A Thread about the film JFK

I'm pretty sure I need not say more than what I said above, but I feel compelled to add that unlike the vast majority of ilxors, when I was growing up there were no VCRs, no cable movie channels, so the phenomenon of watching and rewatching favorite movies to surfeit simply didn't exist, and first through non-existence, then poverty, and then bychoice I have quite literally never had cable television or streaming in any home where I've lived up to the present minute.

This is not a brag. I understand that this places me well outside the bounds of cultural norms. That's neither a feature nor a bug in my estimate. It just makes me abnormal in a way that I find very acceptable and doesn't seem to adversely affect my general well-being. I wish the continual family crises hadn't been so central to my life, but I don't really miss the presumed benefits of having consumed mass quantities of popular culture, post-1972. I get along OK.

do you remember any of the poetry

I presume if I'd listened to the same poetry as often as I've heard ad jingles and Beatles songs, I'd have it burned in pretty deeply. But I read it instead. I learned a lot about how it operates and how to write it. But I wasn't memorizing it, no. That wasn't my interest.

Anyway, carry on with Kevin, Tommy Lee, Joe Pesci and the gang.

"As a matter of fact I don't even own a TV"

Good for you. I own one and watch it, too. May I just say that lives can be very complicated and your desire to cram me into a simple slot has more to do with your need to stop thinking than any connection to my life.

"among a group who clearly has watched it so often they've memorized large parts of the script and take delight in quoting it."

I've watched the whole thing twice. Maybe three times. And I don't know anything about The Princess Bride. Maybe it's you know that should stop trying to draw conclusions about others and what's happening.

i dreamt last night that the cause of jfk's assassination was bob-a-job week

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, October 15, 2003 5:52 PM (fifteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still the only good theory imo

― mark s, Friday, 17 May 2019 15:02 (eight months ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't make me tap the sign

― mark s, Wednesday, 22 January 2020 14:23 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

also

― mark s, Tuesday, 26 April 2022 15:27 (eight months ago) bookmarkflaglink

☝️☝️☝️

It was wrong the first time.

That's some bullet.

The telephones didn't work to keep the wrong stories from spreading if anything went wrong with the plan.

Do ppl like The Doors as much as JFK? Same year and similar approaches (use of name actors in minor roles, cutaways, monolithic deification of flawed 60s figures). I wanted nothing to do with either one at the time. I've since seen The Doors in bits and pieces and it seems just bad and not that entertaining.

Kevin's not entirely wrong though:

reactionary proto-Q movie is good because it’s entertaining

It's a terrible film, and not entertaining.

JFK is The Doors perfected.

They both also seem very sloppy/ugly. My wife noticed sets in JFK with furniture that was so 80s/90s. Ppl in The Doors look like they could step immediately into Singles without a costume change.

Why don't we drop this subject. It's one thing to engage in badinage with these youngsters, but this sort of thing could be so easily misunderstood.

I've noticed no incongruity with the visual design. But I do have a lovely Chippendale dining table. I often have a friend sit at one end while I sit at the othah. It's precisely the point of a looong dining table.

xp (which is to say, there isn't a single out of context quote in this thread as pointless and annoying as someone adapting a lateral lisp and interjecting "inconceivable!")

ftr sometimes when i post a decontextualized line from a movie i am trying to get people to notice thematic or metaphorical resonance context tends to camouflage, as here--

we got out near the geese, and only then did we realize we had forgotten our shotguns! stupid right? so, uh, of course, we didn’t get any geese.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, November 22, 2022 4:05 PM bookmarkflaglink

--but admittedly this thread tends to be an exception lol

Wise buncha birds!

there were thousands of them, all over the place, but, uh, you couldn't approach 'em

(untouchable, man)

Forget it, Aimless, it's ILXtown.

but, uh, you couldn't approach 'em

I really dig how Pesci looks solemn while saying this line, like he's swallowed his own bullshit about the birds.

i been working with mice, yknow, trying to come up with a cure

Man, Pesci had the run for a moment there.

https://i.imgur.com/jOyaV7s.png

Wise buncha birds!

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 3 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Completely irresponsible waxwing birds 🐦🐦🐦 tend to eat fermented fruit and then lie drunk on the sidewalks.

Wise passers-by collect them and put them in a safe place until they sober up. pic.twitter.com/jff6nuv2nw

— State of Poland 🇵🇱 (@StateOfPoland) January 9, 2023

Yikes

https://variety.com/2023/film/global/jfk-assassination-viggo-mortensen-shia-labeouf-david-mamet-1235612087/

What am I reading.

deranged movie. makes a good counterpart piece to oppenheimer

Please don't make me watch it

Just a quiet chat between gentlemen.

The most audacious film to be produced by a Hollywood studio in the last 50 years. Robertson’s cinematography is astounding, as is the editing.

Producer/financier/former Israeli weapons smuggler Arnon Milchan is currently knee-deep in Netanyahu’s corruption trial. I remember once boarding an airplane, probably not too long after this film came out, and noticed a man in the first row who was flanked by two Dobermans he had purchased the adjoining seats for. My father leaned over and told me it was Milchan

We're going back into the case. The murder of the President.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jfk-assassination-witness-breaks-silence-142858952.html

The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh. It seemed incredible that a single bullet could do all that, so skeptics called it the magic bullet theory.

Investigators came to that conclusion partly because the bullet was found on a stretcher believed to have held Connally at Parkland Memorial Hospital, so they assumed it had exited his body during efforts to save his life. But Landis, who was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, said that is not what happened.

In fact, he said, he was the one who found the bullet — and he found it not in the hospital near Connally but in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.

When he spotted the bullet after the motorcade arrived at the hospital, he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened. At some point, he now guesses, the stretchers must have been pushed together, and the bullet was shaken from one to another.

“There was nobody there to secure the scene, and that was a big, big bother to me,” Landis said. “All the agents that were there were focused on the president.” A crowd was gathering. “This was all going on so quickly. And I was just afraid that — it was a piece of evidence, that I realized right away. Very important. And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision,’ and I grabbed it.’”

Landis theorizes that the bullet struck Kennedy in the back but for some reason was undercharged and did not penetrate deeply, therefore popping back out before the president’s body was removed from the limousine.

~deep exhale, pinches bridge of nose~

see that’s the thing with this whole bag of cats now: the explanations are always somehow even dumber than the crackpot theories

Stop eatin' that crab meat, VegGrrl, and listen!

"it's my belief that the bullet was already embedded in the backseat of the car when Kennedy got in, and when he sat back it was pushed into him. i heard him say ow, what's that?"

dammit liz i've been sleepin for three sixty years!

lmao

I'm in my 40's, so I'll have shuffled off this mortal coil by then. But I'm telling my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit, so that one glorious September morning, in 2023...

never in the history of warfare has there been a bullet this ridiculous!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5YOiaBq3KI

(2m 37s in that clip)

Coming soon to 4K UHD from Shout Select

JFK (1991) 4K UHD #4KUltraHD #4K #Bluray #PhysicalMedia #Movie #Movies #Film #Cinema #FilmTwitter #JFK #KevinCostner pic.twitter.com/TuWhdNh4i4

— Dawn of The Discs (@dawnofthediscs) October 2, 2023

According to the site:

RUN-TIME
205 / 188 min

So here’s hoping we are getting the theatrical version in 4K

Camelot in smithereens!

I don't think John Williams is given enough credit for this film's score. It's traditional American epic by way of Morricone's score for The Thing. It really gives a sinister, eerie undercurrent to so many of the scenes. It's off-kilter, and elsewhere when he engages in some patriotic marching band motifs, it morphs into a horror score (like the opening assassination scene.)

Fuck yeah!

i missed the 4K announcement somehow. Lord, wake me. I must be dreaming.

Unfortunately, that set's theatrical release is only BR, not 4K, but honestly, that's still better than I'd hoped for given Stone's preference for the idiotic director's cut.