An Exercise In Nonsense

Admirable film.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This slow-moving but intense, stylish, visually sumptuous political thriller directed by Alan Pakula (best known for Klute, All the Presients Men, and and Sophie's Choice) somehow combines a preternatural clarity with a misty dissonance: it's like someone shattered the 1960s political assassinations and jumbled them together into a dream. Warren Beatty is great as the callow but dedicated reporter whose curiosity gets him in waters farther over his head (on some occasions literally) than he could have imagined. Several of the film's aspects are, and are probably intended to be, reminiscent of Hitchcock: the way things and people are not as they seem, and a final explosion of menace in the cheerful public environment of a political rally. One of the key films in the political conspiracy theory genre.

After watching this film a number of times, I had some thoughts on one of the film's most chilling scenes. In the middle part of the film when Beatty's character goes for the test at Parallax Corp, he subjected to a 5 minute mind control photo montage. This has always seemed too real for me, and I look back at what it must have been like to watch this in a movie theater back in the day. It's a brilliant piece of film work, but a bit scary in that the director puts the viewer into the mind control experience. They are for the most part photos we have all seen in the past, but organized in manner with a musical score that brings the subject to a brainwashed state.

If you are given to conspiracy theories than you should look no further than The Parallax View which goes way over the top in saying that all the assassinations in that spate of them and also attempts were the product of one group of secret conspirators who are our permanent government. The extremes should love this film from the John Birch Society to the WikiLeaks fans.Warren Beatty is a reporter for a Seattle newspaper and is on the scene of an assassination of a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate at the Space Needle. By the way talk about a place with no possible getaway.A few years later Paula Prentiss comes to him scared out of her mind in that several witnesses of said assassination are becoming dead themselves. Shades of the Warren Report. Beatty investigates further and finds an outfit called the Parallax Corporation which seems to be looking for loner types who can be manipulated. The image of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan etc. Seems like our assassins seem to be cut from the same mold.What can I say, but Beatty becomes a victim of his own story.I saw The Parallax View when it came out in theater years ago. It's still for the paranoid minded among us. I think it's a way bit much, but who knows with today's news and our president considered a Moscow stealth candidate.Stranger things have happened.

An ambitious reporter (Warren Beatty) gets in way-over-his-head trouble while investigating a senator's assassination which leads to a vast conspiracy involving a multinational corporation behind every event in the world's headlines.This is not a well-known thriller, even with Beatty leading the way. I would speculate part of the reason is the title, which does not lend itself to being easily remembered. Even after seeing the film and understanding the significance, it does not seem the best choice o really grab someone's attention.But anyway, lots of action and twists and turns. Some mystery. And a great big conspiracy that is pretty much impossible, but for the sake of a good story is worth suspending your disbelief for.