Touches You

Nice effects though.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

I was in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper's library when I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination. Thus began a great mystery in the U.S. and around the world that continues to this day. Trillions of words and thousands of books have been written about the assassination, and that alone tells us that there is no one satisfactory theory about why or how Kennedy was murdered.Robert Stone's documentary is both odd and disjointed. As someone else on this board has already noted, director Stone starts off with a reasonably balanced view of the assassination, leads us through various conspiracy theories and talking heads, and then, boom, just like that, in the final 10 minutes, allows noted author Norman Mailer to wrap it up for us: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.Mailer offers his 'evidence' more from a novelist's point of view than from one of evidence. Mailer's 'proof': Oswald was living in desperate straits, he was frustrated but bright and articulate, he had delusions of grandeur, he wanted a permanent place in American history, he worked in a building on the parade route, and voila: it all came together. Director Stone ends his movie focused on Mailer's fanciful artistic interpretation of events (Oswald's ghost knows the answers, but a ghost will not tell us). It's quizzical to say the least.Mailer (and ultimately filmmaker Stone himself) leaves out a glaring contradiction that still stares at conspiracy theorists today. It's a glaring contradiction not wrapped in Maileresque language: the famous Zapruder film (now digitalized for even more vivid inspection), which clearly shows that Kennedy had the top of his head blown off by a shot from the FRONT, not from the Texas Schoolbook Depository in the rear, where Lee Harvey Oswald was purportedly firing three shots in six seconds.It is peculiar that Mailer, Stone, Elliott Jay Epstein (author of a book on the murder), former student radical-activist Todd Gatlin, and disgraced former Senator Gary Hart have all attached themselves to the 'single gunman' theory. Oswald may well have been involved up to his skinny little neck, but it still doesn't explain Zapruder's remarkable film, which has nothing to do with Oswald the Man, but merely frightening evidence that something else was happening on that fateful day in November 1963. That 'something else' has never been explained, and this film basically ignores it.This film ultimately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. Exactly what we needed: even more questions about the Kennedy assassination.'Oswald's Ghost' left me with this uncomfortable feeling that too many people are desperate to put this whole messy business behind us. It is, after all, much easier, and much neater, to blame it all on a single shooter who also happened to be crazy.

It's impossible to review this film without having a bias. I do believe a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy but, as always when dealing with these matters, I do keep an open mind. While the film ostensibly is not on the whodunit but that question has done to us, Oswald's Ghost has a definite bias in it. And that bias is what kills the film.Director Robert Stone seems to have done his homework. His interviews cover many proponents of both sides of the argument. He also goes a step further to present unseen or rarely seen / heard materials including news clips and the actual Dallas police recordings. Stone also chooses to employ some interesting visual techniques in the film as well. For example there is the whirlpool of Oswald and Warren Commission images at the start of the film, the (apparent) black hole of conspiracy books, and the positive / negative effect on stock footage during the playing of the recording of Perry Russo's sodium pentothal questioning. These are all well done, but their use in Stone's context is questionable.Thus the film's fault lies in its bias. Stone seems convinced that the mystery is solved and has been for nearly forty-five years. The film then proceeds to essentially say that independent researchers (that is to say conspiracy theorists) have led the public on a wild goose chase of truly epic proportions. Stone seems to use the film and virtually every frame to saying this. Stone's film is not just, as he claims, a study of the effect of a mystery on the public. For the most part the film feels like an indictment of those who dare not agree with his point of view.Would the film have been better without this bias? That's hard to say, really. I suspect that one's own opinion on the topic determines how one interprets the film. While one can argue over the factuality of the film, it is visually striking in its presentation as if to shock and awe. Does it succeed in that aim? I'll leave you to be the judge

OSWALD'S GHOST got a brief theatrical release on it's way to an American EXPERIENCE broadcast on PBS. There is little to recommend for seeing it on the big screen as most of its footage is either archival stock that was meant to be shown on TV in the first place, or typical talking heads interviews from the present day.The film goes over familiar territory for anyone even vaguely familiar with the JFK assassination. Some of the talking heads such as Mark Lane and Dan Rather trot out stories most have seen before. More interesting are individuals like former Presidential Candidate Gary Hart and Norman Mailer who, rightly or wrongly, give us their insights into the matter (more on Mailer later). For the first hour or so, Director Robert Stone tries to portray a sort of kaleidescope (a word used in the documentary) of the Assassination, the official and conspiracy theories and a view of how it affected people of the immediate and subsequent generations. On that level, it sort of keeps one's interest. Some of the footage is less familiar than others, and it's edited together competently enough. Gary Lionelli's music itself is evocative, but, unfortunately, Stone mixes it too high and he drowns out some of the dialog in the process. Worse, much of the archival footage would be more effective without the intrusive music. *** Possible SPOILER AREA ***And, then, in the last 20 minutes, Stone completely flips the film on its end. Gone is the dispassionate, relatively even-handed approach and he gives the film over completely to one side of the argument. Norman Mailer and HIS theory of the assassination come to dominate the final section of the documentary. Mailer's conclusions become the film's conclusions. In light of Mailer's subsequent death, the film could just as easily been called, "Mailer's Ghost". And, then, it ends abruptly.Without knowing more about Stone (his surname an irony in itself that even he can't avoid as he includes behind-the-scenes footage of OLIVER Stone directing his film JFK!), it's impossible to know if this method of seemingly pulling the rug out from the viewer was an intentional act of the old in-and-out sucker punch, or if it naturally evolved that way through the editing process. In either case, it considerably weakens the film - setting all prejudice one way or another about one's particular view of the JFK assassination aside. Not only does it come out of nowhere, but it tarnishes what was good about that first hour.

Here is my soapbox dispelling the myths as promoted by the film. Please bear with me.While the documentary strive to supply the information in conjunction with rare footages, Robert Stone did a dismal job ignoring the central heart of the conspiracy connected to the CIA (not rogue but whole) and the Mossad in the elimination of President Kennedy, partly in revenge over Bay of Pigs fiasco and JFK's private threat to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds" & withdraw from Vietnam where CIA place its stake and most importantly reversing JFK's foreign policy towards Israel on the matter of clandestine development of the nuclear arsenal at the secret nuclear reactor Dimona. JFK signed National Security Action Memoranda 55, 56 and 57 that stripped CIA of its power to freely operate in covert ops and to account for its actions, which outraged senior members of the CIA. (JFK fired CIA director Allen Dulles after Bay of Pigs failure, and that same person ended up as a member of the Warren Commission.) The tension between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion & his subsequent successor Levi Eshkol and JFK was well-documented in the telegram correspondences ("Israel and the Bomb" by Avner Cohen). David stepped down abruptly on June 23, 1963 over argument with JFK concerning Israel's right to develop nuclear weaponry, ostensibly for self-defense in case of warring with hostile enemy neighbors.CIA and Mossad, through the coordination of chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton as liaison to Israel, cooperated in the joint operation to "remove" JFK to protect their geopolitical interests as well as the reputation, and the end result were the escalation of Vietnam War due to Gulf of Tonkin hoax and the complete turnaround of U.S. foreign policy to unconditionally respect Israel's power and sovereignty as an erstwhile ally in Middle Eastern affairs.Lee Harvey Oswald may well have been involved in the conspiracy but only as an intelligence agent through myriad of contacts (US Naval Intelligence and possibly KGB), but he was a patsy as he said -- he was simply framed up as a useful covert intelligence asset for disposal by the CIA and the conspirators. In other words, Lee was certainly not guilty.Lyndon Barnes Johnson was undoubtedly a traitor as were the high-ranking members of the US government and military who knew what faction removed JFK. Because LBJ usurped the power to appease the military-industrial complex, fabricating Gulf of Tonkin incident to begin escalating the Vietnam War to a larger level and extract the blood money & introduce sophisticated weaponry, tactical strategies and military technology in the process of brutalizing Vietnam to a perpetual third world nation status. The "communist domino theory" is non-sense as an excuse framed to justify the illegal and pointlessly bloody war.After JFK's assassination, it is likely that President Johnson had contemplated invading Cuba after fabricating the intelligence that Castro ordered the murder of JFK in retaliation for the attempted invasion as well as spreading the fear of communist onslaught if not contained; USSR agreed to withdraw the missile bases, with the condition that USSR will once again retaliate to destruct United States should U.S. invade Cuba in a massive effort again.JFK died a true patriot for America in defending her sovereignty against foreign and internal threats that converged to murder President Kennedy. The nuclear fires of World War III will be traced back to the assassination of JFK that have changed the course of human civilization forever, with the military-industrial-Congressional complex and State of Israel consolidating the ultimate power to decide the manifest destiny for the current world affairs at large...Fascinating spools of rare footages aside, "Oswald's Ghost" offer absolutely nothing new for the knowledgeable readers of the pivotal event like me. The problem is that propaganda is an easy and persuading media to bamboozle the uninformed viewers, which is why this movie infuriate me every other minute with disinfo (omitted, half-truth, lies).Robert Stone and the producers, why have you forsaken America with the film that only the Establishment and lone assassin-magic bullet theory/Warren Commission defenders would approve of? Forsaking the truth lead to America's demise and disintegration as a sovereign republic subservient to Israel and the ruling oligarch Elite's pernicious influence. (For reference: "Plausible Denial" by Mark Lane; "Final Judgment" by Michael Collins Piper; "The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt" by Erik Hedegaard, Rolling Stone, March 21, 2007; George Washington farewell address, Sept. 1796; President Kennedy's speech "The President and the Press: Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association" in NYC, April 1961)1/2 out of 4Postscript: I recommend reading Citizens for Truth about Kennedy Assassination chairman James DiEugenio's critical review of Oswald's Ghost. Google his name combined with the film title. Postscript II: Watched the ABC News special The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy originally aired on ABC in fall 2003 on History Channel on February 19, 2008. It's a sham with the predicably biased narration doling out lie after lie, exaggeration and half-truths. Do your research, not what the media tell you to believe Oswald was responsible alone and alone.