. . . I didn’t even think it was a good movie. I made it through maybe 45 minutes before I changed the channel. Bad script, bad directing, mostly bad acting.
My problem with JFK is that it falsified quite a bunch of very well-established facts. There are enough ambiguities in the Warren Report to make ten paranoid fantasies (I loved the X-files Reflections of a Cigarette-Smoking Man!) without trashing the few facts that are known.
Absolutely.
The 15 to 20 minute monologue of Donald Sutherland’s, alone, is one of the most riveting pieces of cinema of the past 20 years.
Watching JFK is like being beaten over the head with a gold brick–it’s beautiful, but it HURTS! Joe Peshci’s (sp?) performance gave me an acid flashback when I saw it in the theater.
Forgive my naivette, but what is an A.N.S.W.E.R. type?
i watched the abc special and the pbs one with jane pauley. what a different world back then. i couldn’t get over how much smoking there was. there were cigs smoldering next to the anchors, good heavens!
the abc jennings special really cleared up the bullet questions. the computer animation helped you see what exactly happened in the zap. film. i could never make heads or tails out of that film. about the only thing that was clear to me was the last shot that killed kennedy.
the only book i read about the kennedy assasination was “death of a president.” most of what i got out of reading it was a deep, abiding, respect and admiration for jackie kennedy. she tried her best to aid her dying husband, she sat alone with his coffin all the way back to dc, she dealt with family, funeral arrangements, political leaders, etc. held herself and the country together (in public, privately i’m sure she had quite a few moments). and the thing i found most incredible, didn’t disappoint a little boy on his third birthday.
while most people think of the horrour and the terrible loss, when this anniversary rolls around; i think of a widow, who held her husband’s head together, and on the day of his funeral, remembered her son, and had a small gathering of sister and cousins around his age, sing happy birthday, with cake and presents for him , because she didn’t want him to be disappointed and think they forgot him. i can’t imagine everything she felt that day. what she did for her son just haunts me. i’ve wondered how john felt about his birthday as he got older and understood what else happened that day, esp. with all the news, and specials every year.
This may come as a surprise, given how much time I’ve spent debunking the assassination conspiracy theories around here, but I agree that JFK is a darned good film. You can’t take it as anything other than fiction, but it is very well done, with a great cast and interesting narrative.
If you dispute the running for her life theory, she was grabbing the pieces of her husband’s brain fragments. There was a website a few years back that zoomed in and showed the splatter and her going right after it on the car’s trunk. I’ve watched the Zapruder film dozens of times. I never noticed it until they showed that close-up.
I have also heard, and I can’t remember the source, that Jackie did not remember crawling out onto the back of the car.
I did like the 3-demensional recreation from the Zapruder film. That was fascinating. Also, they pointed out how Connelly’s suit jacket suddenly showed signs of movement about two frames after the car emerged from behind the sign, giving credence to belief in the single shot through Kennedy’s throat and the Governor’s back.
But they glossed over the movement of the President’s body when it was struck by the fatal bullet – saying that it could have moved backward even though shot from the back. Of course, it can move backward if shot from the front too.
One bit of reporting was not sound. They told what Johnson had on his mind. That’s not good objective reporting. Instead, they should have said what Johnson said was on his mind. That may sound like too much of a nit pick, but when you consider that some believe that Johnson had a hand in the assassination, that is not objective reporting.
Minty, I’m glad that we agree that JFK was an excellent movie, but unreliable as a general source of information. (That was the first time that I saw the photos from the hospital, however. There was so much we didn’t see for so long.)
The backwards movement is easily explained: The mass of what exited from the front is much greater than the mass that entered from the rear. All kinds of experimental evidence has shown that backwards was necessarily the direction the head would have gone. Further details, including film clips of experiments, can be found about 1/3 of the way down this page. Don’t miss the head shot to the live goat. :eek:
Speaking of LBJ (and I don’t add this to fuel any “Johnson was in on it” theories), earlier in the week, I heard the historian Michael Beschloss mention that either at the speech Kennedy was going to give at the Trade Mart or sometime later, Johnson was going to introduce him by saying, Well Mr. President, it’s nice to see you made it out of Dallas alive.
Yow.
rocking chair, dear, upper- and lower-case letters, please? Your post may have been incisive, but it was really difficult to read. Thanks.
Very well done? For a piece of revisionist history, yes. I’m not one of those conspiracy theory nuts but ‘come on’! First,they’re still trying to pass off the 'magic bullet theory. A bullet rips through JFK’s neck, passes through the Texas Gov.'s chest, breaks some ribs, and then lodges in his leg, breaking bones,etc. and is found on the floor of the car in pristine condition. YEAH, RIGHT!!! ON WHAT PLANET!!!???
Then there’s the way JFK’s head whips back violently from the third shot. They didn’t even try to whitewash that one. Everyone knows if you’re hit from behind (especially with a round from a high powered rifle) your head doesn’t whip TOWARDS WHERE THE SHOT CAME FROM!!! And please, don’t tell me the head whipped back and forth from the shot and that’s what I saw. I’ve seen the film often enough in slow motion to see that JFK was leaning forward after grabbing at his neck, he’s motionless, and then “WHAM”! Suddenly his neck snaps back violently and chunks of brain and bone bounce along the hood of the vehicle.
Very well done? As a puff piece of revisionist history, yes. There’s still too many unanswered questions. We’ll find out the truth though. Probably about a week after the last person who can be prosecuted is dead and safely beyond the reach of earthly justice.
As far as the head flinging backward from the shot, I remember Penn and Teller shooting a watermelon with the same type of gun Oswald used. The watermelon was put on a pedastal and it actually jumped toward the direction the bullet was fired from. Anyone else see this?
Interesting point, I love Penn and Teller, but, you’ve got to agree that with very few exceptions, for example, our current President, a watermelon is not a human head…Heh, heh, heh…
da bear,
Welcome to the boards.
I gotta ask, based upon your posts…did you actually see the Jenning’s special or not?
Actually, the bullet was found on Governor Connally’s hospital gurney. There are several points to make here:
- The bullet had a full metal jacket.
- It was not in “pristine” condition. Three grains of weight were missing, the lead core was extruding from the rear, and the bullet was flattened laterally. Most importantly, it had the distinct grooved markings that matched the barrel characteristics of Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of any other.
- The weight and composition of the bullet fragments found in Connally’s wrist matched the missing portions of the gurney bullet.
- The forensic evidence indicates that the bullet was tumbling end over end as it entered Connally’s back. The entry wound on his back was not a circular hole but long, matching the length of the bullet. A tumbling bullet has a larger area over which to absorb impact energy, hence the laterally flattened nature of the gurney bullet. A rifle bullet normally spins nose first into its target. A tumbling bullet has been deflected in its flight path by hitting something else first.
- Ballistic tests simulating Connally’s chest and rib wounds produced a similarly flattened bullet.
Actually, the initial impact movement of Kennedy’s head, between frames 312 and 313 is forward, by about six degrees (notice also that the jets of brain tissue in 313 are moving predominately forward). Had he been sitting upright at the moment he was shot in the head, the forward movement arc probably would have been greater, but Jackie Kennedy had already pulled him forward and towards her. As others here have explained, the broad explosion of his brain and skull in an outward direction caused a jet effect moving the head in a violent motion in the opposite direction. The mass of the exploding bone and tissue moving in one direction greatly exceeded the mass of the bullet moving in the opposite direction, even accounting for velocity absorbed as friction. It is impossible not to have a jet effect under those conditions. Remember, a human head is not a detached object like a melon sitting on a fence post. It is attached to a neck and a body; when the head of a sitting person is struck by a bullet, the head will pivot in one direction and then fly back in the opposite direction.
To believe that Kennedy was shot in the head from the front, one would have to believe that the rifleman was shooting from behind the stockade fence on the grass knoll. However, as that link explains, such a person would have been completely exposed on the sides and from the back to eyewitnesses. There is a two-story railroad switching tower with an unobstructed view of the rear of the stockade fence, and it was manned at the time of the assassination. Abraham Zapruder and his secretary were standing on a pedestal only a few yards from the stockade fence, within an unobstructed view over it, and neither heard any shots come from that area.
The one thing that I thought was weak in the documentary (which I am assuming is the same one shown on the BBC on Sunday night) was this point above. Oswald’s service record shows him to be a competant marksman, but several years had passed between his service and the assasination - I would imagine that, unless he had been maintaining his practice during the years in between, he would have lost his touch.
Or is there any evidence of him using the rifle at firing ranges??
Grim
You can practice shooting pretty much anywhere where people aren’t (see the tapes of the Columbine killers shooting up the woods). You don’t have to be in an official shooting range.