JFK Discussion

Originally Posted by Saint G

Definitely a great movie. The way it snowballs all the conspiracy theories, and gives them this plausible light is well done. The performances are also top notch. Costner at his best, Pesci, Bacon, Candy, etc. They all brought their unique characters to life. It also opened my eyes to how entertaining conspiracy theories can be. It is the mix of truth with plausibility, thrown into a blender with conjecture and paranoia.

Originally Posted by Richard Dickson

I don't think Stone was trying to say any one theory was right. What he was saying is that we should be asking questions, that we shouldn't blindly believe in our government anymore. It's about how the veil of innocence fell from before our eyes that day in Dallas -- "black is white," as Garrison says -- and that, nearly thirty years later, we'd started to close our eyes again. He wants us going forward with eyes open, not necessarily paranoid, but mindful of the fact that the company line isn't always the truth.

Originally Posted by From David Oliver

It goes without saying that, accurate or not, this is one of Oliver Stone's best movies, with Oscar-winning editing and cinematography and fantastic performances by a murderer's row of actors. Kevin Costner doing the type of character that he does best. John Candy as a slick, scat-talking Southern lawyer. The sheer level of complexity in the script itself. All excellent.

Originally Posted by Devin Faraci in his review of Alexander

As Hephaistion he is Alexander�s boyhood friend and lover (in a very roundabout way � the movie talks endlessly about the love between two men, and how it is the highest ideal of love, but Stone shies away from showing us two men getting it on at all. I can�t be all that surprised � the most prominent gay characters in the Stone oeuvre are the weirdo conspirators in JFK, who engage in such ridiculous orgies that the whole thing almost seems a slander.

Originally Posted by Devin Faraci

JFK is the apotheosis of Stone's anti-authoritarianism: it's a top-down indictment of nearly every political figure who came to power subsequent to Kennedy's assassination; on the surface, the film dares to suggest that, even today, we are living under an installed government.

The point of Stone's cinema is to raise more questions than could possibly ever be answered, and the fact that he does it under the guise of drama makes it far more defensible than the documentary fabrications of Michael Moore. At his best, Stone challenges everything you thought you knew about history; via a canny, technically peerless melding of hysterically loaded form and content, he forces you to reconsider the standard line while being skeptical of rampant conspiracy theorizing (JFK is a wonderful dichotomy: it's brilliant, rousing propaganda that's fully aware it's three-quarters full of shit).

Originally Posted by Clarence Beaks

Stone's penchant for heavy-handed moralizing has tainted even his best work (i.e. Salvador and JFK)

Originally Posted by Nordling

JFK - It doesn't matter if this film is right. It doesn't matter that both Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison may be as nutty as a Pay Day. What matters is that this is a film that not only questions authority and government but swells with American pride while doing so. It shows that patriotism comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the message isn't as important as the language it's given. This is a great American film.

Originally Posted by Moriarty

Those who would damn this film for not being “true” miss the point. No film is true, especially not a film about an event as clouded in obfuscation as this one. Instead, this is an American RASHOMON, a film about the search for truth and the elusive nature of it. Oliver Stone illuminates every theory in the film visually, shows us possibility after possibility for how things might have happened. It’s the finest work he’s ever done as a filmmaker, and it should be taught in film schools for mise en scene, if nothing else. The giant, unruly supporting cast gives us glimmers of life in the strangest moments, and the overall effect of the picture is dizzying. I left the theater after my first viewing drunk on the potential of cinema. Any film that can still do that to me after all the movies I’ve seen is a classic.

Originally Posted by Princess Kate

I have to also add, jfk is the best edited film if all time in my opinion

Originally Posted by Arjen Rudd

Slightly hyperbolic, but in essence, I agree. It's a master class.

Originally Posted by Pompoussory Estoppel

I'm a huge Kevin Costner fan. If this was an 80s movies list, I'd probably have three or four from him in it. JFK representhttp://www.chud.com/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1795038s a lot of things to me. It shows the good of America along with the bad. Perhaps the best thing about JFK is that it takes the story of the Kennedy assassination and it turns it into a truly American detective story. Costner is fantastic and the scene of Garrison and X remains one of the greatest scenes in movie history, IMO.

Originally Posted by Roger Ebert

The important point to make about "JFK" is that Stone does not subscribe to all of Garrison's theories, and indeed rewrites history to supply his Garrison character with material he could not have possessed at the time of these events. He uses Garrison as the symbolic center of his film because Garrison, in all the United States in all the years since 1963, is the only man who has attempted to bring anyone into court in connection with the fishiest political murder of our time.

Stone's film is hypnotically watchable. Leaving aside all of its drama and emotion, it is a masterpiece of film assembly. The writing, the editing, the music, the photography, are all used here in a film of enormous complexity, to weave a persuasive tapestry out of an overwhelming mountain of evidence and testimony. Film students will examine this film in wonder in the years to come, astonished at how much information it contains, how many characters, how many interlocking flashbacks, what skillful interweaving of documentary and fictional footage. The film hurtles for 188 minutes through a sea of information and conjecture, and never falters and never confuses us.

Stone and his editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, have somehow triumphed over the tumult of material here and made it work - made it grip and disturb us. The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche. John F. Kennedy was murdered. Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone. Who acted with him? Who knew?

Originally Posted by Roger Ebert's second review

Shortly after the film was released, I ran into Walter Cronkite and received a tongue-lashing, aimed at myself and my colleagues who had praised "JFK.'' There was not, he said, a shred of truth in it. It was a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. It did not reflect the most elementary principles of good journalism. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.

I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that "JFK'' is no more, or less, factual than Stone's "Nixon''_or "Gandhi,'' "Lawrence of Arabia,'' "Gladiator,'' "Amistad,'' "Out of Africa,'' "My Dog Skip'' or any other movie based on "real life.'' All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.

Given that standard, "JFK'' is a masterpiece.

But ``JFK'' will stand indefinitely as a record of how we felt. How the American people suspect there was more to it than was ever revealed. How we suspect Oswald did not act entirely alone. That there was some kind of a conspiracy. "JFK'' is a brilliant reflection of our unease and paranoia, our restless dissatisfaction. On that level, it is completely factual.

Originally Posted by Ben Thomas

The use of reflected light on Costner's glasses was a very interesting component in Empire's Masterpiece review a few years back. At several points throughout the film, Costner's Garrison is unsure of where the case will take him and how it will effect his life and we see his eyes - his vision - are completely distorted by light reflecting from the lenses of his spectacles. By the time he makes his summation at the end, and crucially addresses the audience, his vision is clear and we seem him look straight down the lens of the camera at us.

Originally Posted by James

I can forgive all the innacuracies in the film, and accept that it's just a melting pot of everything said about the assassination. Plus, according to the Time magazine (?) profile at the time, Stone really did believe a lot of what he put in the film (There's an article I'll try and drag up).