One of the most important films ever produced

Rating: Null/10 (23 June 2013)

When Oliver Stone sat down to write and direct this picture, given that 95% of the data contained within was available in numerous books since the '60s and '70s, he must have expected the typically dismissive reaction those paperback treatises had largely received.
Instead, all Hell broke loose.
Not since the jaw-droppingly racist epic THE BIRTH OF A NATION seventy-six years earlier had a movie received such a startlingly prickly response or would become such a controversy.
Based rather loosely on New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's prosecution of local businessman Clay Shaw regarding Shaw's alleged complicity in setting up Lee Harvey Oswald in the 1963 JFK assassination ("loosely" because the investigation and trial is used as a format for presenting data uncovered in some cases by other investigators and at a later date) the picture is a mesmerizingly rich montage of fact and educated theory, Stone's quick-cuts editing style then highly unusual (though now used incessantly in movies about absolutely nothing) and evocative. He does an impressive job of communicating a massive amount of information to the audience in only about three hours. But it's exactly Stone's cinematic skill which caused "JFK" to explode into reviled critical consciousness in a manner all those assassination books never would, could or did.
Any honest student of the assassination won't be stunned by the content. But the media and governmental over-reactive upsurge against the movie was almost more damning that the movie itself.
Even today, nearly two decades after the film was released, it's astounding how infamous it remains. Also astounding is how the LoneNut/Oswald-did-it mindset continues to hold on. If one checks out the numerous assassination Internet websites, for example, they are nearly all stalwart defenders of the Warren Commission, some surfacely affecting objectivity, some rabidly direct --- they are essentially the cyber version of Gerald Posner's 1993 "Case Closed", once called "the most dishonest book ever written" and a literary response to Stone's movie. "Case Closed" (and those websites) clearly know the data: they go into great, intricate detail in an effort to meticulously deconstruct all of the pro-conspiracy material.... only they deconstruct falsely. As anyone who knows the material will quickly realize. But, to the uninitiated, such sites' endless, 24/7 "debunking" (a favorite phrase by the fervent and on-message-beyond-belief LoneNut bloggers who haunt the Internet) of the conspiracy can appear quite convincing, just as these more casual audiences are so easily fooled by the authoritative yet selectively sloppy Untruths of Peter Jennings' 40th Anniversary Special for ABC in 2003 or (that other Stone's) "Oswald's Ghost." The eternal rationalizations, the endless manipulations from the pro-Warren Commission crowd. The unending assertions of, "Oh, I use to be a conspiracy believer, too, until I learned that.... ," and the ubiquitous world-weary faux tones of, "Let's just finally get this behind us, people. If you would read the superb and painstaking investigation by ...... then, you would know that this was all concretely disproved years ago when....." On and on and on.
Apparently, the only massive conspiracy this seething, vitriolic army of LoneNutters finds credible is that countless otherwise unconnected witnesses --- even those first-hand witnesses from Dealey Plaza! --- all somehow colluded in their shameless efforts to clear Oswald, frame the CIA, or just to frame faceless gunman in the trees behind the picket fence. All for money or attention or to achieve some other unspecified spineless agendum.
At this late date, however, with nearly all of the conspirators presumably long gone (and ~75% of the American public still convinced of the conspiracy, as they have been since the '60s) why is maintaining The Lie so important in some corners? As clearly it is. It has, after all, been nearly half a century since Kennedy died on the streets of Dallas.
Perhaps because the dynamic behind the assassination of the 35th president (or the dynamic behind misrepresenting it) is still essentially in place. 'The Secret State' is an awfully mysterious phrase, but it simply reflects large corporate business interests and those interests' determined defense of their rights to circumvent our democratic processes at every possible turn... Up until the recent near-Depressional economic downturn, the national news media (generally in bed with the same corporations) wouldn't even fleetingly address arguably the most pressing issue of our time: corporate corruption and Big Business's stranglehold on all levels of our government. And even now, such coverage is superficial and grudging at best.
So when famed Watergate burglar E Howard Hunt's 2004 handwritten and audio-taped confession of personal and CIA/LBJ involvement in JFK's murder can't even receive coverage in the national media decades after the event, where are we still? It seems there is no pro-conspiracy revelation, no matter how dramatic and credible, which can receive coverage. And no anti-conspiracy evidence, no matter how flimsy and contrived, which can't.
Many detractors have sneered that it's dreadful that millions of youngsters perceive the JFK assassination thru the "distorted lens" of Oliver Stone. But I say, "Thank goodness for Oliver."