly after Lee Harvey entered the house, a Dallas Police Car stopped in the street out front and honked twice. Since no archieval footage of this event existed, director Stone had to fake it.

Stone was very kind to Jack Ruby and muddied his tracks. Not much about mob ties in the movie.

Next up on TNT's nightly lineup was brother Mel Gibson's "Conspiracy Theory", a personal fun favorite.

In one bit, Mel rants to Julia Roberts that Oliver Stone is one of "them" whose purpose to to spread disinformation.

Stone is covering up for the mob.

[Guaranteed]

10. I didn't expect much at all, actually.

How much did you expect that I expected?

[mrbill]

12. gerry ford reciting the warren commission to elevator music......

n/t

[H2O Man]

17. you forgot one thing:

he'd need rosary beads

[DemBones DemBones]

5. I don't know that Stone made up anything himself but he

used a lot of material that is often considered "conspiracy theory."

Personally, I never used to believe in conspiracies but now I wonder if the government, the media, or the history books have ever told the whole truth about anything.

:shrug: :tinfoilhat: :shrug:

[Old and In the Way]

7. I think it was pretty honest......

I thought the magic bullet presentation was most illuminating.

LBJ did sign that Presidential order to go "all in" in VietNam shortly after Kennedy's assassination which was a reversal of Kennedy's plan to pull advisors out. And Kennedy was planning to take down the CIA. He had lots of enemies in the MIC.

Watching that Zapruder film convinces me that it was a conspiracy. They've gotten better with their assassinations, though. No more bullets in plain sight. Heck, they don't have to kill you anymore, either...pre-emptive character assassination works just as well and is a lot less messy.

What really struck me was the media's non-performance in investigating the assassination and how eerily similar it was to our media today and its non-investigation of 9/11.

[H2O Man]

9. The movie is very well done

I do not agree with everything in it, but it is well done. My favorite part is "Man X" in the park, which is perhaps the single most important scene. It is highly unlikely that Oswald shot a rifle that day. There is absolutely no way that he shot JFK.

[DemBones DemBones]

18. Yes, "X" makes the movie. The first time I saw it,

I kept replaying that scene with Donald Sutherland, trying to take it all in. I guess the creepiest bits in that part of the movie were X telling about regular military being told to stand down in Dallas and about X being sent off to Australia and seeing the headline about Oswald killing Kennedy -- was it before Kennedy was killed or "just" before Oswald was identified as a suspect by the police?

Lots more twists and turns, of course, but the scene with X was seminal. The movie raises some questions I hadn't heard before, too.

[Dem2theMax]

11. I caught the last 50 minutes. And I've never seen the film before.

Now I want to see the whole thing. I was sitting there flabbergasted, wondering how many of the 'facts' of the film were really FACTS. As for the black and white film not being 'real', that was no big deal to me at all.

[TomClash]

13. The best scene is the one with Costner and Sutherland

walking and talking on the Mall. A great summary of politics circa 1970 and much of it is quite applicable today.

[mrbill]

14. yep, just change brown and root for halliburton.........

who stands to profit?

how many helicopters lost?

Viet Nam only cost about $200 billion, that's a year in Iraq.

[Bridget Burke]

19. KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root) is a subsidiary of Halliburton.

Guess who stands to profit?

[H2O Man]

15. Man X

See the book "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam,and the Plot t Assassinate John F. Kennedy," by Colonel L. F. Prouty, who is the actual person Sutherland plays. Absolutely the most important scene in the film.

[H2O Man]

16. Also read "Farewell America"

by "James Hepburn." This book is in large part the Moynihan investigation into 11-22.

[Eloriel]

22. Available online here, and a fab read

Farewell America
http://www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html

[DelawareValleyDem]

23. Excellent Book

"Crossfire", by Jim Marrs, one of the books JFK is based on, owes a lot to Farewell America

[RainDog]

20. I don't know

...and neither, honestly, does most everyone else.

Here's some relatively new information.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/17/joannides/index_np.html

Dec. 17, 2003  |  A diverse group of authors and legal experts have announced their support for a lawsuit that demands the release of secret CIA records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

At issue in the suit, filed Tuesday in Washington, are records on the unexplained role of a Miami-based undercover CIA agent named George Joannides in the months prior to Kennedy's murder on Nov. 22, 1963. The authors supporting the suit include anti-conspiracist Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 book "Case Closed," and Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo, two leading novelists who have explored the mysteries surrounding accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Also backing the lawsuit are legal experts G. Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970s investigated Kennedy's death, and John Tunheim, a federal judge who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board of the mid-1990s.

The authors and experts differ on who was responsible for the president's murder, but all agree that the CIA must now come clean about Joannides, a career spy who died in 1990.
***

recently I read that whenever Bush's motorcade drives down a street, the manhole covers have to be sealed first.

made me think of the movie.

fwiw, Porter Goss, admits to paramilitary activity in the Bay of Pigs moment and was also based in Florida at this time.

Mad Cow productions has a photo that links Goss to Barry Seal, Mafia bosses and Cuban exiles taken back in the day.

I know longer know what's true. I only know that the Bush League has a record that makes me tend to disbelieve anything they say.

[deutsey]

21. I have the book version of the script for JFK

Stone provides lots of footnotes that source what he's basing his dramatization on.

He also reprints numerous columns in the book from mainstream media that both defended and attacked his film when it first came out.

I think Stone is not making a historical documentary here; he's making what he called a "counter-myth" to the Warren Commission version of what happend in Dallas. Myth in this case does not mean falsehood; myth actually consists of metaphorical representations of deep truths that are too large to summarize in simple "factual" reporting.

So the movie is not attempting to portray what happened as a straightfoward documentary; Stone's weaving together various strands of assassination research into an engaging narrative that creates what he sees as a plausible interpretation of the events in Dallas and the powers that may have been behind them.

Personally, I think there's a lot to be said for the contention that rightwing anti-Castro types in US intelligence allied with the mafia pulled off the murders of JFK and Oswald. There's a lot of debate about whether Kennedy was going to begin pulling troops out of Vietnam, as Stone contends, but there's enough evidence to at least make his argument worth listening to.

[Eloriel]

24. That's a fairly decent assessment

It IS, after all, a commercial movie -- not a documentary, as has been pointed out here already.

I didn't see the film until about a year or maybe longer ago, well after I'd taken in a good deal of information about the assassination here at DU, along with many other unpleasantries which represent a more realistic depiction of our recent history than the prevailing mythology and "official stories."

The "single bullet theory" has NEVER seemed plausible to me and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone accepts it, even for a moment, since it defies logic and common sense. And even before DU, there came a point (gradually, probably) when I suspected it wasn't some lone crazed commie gunman who did Kennedy in, but had to be factions within or allied with our own government at the heart of it.

DU, of course, brought all that into pretty sharp focus for me. So when I saw Stone's film, I considered it (and still do) absolutely dead on. There may be factual "errors" (and maybe not - I'm not a detail person, so I don't know and don't care), there may be cases of poetic license. There may be concessions Stone made due to logistics, money, time limitations (how long can a film be?), etc., I don't know.

And I don't care. AFAIC, the film superbly portrays, in broad overview at least, what really happened to JFK and who was involved.

As I said in another thread about the film yesterday, understanding what happened to JFK, why, and who was involved as Stone portrays it in overview or broad themes, is one essential key (tho probably not the ONLY key) to understanding where we are now, why, and who is involved.

There is a wealth of material available on the internet, and there's been a wealth of material which has been posted here at DU, going back a long time. (I joined when DU had about 12,000 members). For the serious seeker, for anyone capable of handling the truth, it's definitely worth looking into.

I was so impressed with Stone's film I bought a copy of the 1970s film "Executive Action." Unfortunately, I was hugely disappointed in it, quite possibly primarily because it seemed so dated and even quaint in comparison. I'll have to watch both again sometime soon. I probably own about 10 videos all together -- Tootsie and Thelma & Louise among them (two of my all-time favorite movies), so you can see how important I think these two JFK films are.

Edited: Let me add one more thing. One of THE key facts about our history which is essential, IMO, to understanding where we are now, though it may seem unrelated to JFK, is the direct importation of many, many Nazis into the U.S., especially into our intelligence services, at the end of and after WW2. We were interested in fighting communism, and Nazis were virulently anti-communist and had well-developed spy operations targeting communist Russia/Soviet Union. Many of them found nice homes within the Republican party, and in fact at least one had to resign from Bush1's campaign when he was exposed as a former Nazi. To make a long story short, we have had a strong fascist orientation within our government for a very long time (going back to the 1920s/30s if not before, actually), incl. within the CIA thanks to the importation of Nazis. Not only did Kennedy want to muck around with the CIA, he was a direct threat in many ways to everything our very own fascists stood for and wanted. Read "Farewell America" and a lot of this will make sense, tho I don't recall that the Nazis among us is included in the book.

[Cheswick2.0]

30. another good movie is 13 days

it is about the cuban missile crisis and makes the case that the military industrial complex/pentagon/CIA hated Kennedy for being soft on communism. IMO, that is why they had to kill him.

[shrike]

25. Makes sense to me

Good assessment. I'm glad Stone is honest enough to admit he was not making a documentary -- although there are people out there who believe it is one, and that Stone's version is gospel truth

There's another theory that Castro himself ordered a hit on Kennedy as a tit-for-tat; our government tried to assassinate him. Guess only Fidel knows for sure. But he's alive and Kennedy is not.

[nostalgicaboutmyfutr]

26. Is there a JFK-Hype 11/22 out there

against the Oliver Stone version of events??? A la Farenhype 9/11 was for Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11??

Thanks...

[deutsey]

27. Maybe Liberal Christians should make

Passion-Hype AD 33 in response to Gibson's film?

:evilgrin:

[Minstrel Boy]

28. "The Taking of America, One-Two-Three"

The title of a very interesting book, written by Richard E Sprague, available online here.

Sprague was consultant to the General Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and served the duration of the committee's life. (Not to be confused with the first General Counsel, Richard A Sprague, no relation.) His expertise was photographic analysis.

While the JFK assassination is the spine of the book, it's really about what Sprague calls the "Power Control Group" which has hijacked America, without most Americans realizing it.

It's about 30 years old, and things have only worsened.

An excerpt:

The taking of America has been both a simple and a very complex process. It has not been the result of a coup d'etat, although some aspects of the process resemble a coup. It has not been a process similar to the dictatorship takeovers in Germany, Italy and other fascist regimes. It has not been a process like the Communist "uprisings" in Russia, Hungary and other Eastern European countries.

The taking of America has been a process unique in the history of the world. The one feature that makes it unique is that what was once the greatest democracy in the world has been taken over by a power control group without the knowledge of most of the American people, their congressional representatives, or the rest of the world.

The group has taken America in this fashion because manipulation of the American presidency and the presidential electoral procedure is enough to control America. Two fiendishly clever stratagems were used to keep the fact that control had been seized from being obvious to the people. The first of these was control of the established media in the dissemination of both true (blocking) and false (flooding) information. The second was the use of clandestine and secret weapons and techniques developed during World War Two and perfected during the Korean and Viet Nam wars. These techniques are so new and unusual as to be unbelievable to most citizens. Thus, the incredibility of such weapons as hypnosis, brainwashing and "programming" of patsies as assassins became a psychological tool in the bag of techniques of the power control group. The average American has shrugged off the possibility of the takeover with the belief that, "That's not possible here."

The use of such weapons, coupled with a tremendous campaign through the controlled media that both whitewashes any signs of conspiracies and spreads disinformation throughout the country, has successfully blocked any serious or official attempts to get at the truth. Unofficial investigators, private researchers, and even Congressional representatives have been ridiculed and completely blocked by both the power control group and their media allies.

[ArkDem]

29. It's BullMoose Looney.