A Thread about the film JFK

Isn't that do-you-see? tone pretty much embedded into every last line of Kevin Costner's? (Or at least him verbalizing his every thought as he tries to figure stuff out, which amounts to the same thing in the end.)

Dis is a coup d'etat. With Lyndon Johnson. WAITING. IN. DA. WINGS.

xpost yes! that’s what I mean! in JFK the “do you see” tone ~works~

a sensible take would be boring. you NEED the gesticulating-wildly, spittle-mouth red-faced craziness. that is part of the, for me, uh “charm” of this movie.

i dont usually like conspiracy stuff & i don’t think i even buy it with JFK that much

but at the same time, for me, with Kennedy there is just something about that world & the cast of characters & thd venn diagram of interested/wronged parties that i never tire of hearing about.

stone captures the wild parade of spooks & weirdos & i love love love it

i dunno

the wild parade of spooks & weirdos--agree that that's the best thing about the film, by far. Unfortunately--for me, anyway; I know I've made this point before on this thread--Costner stops the film cold every time he opens his mouth.

I don't know if don't-you-see is all over Nixon, which I love. I can think of at least one flagrant instance, when the Larry Hagman character is trying to get Nixon to run in '64; Nixon says no one can beat Kennedy, then some guy in the shadows says "But what if Kennedy doesn't run," and everybody exchanges knowing glances.

hoover watching w cruel satisfaction as leading racehorse unexpectedly collapses

dammit who cooked this steak there’s blood all over my plate

i know what hunt is; i know what he… TRACKS back TO (i actually like this a lot)

it’s the system!

Also the scene where Richard Helms's eyes literally turn black:

https://phildellio.tripod.com/cia.jpg

Yeah, I suppose do-you-see is all over Nixon too. But happily, no Kevin Costner.

Unfortunately--for me, anyway; I know I've made this point before on this thread--Costner stops the film cold every time he opens his mouth.

yeah but the sleaze would lose its thrill without true-hearted Ray Kinsella in the center of the film

As I recall it, even though he gave his usual performance on the level of a large lump of unrisen doug, and yet that doughy lump gave the film its vital center of gravity and a breath of sincerity it absolutely required.

"where i think he overtstates the case is that this kind of thinking is always always always already a pretty constant pretty mainstream in american culture:
eg https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/illuminating-conspiracy";

Heard this late last night and it was an odd experience because like, everyone knows it's terrible history that is a bunch of conspiracy nutso rants. I did laugh at the JFK historian talking about the length of the Donald Sutherland monologue (the centrepiece of the film, far more than the trial) because yes that is the point in the film you get to thinking it's a high grade entertaining piece of fluff (but also a good piece of film for Stone, I certainly wouldn't bother with anything else he's made) or you try and get more mileage out of the 'terrible with damaging consequences for the state of the nation' theory, which at the moment is based on conversations Ganz had with people he's met. I was struck by how the historian (Alexis, forget her name) or the host didn't really engage much with what Ganz was proposing, which isn't that different from the outrage you used to get at violent film, and how they could incite violent acts. And no one really believes that, bar conservatives.

But it is all chat and maybe when he puts meat on the bones it might read more convincingly.

ganz is working on a book abt politics and culture in the 90s and grumpily noted during the pod that he now realised he had to write a JFK chapter lol

to me the point is that there's a larger curdling of various reaches of 60s radicalism -- which stone is certainly adjacent to -- into the bed* of present-day reactionary thinking among boomers in the UK and the US and elsewhere. of course JFK isn't remotely a catalyst outside the US: so i'd want to look for something less parochial as the jumpstart (if it has to have a single jumpstart). i'd be happy maybe to argue that JFK allowed a latent but very widespread tendency towards conspiracy theory in the US political unconscious to manifest as a new kind of cultural coalition, and helped flavour the form it took as the curdling happen. conspiracy theory wasn't remotely and was never far off the mainstream, but maybe as the boomers came of age this is when their version of it (sparked by and against COINTELPRO and MK-ULTRA) began significantly to fuse with the far-right versions? i'd like to see that argument dug into more (ganz already has a model for it in what he calls the "sorelian left", the strand of the french far left at the turn of the century who moved *right* in the wake of the dreyfus affair and WW1: but i haven't really seen himn connect the dots in this specific area… )

rush to judgement was *huge* among 60s counterculture radicalism -- remember the first beatles LP to land in the US, beatlemania, was release just three days after JFK was shot --

*not a mixed metaphor, lots of things can curdle into a bed: cheese for example

lol ignore the beatles paragraph -- i have a theory abt that also (abt kennedy as the lost prince across the water and who the counterculture embraced as replacement daddy) but i meant to delete it as it is NOT WELL FORMED YET and a distraction in this context

I forget if J. Hoberman ever addressed JFK in any of his many published pieces on film + paranoia.

he and amy taubin never shut up abt the zapruder footage :)

i probably have the village voice review of JFK in a box somewhere but i don 't remember who the reviewer was (seems p likely it was JH but… )

"to me the point is that there's a larger curdling of various reaches of 60s radicalism -- which stone is certainly adjacent to -- into the bed* of present-day reactionary thinking among boomers in the UK and the US and elsewhere. of course JFK isn't remotely a catalyst outside the US: so i'd want to look for something less parochial as the jumpstart (if it has to have a single jumpstart)."

Yeah I think the podcast got me to see what a trauma this was for Americans. I know it was, but just hearing it hammers the point. As a film it's a truly surrealist jumble of these conspiracy theories ("at the most secret point") with...Cuban gay mafia(??!?!?!) Very glad the editing aspect was mentioned, because that's the heart of why this is worth a bother, and why Ganz needs to write a chapter on it (weirdly I don't think it's a big deal at all, but I'm an ocean away). Because it's good as film, it engages/enrages.

Was thinking that maybe Brexit is the nearest analogue. But I don't know, it doesn't have the true sudden shock of a whole nation mourning, as this was the result of a nation divided. Diana was seen as just off the heart of the establishment, though it has the conspiracy element. Maybe that's why I am really looking forward to the Queen's death so much.

it doesn't jumble anything like enough of the conspiracies!

(e.g. no george hickey and his hair-trigger AR-15 in the car behind for example, the funniest and therefore the only good theory imo -- hickey fell over backwards when the motorcade sped up after the first shots, his finger tightened involuntarily and he blew off JFK's head by mistake)

re the mourning: the US was also divided tho (as the movie clumsily shows, costner muttering " i hate this country" when some trolls hoot and holler with deliught in the bar. more interestingly maybe, the counterculture was also divided (at least if you stretch that term to include e.g. malcolm x saying the chickens had come home to roost)

luka/aimless: I think that point has been made on here too, that Costner's blandness is a necessary foil to all the craziness. I've compared him to the Martin Milner character in Sweet Smell of Success; Diane Keaton in the two Godfathers might be another parallel, especially the second, where she's seemingly there to explain stuff we've already figured out.

Would Godfather II be hurt by her absence? I don't think so--I think it'd be an even greater film with a less bland Kay.

ed asner shd have played garrison (on stilts perhaps since i believe garrison was a beanpole of a man): the milquetoast niceman persona we get is as exhausting after like five seconds as it's implausible (he's a new orleans district attorney ffs)

costner's first line -- when he's told kennedy's been shot -- is like "oh no" in just the weediest squeakiest way. of course some of the problem is that stone has zero sense of humour -- a garrison who was darkly funny abt all this absurd stuff (instead of a nerdily credulous exposition-robot) might have actually been an adequate foil

also more shd have been made of the jacques tati pipe-and-umbrella combo, it's right there and then it's just thrown away (in conclusion jacques tati shd have directed this film, being ten years dead is no bar to it being better than stone's film)

the milquetoast niceman persona we get is as exhausting after like five seconds as it's implausible (he's a new orleans district attorney ffs)

Yes. Remember "I took nine judges on, Deano, right here in New Orleans, and I beat 'em all!"?

I was looking for a today-in-history to talk about with a grade 8 class this morning, and it's the 50th anniversary of Hoover's death. (65th anniversary of Joe McCarthy's.) Hoover's quite prominent in Nixon, of course; can't remember how often he's referenced in JFK.

Monsieur Hulot stumbling into a Clay Shaw sex party would've been a fabulous movie.

"Hulot's a real butch john. You'd meet him on the street, you'd never snap. You could go fishing with him, play poker with him, you'd never snap in a million years!"

lol at all the conspirators who "speak five languages" -- not six, not four, but five, evidently the number that most impresses our oliver

Knows phil-lo-so-fee.

Conspiracy theorists consider four or five groups, alone or in combination, to be the primary suspects in the assassination of Kennedy: the CIA,[313][314] the military-industrial complex,[313][314] organized crime,[313][314][315] the government of Cuba led by Fidel Castro,[314][315][316] and Cuban exiles.[314] Other domestic individuals, groups, or organizations implicated in various conspiracy theories include Lyndon Johnson,[316][314][315] George H. W. Bush,[314][315] Sam Giancana,[316] Carlos Marcello,[317] J. Edgar Hoover,[315] Earl Warren,[316] the Federal Bureau of Investigation,[314] the United States Secret Service,[314][315] the John Birch Society,[314][315] and far-right wealthy Texans.[314] Some other alleged foreign conspirators includes, the KGB and Nikita Khrushchev,[316][314] Aristotle Onassis,[315] the government of South Vietnam,[318] and international drug lords,[314] including a French heroin syndicate.[318]

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920x1080/p05lxz1y.jpg

https://spikemagazine.com/reviews/onion.jpg

thats right

words david ferrie did not say in the early to mid-1960s: "wannabe"

"i could give you a false name, but i won't, just call me X" lol im sorry that is also a false name in my opinion

if you wannabe my lover
u gotta shoot up my friends

garrison (squeaky with horror at the chaotic info-dump that agent "X" just unloaded on him): "i can't believe they killed him bcz he wanted to *change* things!"
me (squeaky with exhaustion even tho im watching this dumb movie in half-hour stretches): "yeah they didn't u colossal nincompoop"
agent "X" (not real name apparently): long section late in (longer) info-dump explaining how robert macnamara of all ppl lol was undermining the drive to war

sutherland is fun to watch of course but his character -- this unflappably amused and cynical aristocratic deep throat -- makes no sense (yes i know he's based on fletcher prouty, and yeah, 30 years later prouty does come across more like this in affect on youtube and wherever)

agent "X" (not real name apparently): "you've become a significant threat to the national security structure! they'd have killed you already bit you've gotta lotta light on you!"
me (eyes rolling down the back mf my head and along the floor): "unlike president john f kennedy in dallas who no one was paying to attention or had even heard of really"
narrator: "he had not become a significant threat to the national security structure"

words david ferrie did not say in the early to mid-1960s: "wannabe"

― mark s, Tuesday, May 3, 2022 6:09 PM (yesterday)

online etymology dictionary traces this one to 1981. clearly david ferrie was sent back in time by the true murderers to throw us off the trail.

lol ffs the weepy strings on this scene

https://i.imgur.com/56zQw6U.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/95I0y3u.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/aIlN9jm.jpg

not gnna lie i wanna see the plays clay shaw wrote

was really not prepared to find out why people were talking about Jar Jar Binks and JFK

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) May 4, 2022

https://i.imgur.com/odvOVBB.png

divorce him liz he isn't worth it, get out and save yrself

lol this domestic squabble is Q-pilling me to see this movie as verhoeven-level irony

need someone to shop showgirls and jfk into the same poster tbrr

Don't ever let me watch a movie sitting next to mark s.

its true i talk non-stop and take pix wth my phone and post them on the internet

but dont worry i will never let you do that

do not forget your dying king, mark!

nothing u say can ruin my enjoyment of this movie

What if no one shot JFK and his head just did that?

— Tom Broome-Jones | Black Lives Matter (@TBroomey) August 3, 2017

more champagne!

"sutherland is fun to watch" is part of the key here. Facts and logic will ofc destroy a lot of what he is saying (though not all - war driving growth is a powerful aspect, what with the industry and networks built around defence -- all the way up to billions in contracting in Afghanistan). but it's all delivery, coupled with the hard to believe fact that a lone person could've killed the most powerful person in the world. Sutherland's monologue is a sorta cry for their lot not being as good as they think they are, and the damage of that knowledge.

Around the fourth or fifth time of watching I get round to thinking people can win. Maybe in the end we could get out of this prison.

back on my bullshit = being correct abt how dumb and bad this movie is

now watching the last hour (i had to take a big time out from the nonsense one week ago): back in to discover johnny carson was also in on the fix, literally the only person not in the conspiracy was garrison bcz he's so milkily annoying

i do remember exactly where i was when i heard the news of rfk's assassination: i was at the kitchen table in a little welsh farmhouse where we went every year for our summer holiday, listening to dad's little portable radio… tho all i remember is sounds of muffled shouting and chaos, like the bbc radio new was broadcasting live from the scene

i also remember that this occurred during the broadcast on the same radio -- which i listened to at the same kitchen table -- of the moon landing: as my memory has it, it went "giant step for mankind", muffled shouting, shots, chaos…

stone shd make a movie abt THAT when sirhan sirhan gets out, sirhan can play buzz aldrin

tommy lee jones shd wear this wig in all his movies tbf