Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

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Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby RocketMan » Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:56 am

Long time no see!

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/oliv ... 234904254/

Oliver Stone's been busy with documentaries these last years and he's put together a four-hour doc on the latest JFK research, spurred on by the legislation JFK forced back in the early '90s. Jim DiEugenio's apparently one of the main talking heads and I seem to remember Stone's back with his OG director of photography Robert Richardson who's since carved major oeuvres with both Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Should be fuckin good.

Anyway, I have to marvel at Stone's optimism at this late stage re: submitting this to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC of all places. :praybow :lol2: Both they and Netflix turned him down based on some "fact checking" process. If this means checking the cutting edge declassified documentary research against stuff by people like Dallek, Bugliosi, Robert Caro et al., well, good luck with that. So I hope he gets picked up in Cannes. Apparently Stone has already gotten interest in Europe for distribution so I doubt this will be completely deep-sixed...

I wrote "JFK" in the search field but came up empty, btw, so that's why I did a new thread...
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby DrEvil » Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:56 pm

I don't recall Netflix doing much fact-checking when Making a Murderer released, or when they gave fucking Gwyneth 'Goop' Paltrow her own show.

But still, should be a good watch wherever and whenever it releases.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby RocketMan » Fri Mar 26, 2021 5:39 am

DrEvil » Tue Mar 23, 2021 9:56 pm wrote:I don't recall Netflix doing much fact-checking when Making a Murderer released, or when they gave fucking Gwyneth 'Goop' Paltrow her own show.

But still, should be a good watch wherever and whenever it releases.


INDEED.

Just a pretty transparent excuse.

And like Stone himself said, how are you going to "fact check" a totally new interpretation of history based on never before seen documents? Jesus Fucking Christ Almighty.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby thrulookingglass » Fri Mar 26, 2021 9:04 am

Hopsicker's work in researching Barry Seal has tied up a lot of loose ends. The Operation 40 photograph is a giant smoking gun. I really hope Douglas P. Horne's work is included somehow in this documentary. Brian Snoddy has also added important information on who was in Dallas that day. It's obscene. Been so many years and with the assistance of the internet the research has cut through the fog. Cyril Wecht was such a passionate pathologist himself. At least ten shots fired. Explain that away. Bush/MIC/CIA junta arrives...no one bats an eye. Sickening. No one should discount what Fletcher Prouty had to add. Still can't get over the fact that Clay Shaw had a butler he called Smedley. Smedley fucking Butler. War is a racket.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby Grizzly » Fri Mar 26, 2021 11:05 am

THIS ^^^
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Mar 26, 2021 11:13 am

.

[turd in punch bowl]

If Stone was a true rogue to the status quo he'd be dead, or kept largely obscure.

[/turd in punch bowl]


Even if everything Stone documents turns out to be accurate, at this rate of 'reveal time', we should be expecting the truth on 9/11 and Covid to be broadcast in ~2060 and ~2080, respectively. Perhaps by then 'the truth' will be accepted, assuming humans aren't fully Borg'd.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Borg


thruthelookingglass shared some interesting info above. Below are some contextual links -- caveat lector applies, of course.

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKoperation40.htm

Excerpt:
...

According to Daniel Hopsicker, the following were also involved in Operation 40: Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming. (10) It has also been pointed out that Operation 40 was not only involved in trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Sturgis has claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents."
This photograph was taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963.It has been argued by Daniel Hopsicker that the men in the photograph are allmembers of Operation 40. Hopsicker suggests that the man closest to thecamera on the left is Felix Rodriguez, next to him is Porter Goss and Barry Seal.Hopsicker adds that Frank Sturgis is attempting to hide his face with his coat.It has been claimed that in the picture are Albertao 'Loco' Blanco (3rd right)and Jorgo Robreno (4th right).

Image
This photograph was taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963.
It has been argued by Daniel Hopsicker that the men in the photograph are all
members of Operation 40. Hopsicker suggests that the man closest to the
camera on the left is Felix Rodriguez, next to him is Porter Goss and Barry Seal.
Hopsicker adds that Frank Sturgis is attempting to hide his face with his coat.
It has been claimed that in the picture are Albertao 'Loco' Blanco (3rd right)
and Jorgo Robreno (4th right).


...



https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_40

Operation 40 was a CIA-sponsored hit squad of the 1960s, composed mostly of Cuban exiles. It was active in the United States and the Caribbean (including Cuba), Central America, and Mexico. Many researchers, including Daniel Hopsicker and Mark Gorton, have pointed to Operation 40 involvement in the JFK Assassination.[1][2] Members of operation 40 have played key roles in deep events decades later, from CIA Drug trafficking to the Watergate Coup to assassinations such as those of John Lennon and Adelino Amaro da Costa, and even in the 9/11 Cover up.



Those spooks sure look to be having a good time in that photo, eh? Utterly verboten now. At least for the lemmings that comply.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 01, 2021 2:27 am

or kept largely obscure


I don't disagree in that we shouldn't lionize pretty much anyone (the less we talk about World Trade Center the better, cough). However, Stone has been very much blackballed in the US. For a filmmaker of his level, he has to work incredibly hard to raise money for his projects. No US studios back his feature projects, though he did get his The Untold History of the US to Showtime. His latest feature projects have been largely funded with European money.

Netflix will throw a coupla hundred million to Scorsese no questions asked for The Irishman, etc. If you watch the Spike Lee interview, he is his usual frustrated self. He really seems to be in pain sometimes with how difficult he finds it.

Remember, he tried to get an MLK film off the ground with Jamie Foxx and almost pulled it off, but the King family pulled support at the last minute. I'm still smarting over that. Wouldn't have fit the iconography I bet.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Apr 01, 2021 8:08 pm

.

All fair points. I'm admittedly not too invested in whether he is or isn't (a threat or 'player'), but appreciate his talents -- even when flawed, his output is worth watching.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby RocketMan » Thu Sep 02, 2021 1:06 pm

Well, the premier went surprisingly well, and though most of the criticism was snarky as expected, it wasn't actually panned. Even the most negative reviews had to resort to cheap shots and entire paragraphs of hand-waving (weird how movie critics become nitpicky political scientists/historians immediately when the hegemonic reality is being critiqued in any way, not so interested in the verisimilitude of such fare as Black Hawk Down or Zero Dark Thirty). Some reviews were actually mixed to positive! It appears Stone has made such a sober documentary without much visual pizzazz and with such credentialed interviewees that it's difficult for the most hardened bootlicker to completely deny what is being said.

It's coming out in movie and four-hour miniseries formats apparently. At least European distributors have been locked, I hope and expect that the US will get to see this as well, eventually.





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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby thrulookingglass » Thu Sep 02, 2021 4:43 pm

And Spike was coerced into removing content regarding 9/11 truth from his recent Showtime series. Ask yourself what "they" are afraid of...
Control through fear, violence, and terror...oldest religion ever.

The meeting at Clint Murchison's house is corroborated by Madeleine Duncan Brown and a maid/housekeep for the Murchisons. They didn't know one another.

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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby RocketMan » Fri Sep 03, 2021 6:05 am

thrulookingglass » Thu Sep 02, 2021 11:43 pm wrote:And Spike was coerced into removing content regarding 9/11 truth from his recent Showtime series. Ask yourself what "they" are afraid of...


YES. This The Vulture piece is a very useful window into the ruling mindset. The reaction is instant, violent and fundamentally irrational.

Anti-semitism seems to be the main weapon against "conspiracy theory" these days, increasingly so.

https://www.vulture.com/2021/09/what-is ... eries.html

What Is Going On in Spike Lee’s 9/11 HBO Docuseries?
By Chris Vognar

Spike Lee’s documentaries usually take the form of visual essays, with the vociferous filmmaker making his voice heard from behind the camera (and occasionally in front of it) and outlining where he personally stands on an issue. He’s hardly the only documentarian to take this approach. The French critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc long ago coined the term camera-stylo, or “camera-pen,” suggesting that filmmakers can and should wield their cameras the way writers use their pens.

None of which fully explains his latest undertaking, NYC Epicenters 9/11–2021 ½. Lee’s 7.5-hour docuseries, the first episode of which has already aired on HBO, attempts the daunting task of addressing both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 9/11 attacks — particularly, New York’s response to these bookend tragedies over the course of two decades. As you may have heard, the series courted controversy, with critics claiming that Lee’s docuseries lends outsize credence to the ideas of the conspiracy group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. In an interview with the New York Times, Lee referenced the debunked “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” myth, adding, “My approach is put the information in the movie and let people decide for themselves. I respect the intelligence of the audience.” However, after those with early access to the fourth episode of Epicenters noted that Lee seems to be in agreement with the conspiracy group, Lee and HBO have seemingly course-corrected before most of the docuseries has even aired, reediting the final episode and asking critics to reserve their judgment until they see the final cut.

Ahead of the finale, set to air on September 11, HBO subscribers and longtime Lee fans may have questions, among them: What is this docuseries even about? What is actually going on in the now-controversial fourth episode? And what do the Boston Red Sox have to do with COVID-19? After watching the whole series, we have some answers at the ready.

First off, what is Epicenters About?
The first two episodes of Epicenters deal with New York’s resilience as the American epicenter of COVID-19 and the ways in which the crisis escalated under the Trump administration. The final two episodes are also about New York’s resilience, this time in the face of the 9/11 attacks and the toxic air that circulated around Ground Zero thereafter.

Okay, so what happens in the fourth episode that’s so controversial?
The original version of Epicenters, episode four, devoted about 30 minutes to the theories of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the group’s founder, Richard Gage. The group has long propagated the thoroughly debunked theory that the collapse of the World Trade Center was an inside job executed by controlled demolition. At various times, Gage has also claimed that Israel was lurking in the background of 9/11 and that COVID-19 is a hoax. Lee himself seemed to lend credence to the inside-job theory both in the series and in the interview with the Times. “The amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt, that temperature’s not reached,” he told the Times. “And then the juxtaposition of the way Building 7 fell to the ground — when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it’s like you’re looking at the same thing.”

The response to Lee’s supposed endorsement was swift, as was Lee’s decision to return to the editing room, where he removed the offending section entirely (the fourth and final episode now runs 90 minutes, trimmed down from its original two hours). Yet the question remains: What was he thinking, and how did the segment make it into the final cut to begin with? Lee and HBO have yet to comment, but two parents of 9/11 victims who subscribe to the inside-job theory released their own statement after Lee made his edits, decrying the series’s “censorship.”

Wait, does Lee have a history of endorsing conspiracy theories?
As the Washington Post pointed out, in his documentary When the Levees Broke, Lee speculated that the New Orleans levees were intentionally blown up during Hurricane Katrina to flood poor Black communities.

All right. So what is the overall tone of Epicenters?
Despite the serious subject matter, Lee’s docuseries is often irreverent. The filmmaker has a lot of fun with big red letters that flash on screen to identify people and places — Donald Trump is “President Agent Orange” (a moniker Lee borrowed from the rapper Busta Rhymes, an interview subject in the series), the Bronx is “Da Boogie Down Bronx (a popular nickname for the borough), Brooklyn is “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn.” “The pile,” the mountain of twisted metal and devastation where the Twin Towers once stood, is simply “Da Pile.”

And it’s full of familiar Leeisms. Epicenters is about five minutes old when the director (loudly) asks a Bronx doctor about all the injured Red Sox fans that must make their way through the hospital when the team is in town to play the Yankees (Lee’s favorite baseball team). Later, he razzes New York City mayor Bill de Blasio about his Red Sox fandom. “You can’t give it up, can you, Spike?” the mayor responds. No, he can’t. And what does this have to do with anything? Nothing, really. But Lee sees much of the world through the lens of athletics (later in the series, he recalls how he gave his wife’s courtside Knicks ticket to the daughter of a fallen New York City firefighter) so he often uses sports talk as a lingua franca, a way to loosen up his interview subjects, who are here to discuss heavier things.

Epicenters is also cinematic. Because Lee isn’t just a filmmaker: He’s a student of film (famously, he studied at NYU). So the docuseries involves a lot of film references and clips: There’s the rousing “New York, New York” number from On the Town, featuring Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin, shown in its entirety. There’s Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, used as a commentary on Trump. There are clips from some of Lee’s own films, including School Daze and Do the Right Thing, the latter intercut with real-life scenes of police violence against Black men. Most movingly, there’s the climax of On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, beaten to a pulp, gets up off the ground and leads his fellow dockworkers back to work as Leonard Bernstein’s muscular score surges in the background. Terry is Lee’s surrogate for New York, bruised and battered but indefatigable and always ready to bounce back.

How does Epicenters compare to his past feature films or documentary work?
It’s his biggest and most ambitious work, fiction or nonfiction. To give some perspective: When the Levees Broke, previously seen as his documentary epic, has about half the running time of Epicenters. 4 Little Girls, his doc on the white-terrorist bombing of a Black Alabama church, clocks in at under two hours.

So if I haven’t wanted Epicenters yet, should I?
Yes. Lee’s love for the city has been front and center in several of his New York–set films, including Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, and The 25th Hour (which remains the greatest of all 9/11 movies, but that’s another story). But he’s never had this big of a canvas to paint on. Epicenters gives all of his documentary filmmaking quirks — from the sports talk to the shouted questions to the nicknames — space to breathe. Moreover, if you’re interested in the subject matter, Lee interviewed more than 200 people, representing New York in all its diversity: firemen and -women, artists, flight attendants, doctors, reporters, filmmakers, actors, maintenance workers, construction workers, and on and on. This mosaic of faces and voices amounts to vital social history — a document that people will look at years from now to better understand these topsy-turvy times. We might never know what happened with the fourth episode or Lee’s decision to endorse and then seemingly discount conspiracy theories about 9/11, but the remaining minutes of this docuseries are well worth experiencing.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby DrEvil » Wed Nov 17, 2021 6:39 pm

Just a quick heads-up that the movie is now out on Showtime's streaming service (and it will air on the TV channel the 22nd). It's also available... other places.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby Harvey » Thu Nov 18, 2021 1:33 pm

Thanks for the heads up. Shall be watching tonight.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby DrEvil » Fri Nov 19, 2021 8:26 am

So I watched it, and I didn't come away from it feeling like I'd really learned anything new (except what Kennedy looks like with his head blown off, which I could have done without). There aren't any big revelations or smoking guns, it's more of a "here's even more nitty gritty detail to support what we already knew or suspected".

I was never deep into JFK lore, so maybe there's more to gain for the more dedicated travelers.
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Re: Oliver Stone's new JFK doc to premiere in Cannes

Postby Harvey » Mon Nov 22, 2021 10:39 pm

Even at nearly two hours, what I saw felt abbreviated. I'm definitely looking forward to the full four hours. An amazing job of painting with context. A film which proves conspiracy in the first few minutes of enquiry can spend more of its time evoking the real story which was erased on November 22nd, 1963. Just a few years before that day, as we recently learned, the first of many oil industry reports found that a looming catastrophe lay in the near future. Almost the first thing that happened was that a new culture of pre-denial was born, then the sixties were strangled at birth as Kennedy was murdered. More steel was used for war in the last century than for any other purpose in the history of iron. The promises of every ruling caste turned into more ashes and more blood. A future was murdered and replaced with the one we have. For our children, it looks like The Future was murdered too.

As a documentary it is very fine. Emotional but not overly manipulative, cool, and almost matter of fact but also involved. If a certain weariness exists, it is at the product of the murder all around us, the compartmentalised consumer consciousness we see everywhere today. The White House is surely a haunted house and the ghosts, many of them much older than it is, are most unquiet. They ask: why would the children of the people who did all this, their students and followers, their friends and families, why would they not also do the same to you? If the short term gain far outweighed their diminished sense of responsibility, why would they not?

In a sense, rather than as an appeal to a minority interest, such as conspiracy experts, I see this film as part of an ongoing and widely distributed conceptual break through. Make history true again.
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