Harvey » Tue Nov 23, 2021 5:39 am wrote: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.
I agree with Harvey (pun intended, great reference both to that murderous prick WILLIAM Harvey and LEE Harvey OSWALD hehe). I liked the dry, elegiac, melancholic quality of it as contrasted with the febrile tension of the 1991 film JFK.
Also, as it's so dry and talking head-y (though beautifully shot by Robert Richardson), it is difficult to plausibly paint as a piece of agitprop by a delusional nut. Though of course they have already tried. It's just that the bad reviews have so little to do with actual reality that it's kind of funny.