Cyclopean

Rating: 6/10 (20 August 2006)

Two aspects of this movie earn respect as cinema: the first is the way Stone manages stock footage - this is masterfully edited and composed. The second is the way it is structured around memories. The entire movie hinges on how Stone imagines his Garrison imagining the recollections of all his 'witnesses' (really just an amalgam of all the conspiracy buffs' theories). At key points, the stock footage and the cinematic 'memories' are sequenced together, producing a "Citizen Kane" effect. And so I rank this on the 'watchable' end of my rating scale.
Stone stated in interviews that his goal was to assemble all of the major conspiracy theories into one movie -- and the result is this elephantine mess, as corpulent as Candy's hipster lawyer. The smart thing to do would have been to focus on one character - Oswald, for example. Oldman handled him especially well - and use the visual storytelling described above to flesh that out...too bad.
It didn't take long for this to be relegated to mere entertainment. Only the most hardened conspiracy nut takes this at face value. I won't go through a list of points that I can refute (yawn). But I can advise you to watch "Unsolved History: JFK - Beyond The Magic Bullet". You may find this useful as an empirical debunking of the 'magic bullet' business that props up this movie and the theories that surround the most studied assassination in history.
So what else 'keeps this story from going away'? Mostly, I think it's the war baby and boomer generations' wounded pride -- they can't accept that the Kennedy lion could have been killed by a gnat. I know this is one of Stone's motivating factors.
Unfortunately, this is the same guy who slobbers all over that murderous despot Castro. Stone's narrative is the same in every movie -- 'regular' Americans love their country, but it's been hijacked by business greedheads and fascists.
It's sad. Sad because so many people take this seriously, in order to fill their emptiness. I had the bilious displeasure of watching "Loose Change 2nd Ed.", a sign of yet another brewing cultural war. I'm afraid that within three decades we'll be seeing narrative movies by A-list directors about Sept. 11, 2001 that demand responses to 'unanswered questions'.
On the lighter side, this was nicely deflated in Seinfeld's "The Boyfriend (1)" episode. That's one magic loogie!