Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

'They Are Us' and the Tragedy Trap

The shutting down of ‘They Are Us’, the film about the Christchurch massacre of 2019, is the right thing to do for the wrong reason

Artists and audiences need time and emotional distance from a tragedy and trauma before they can make and appreciate any worthwhile cinema about it.

Last week pre-production for the film They Are Us, which intended to dramatize Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the killing of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist in Christchurch in 2019, was shut down due to outrage from New Zealand’s Muslim community which deemed the project “insensitive” and “obscene”.

The film, which had Rose Byrne set to star as Ardern, is now “on hold” and may have a difficult time exiting its self-induced purgatory. And maybe that’s for the best, at least for the time being.

I’m conflicted when it comes to this controversy, as I don’t believe that any group of people being offended, even righteously offended, by a film should ever stifle a project, but I also think that making a movie out of a recent tragedy is a bad idea because it rarely produces worthwhile cinema.

Generally, when a movie rushes to recount a recent tragedy it’s either cynically exploiting trauma to make a quick dollar, or it’s a piece of propaganda meant to manipulate the public.

In the case of They Are Us, it may very well be a combination of the two.

It’s highly curious to make a film focusing on a politician’s reaction to a recent real-life tragedy when that politician is still active in the political arena. It seems likely that They Are Us would be cashing in on a horrific tragedy by making a two-hour campaign commercial for Jacinda Ardern, which doesn’t exactly sound very artistically compelling.

The They Are Us controversy brought to my mind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), which told the story of Chris Kyle, a famed Navy SEAL murdered in 2013.

Kyle’s father told Eastwood “disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell”, so the director dutifully made a hagiography that played up Kyle’s legend and ignored his fabulist tales of punching Jesse Ventura, shooting carjackers and sniping looters in New Orleans.

American Sniper was a propaganda popcorn movie and made tons of money by watering down not only Kyle’s complexity but the Iraq War’s as well. While commercially successful, artistically it was ultimately forgettable as it shamelessly promoted myth in favor of exploring truth.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion They Are Us would follow the same empty path regarding Ahearn and the massacre. Truth is that time and emotional distance are needed for artists to make noteworthy cinema about tragic events and audiences to be able to make sense of them.

For example, the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Vietnam was 1968 and it took a decade before Hollywood could adequately make a movie about that war. Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first to successfully ponder the Vietnam fiasco, with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989), and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) continuing the exploration nearly a decade later.

Time and emotional distance greatly aided these films, their filmmakers and the viewers who digested them, as artists and audiences simply weren’t capable of diving into the horror of Vietnam in its immediate aftermath.

Oliver Stone has often gone back to examine the unhealed wounds of the American psyche. Twenty-eight years after JFK’s assassination he made his masterpiece JFK (1991), and twenty years after Richard Nixon’s downfall he made the brilliantly astute Nixon (1995).

The previously mentioned Vietnam war films and the Oliver Stone historical dramas succeeded artistically because they were constructed on a foundation of reason, and upon that foundation emotion and drama were built, whereas films made closer to traumatic events are usually built on a flimsy foundation of heightened emotion and therefore lack all meaning and purpose besides emoting and manipulating.

Speaking of manipulation, a perfect example of a movie exploiting an event for propaganda purposes is Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to tell the tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December of 2012, a quick year and nine months after Bin Laden’s killing, and was propaganda meant to lionize the Obama administration and the intelligence community as it played up the effectiveness of torture and played down its barbarity.

Similarly, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, premiered four and half years after 9-11 and exploited the raw emotion of that trauma to indelibly imprint upon the public’s consciousness through drama the government’s version of that heinous event.

Greengrass also made 22 July, about the 2011 massacre in Norway. 22 July came out in 2018, and like United 93, even some time had passed from the traumatic event it recounted, the emotional trauma was still too fresh. Both films are well made but the wounds they probed were too fresh for any valuable insights to be uncovered.

In contrast, Greengrass’s greatest film, Bloody Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre in the north of Ireland by British troops in 1972, came out in 2002, thirty years after the events depicted. And while that movie is viscerally jarring and emotionally unnerving, it’s also powerfully poignant and insightful in ways that United 93 and 22 July simply aren’t because it had the benefit of time, distance and perspective.  

As for They Are Us, maybe a decade from now a worthwhile movie about the Christchurch massacre could be made as both artists and audiences will have had time to process that tragic event and be open to insights and interpretations of it that they’re immune to in the current, more emotionally fraught moment. Any movie made sooner than that will most assuredly only be exploiting trauma, rather exploring it for deeper meaning.

 A version fo this article was published at RT.

©2021

The Pentagon and China's Propaganda Wars (Expanded Edition)

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 14 seconds

The Pentagon and China are waging a propaganda war against their own people, and the greedy globalists of corporate Hollywood are happy to help

Hollywood won’t choose between the totalitarian Sauron of China and the authoritarian Darth Vader of the U.S. military, but instead will support both evils, and the people of the world and the art of cinema will suffer greatly because of it.

There is currently a propaganda war being waged by China and the U.S. military where both want to control Hollywood, and therefore the minds of their citizenry, for their own nefarious means.

Not surprisingly, like whores at a battlefield brothel, the morally ambiguous harlots of Hollywood are trying to profit by servicing both combatants.

PEN America, a group championing free expression, recently released an exhaustive report detailing how China has taken control over Hollywood.

The report states, “The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”

China strictly controls films released in their market, which is soon to become the largest box office in the world, and Hollywood wants in on that lucrative action, so they appease their Chinese overlords by obeying censorial demands, like whitewashing a Tibetan character from Marvel’s Dr. Strange, and strenuously self-censoring, like cancelling a planned sequel to World War Z.

The whitewashing of a Tibetan character from Dr. Strange is particularly interesting as that became the outrage of the moment back in 2016 when the movie was released. Many activists and journalists howled at the inherent racism of casting a white woman (Tilda Swinton) in a role that was an Asian man in the source material. Interestingly enough, Disney (who owns Marvel) stayed entirely silent throughout the controversy. The PEN America report shows that the reason for the whitewashing was that China wouldn’t allow a Tibetan portrayed on screen, so Disney dutifully complied in an attempt to get the film in the Chinese market. Disney also kept its mouth shut as to why it engaged in whitewashing in order to cover up its appeasement to Chinese demands.

Disney genuflecting to China should come as no surprise. In 1998, Disney’s then CEO, Michael Eisner, met with Premier Zhu Rongji to talk about Disney’s desired expansion into China and the 1997 Martin Scorsese biography of the Dalai Lama it produced, Kundun, which infuriated the Chinese government.

The loathsome Eisner said of Kundun, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner then groveled further, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”

In the two decades since then, Chinese power has only grown and Hollywood has only become more and more weak kneed and reflexively compliant.

This Orwellian sentiment of controlled storytelling to fit a government-approved narrative is not limited to the communists of China though. The U.S. military has long had a very fruitful arrangement with Hollywood where they exchange free military equipment, expertise, personnel and locations in exchange for ultimate control over scripts.

Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, sounded like Xi Jinping when he described Pentagon expectations while cooperating with a movie, “We’re not going to support a program that…presents us in a compromising way.”

PEN America notes this Pentagon propaganda program, “…the United States government has benefitted from, encouraged, and at times even directed Hollywood filmmaking as an exercise in soft power.”

But then disingenuously dismisses it, “But this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing’s does.”

That is an absurd contention as the Pentagon picks movies based on a studio’s willingness to conform to its rigidly pro-military narrative standard, which is, in function if not form, just like China picking which Hollywood movies it allows to run in its country based on their adherence to a pro-China criteria.

Regardless, the reality is if Hollywood can financially benefit by acquiescing to the Pentagon and/or China’s demands, it certainly will.

In response to China’s Hollywood propaganda, Sen. Ted Cruz proposed the egregiously titled Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act.

Cruz’s bill aims to kneecap Hollywood studios by withholding access to U.S. government support – the Pentagon propaganda program, if they alter their movies to appease Chinese censors.

Of course, SCRIPT will never go anywhere as the Motion Picture Association of America will aggressively lobby to get the whole thing scuttled to keep both Chinese and Pentagon money flowing to La La Land.

On the bright side, the SCRIPT Act has at least frightened the propagandists in the Pentagon and Hollywood enough that they are now openly touting their shadowy alliance.

For example, The Military Times recently ran a jaw dropping op-ed by Jim Lechner shamelessly espousing Hollywood’s Pentagon propaganda.

Lechner admits, “…limits on the cooperation with skilled storytellers at the American movie companies would significantly degrade the ability of the U.S. government to tell its own story…”

Lechner then boasts, “…over the decades, Hollywood has provided one of the most powerfully positive images of our military. No Pentagon-based press relations operation could come close to what Hollywood has achieved through its films.”

Over the last three decades, the Pentagon-Hollywood alliance has drastically altered American’s perception of the military and successfully neutered filmmakers as artists and truth-tellers.

For example, in the 70’s and 80’s Francis Ford-Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, made great anti-war films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, that explored the dark side of American militarism and empire.

That type of artistic and intellectually challenging anti-war movie went on the endangered species list in 1986 when the Pentagon collaborated on the making of the blockbuster Top Gun, and has since become extinct, which is why we haven’t had any great movies detailing the heinous fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Oliver Stone spoke about how he had wanted for decades to make a movie about the My Lai Massacre but was unable to get a studio on board for funding. Stone did not explicitly state this, but the implication was clear, the Pentagon’s propaganda program not only assists pro-military movies, but intimidates studios into avoiding films that are anti-war or highlight military misdeeds.

Ironically, Top Gun has become not only a symbol of the Pentagon’s propaganda prowess, but of China’s as well. In the poster for the sequel due out this year, Tom Cruise’s Maverick is still wearing his signature leather jacket, but in order to appease Chinese censors, gone from its back are the prominent Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the original.

The modern golden era of Hollywood films exploring the darker side of China peaked in 1997 with Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. China’s swift and severe reaction to those films and the studios and production companies that made them, was extremely effective as it has resulted in studios strangling any truthful artistic exploration of Chinese themes and stories in order to avoid alienating the Chinese Communist Party and potentially missing out on the ever expanding Chinese box office.

As a cinephile and a truth-seeker, I want to see films made by true artists that chronicle the dramatically potent moral and ethical atrocities of both America and China. The plethora of post 9-11 American evils (surveillance, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan) and the brutal Chinese atrocities against the Uighers, Tibetans and members of the Falun Gong, are fertile cinematic ground. But sadly…thanks to Hollywood’s insidious, incessant and insatiable greed, none of those important stories will ever be told on the big screen.

The reality is that the propaganda war is already over and the authoritarian and totalitarian corporatists, globalists and militarists of Hollywood, Washington and Beijing, have handily won…and we the people, and the art of cinema, have lost. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Sam Mendes’ visually stunning new war film may generate Oscar hype, but it is ultimately an underwhelming and totally forgettable cinematic venture.

With the media telling me that the world, or certain parts of it, is once again potentially on the verge of war, I did the brave and noble thing and ventured out to my local movie theatre to see Oscar winning director Sam Mendes’ new World War I film, 1917.

My hope was that 1917, a recent winner of the Golden Globe for Best Picture and Best Director, would be a powerful film that would remind audiences, particularly the more belligerent American ones, of the spiritual, emotional and physical toll of war and the inherent inhumanity, futility and barbarity of waging one. Sadly, 1917 is not up to the task.

The film, which boasts a solid cast that stars George MacKay with supporting turns from Dean Charles-Chapman, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth, is the story of two British soldiers in World War I sent on a dangerous mission to save hundreds of their countrymen from an impending German ambush.

 1917 has all the makings of a great movie as it tells a compelling war story, is beautifully shot and proficiently acted, the problem though is that those ingredients never coalesce into a cohesive cinematic meal that satisfies and viewers are left still feeling hungry after the closing credits roll.

The best thing about 1917 is the exquisite cinematography, as it is beautifully shot by one of the great cinematographers in film history, Roger Deakins, a 14 time Oscar nominee. The film has generated a lot of buzz because it is shot and edited so that it appears as if the entire movie were filmed in one long take. That ‘one long take’ approach could be thought a gimmick in lesser hands, but Deakins uses it to expertly draw the viewer into the narrative and escort them through the film’s journey. Deakins’ ability to use camera movement, framing, light and shadow to propel the story is sublime and visually gorgeous to behold.

No, the problem with 1917 is certainly not the look of the film, but rather the feel of it. As impressive as the movie is visually, it never resonates emotionally and ends up being a rather hollow cinematic experience. The blame for that failure lay squarely at the feet of writer/director Sam Mendes.

Mendes’ shallow script has fundamental structural and dramatic flaws, such as plot points that hit too soon or too late, that keep viewers at arms length from the two main characters, Lance Corporal William Schofield (MacKay) and Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Charles-Chapman). Due to the script’s failures, viewers never really have too much invested in Schofield and Blake as they are whisked along on their perilous odyssey. This emotional detachment reduces the twists and turns of the story into mere storytelling devices without emotional power, and thus the movie often feels reduced to a roller coaster ride or a video game, which can be exciting but predictable and never dramatically profound.

I have long found Mendes to be a middling talent, and a brief perusal of his filmography is a study in underachievement and wasted opportunities. American Beauty (1999) won Mendes his Best Directing Oscar but is a movie that has not stood the test of time and is, in fact, like its star Kevin Spacey, quite embarrassing in retrospect. Other Mendes films, like Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary Road (2008) had fantastic casts and interesting stories but, like 1917, never coalesced into cinematic greatness.

Another issue plaguing 1917 is that as a war movie it will inevitably be measured against other notable films in that genre, and it does not fare well in comparison. For instance, it is not as technically superior, particularly in terms of the sound, or as artistically ambitious as Christopher Nolan’s time and perspective bending WWII tour de force Dunkirk (2017). It lacks the emotional resonance and spiritual profundity of Terrence Malick’s thoughtful The Thin Red Line (1998), and has nowhere near the psychological and political insights of a masterpiece like Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). It also fails to convey the sheer madness and depravity of war like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1978), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).

On the surface, 1917 is somewhat evasive in its political, moral and ethical perspective, and avoids dirtying its hands in the complexity of war. Mendes shows his true bourgeois colors though by choosing to focus the narrative exclusively on the nobility and heroism of the soldiers who fight the war and never even hinting at the malignancy of those in the officer and ruling class who cynically wage it. In Mendes’ hands, World War I is a morally sterile and ethically antiseptic venture that was little more than a stage to showcase the better angels of British soldier’s nature.

Mendes sticks to this painstakingly straight forward and uncomplicated approach in 1917 because he wants the audience, particularly the older, Anglophile viewers who vote for the Academy Awards, to mindlessly gobble up his middle-brow Oscar bait and not get bogged down with too many difficult questions he is ill-equipped to ask, never mind answer.

Sadly, in the hands of the artistically obtuse Sam Mendes, 1917 is incapable of being the great and profound war film the world needs right now, the type that challenges audiences and changes hearts and minds. At its best, 1917 is a stunning piece of technical virtuosity reduced to a mildly entertaining, but ultimately forgettable, film.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Pentagon and Hollywood's Successful and Deadly Propaganda Alliance (Extended Edition)

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 48 seconds

The Pentagon aids Hollywood in making money, and in turn Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine.

The U.S. has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion, far larger than any other nation on earth. The U.S. military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known…Hollywood.

Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner Wings in 1927, the U.S. military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows, and Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like Lone Survivor, Captain Philips, and even blockbuster franchises like Transformers and Marvel, DC and X-Men super hero movies, have over the years agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of U.S. military hardware.

In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DOD), producers must sign contracts - Production Assistance Agreements - that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.

Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation,

“We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”

Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear,

“If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”

In other words, the Department of Defense is using taxpayer money to pick favorites. The DOD has no interest in nuance, truth or, God-forbid, artistic expression, only in insidious jingoism that manipulates public opinion to their favor. This is chilling when you consider that the DOD is able to use its financial leverage to quash dissenting films it deems insufficiently pro-military or pro-American in any way.

The danger of the DOD-Hollywood alliance is that Hollywood is incredibly skilled at making entertaining, pro-war propaganda. The DOD isn’t getting involved in films like Iron Man, X-Men, Transformers or Jurassic Park III for fun, they are doing so because it’s an effective way to psychologically program Americans, particularly young Americans, not just to adore the military, but to worship militarism. This ingrained love of militarism has devastating real-world effects.

Lawrence Suid, author of “Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film” told Al Jazeera,

“I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why. And when I was getting my film degrees it suddenly occurred to me that the people in the U.S. had never seen the U.S. lose a war, and when President Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”

As Mr. Suid points out, generations of Americans had been raised watching John Wayne valiantly storm the beaches of Normandy in films like The Longest Day, and thus were primed to be easily manipulated into supporting any U.S. military adventure because they were conditioned to believe that the U.S. is always the benevolent hero and inoculated against doubt.

This indoctrinated adoration of a belligerent militarism, conjured by Hollywood blockbusters, also resulted in Americans being willfully misled into supporting a farce like the 2003 Iraq war. The psychological conditioning for Iraq War support was built upon hugely successful films like Saving Private Ryan (1997), directed by Steven Spielberg, and Black Hawk Down (2001), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that emphasized altruistic American militarism. Spielberg and Bruckheimer are two Hollywood heavyweights, along with Paramount studios, considered by the DOD to be their most reliable collaborators.

Another example of the success of the DOD propaganda program was the pulse-pounding agitprop of the Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun (1986).

Top Gun, produced by Bruckheimer, was a turning point in the DOD-Hollywood relationship, as it came amidst a string of artistically successful, DOD-opposed, “anti-war” films, like Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, which gave voice to America’s post-Vietnam crisis of confidence. Top Gun was the visual representation of Reagan’s flag-waving optimism, and was the Cold War cinematic antidote to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.

Top Gun, which could not have been made without massive assistance from the DOD, was a slick two-hour recruiting commercial that coincided with a major leap in public approval ratings for the military. With a nadir of 50% in 1980, by the time the Gulf War started in 1991, public support for the military spiked to 85%.

Since Top Gun, the DOD propaganda machine has resulted in a current public approval for the military of 72%, with Congress at 12%, the media at 24% and even Churches at only 40%, the military is far and away the most popular institution in American life. Other institutions would no doubt have better approval ratings if they too could manage and control their image in the public sphere.

It isn’t just the DOD that uses the formidable Hollywood propaganda apparatus to its own end…the CIA does as well, working with films to enhance their reputation and distort history.

For example, as the War on Terror raged, the CIA deftly used Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) as a disinformation vehicle to revise their sordid history with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to portray them-selves as heroic and not nefarious.

The CIA also surreptitiously aided the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and used it as a propaganda tool to alter history and to convince Americans that torture works.

The case for torture presented in Zero Dark Thirty was originally made from 2001 to 2010 on the hit TV show 24, which had support from the CIA as well. That pro-CIA and pro-torture narrative continued in 2011 with the Emmy-winning show Homeland, created by the same producers as 24, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.

A huge CIA-Hollywood success story was Best Picture winner Argo (2012), which ironically is the story of the CIA teaming up with Hollywood. The CIA collaborated with the makers of Argo, including alleged liberal Ben Affleck, in order to pervert the historical record and elevate their image.

The CIA being involved in manipulating the American public should come as no surprise, as they have always had their fingers in the propagandizing of the American people, even in the news media with Operation Mockingbird that used/uses CIA assets in newsrooms to control narratives. 

Just like the DOD-Hollywood propaganda machine has real-world consequences in the form of war, the CIA-Hollywood teaming has tangible results as well. 

For example, in our current culture, the sins of the Intelligence community, from vast illegal surveillance to rendition to torture, are intentionally lost down the memory hole. People like former CIA director John Brennan, a torture supporter who spied on the U.S. Senate in order to undermine the torture investigation, or former head of the NSA James Clapper, who committed perjury when he lied to congress about warrantless surveillance, or former Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden, who lied about and supported both surveillance and torture, are all held up by the liberal media, like MSNBC and even allegedly anti-authoritarian comedians like John Oliver and Bill Maher, as brave and honorable men who should be thanked for their noble service. 

The fact that this propaganda devil’s bargain between the DOD/CIA and Hollywood takes place in the self-declared Greatest Democracy on Earth™ is an irony seemingly lost on those in power who benefit from it, and also among those targeted to be indoctrinated by it, entertainment consumers, who are for the most part entirely oblivious to it.

If America is the Greatest Democracy in the World™ why are its military and intelligence agencies so intent on covertly misleading its citizens, stifling artistic dissent and obfuscating the truth? The answer is obvious…because in order to convince Americans that their country is The Greatest Democracy on Earth™, they must be misled, artistic dissent must be stifled and the truth must be obfuscated.

In the wake of the American defeat in the Vietnam war, cinema flourished by introspectively investigating the deeper uncomfortable truths of that fiasco in Oscar nominated films like Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July, all made without assistance from the DOD.

The stultifying bureaucracy of America’s jingoistic military agitprop machine is now becoming more successful at suffocating artistic endeavors in their crib though. With filmmaking becoming ever more corporatized, it is an uphill battle for directors to maintain their artistic integrity in the face of cost-cutting budgetary concerns from studios.

In contrast to post-Vietnam cinema, after the unmitigated disaster of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, there has been no cinematic renaissance, only a steady diet of mendaciously patriotic, DOD-approved, pro-war drivel like American Sniper and Lone Survivor. Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker (2008), shot with no assistance from the DOD, was the lone exception that successfully dared to portray some of the ugly truths of America’s Mesopotamian misadventure.

President Eisenhower once warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

Eisenhower’s prescient warning should have extended to the military industrial entertainment complex of the DOD/CIA- Hollywood alliance, which has succeeded in turning Americans into a group of uniformly incurious and militaristic zealots.

America is now stuck in a perpetual pro-war propaganda cycle, where the DOD/CIA and Hollywood conspire to indoctrinate Americans to be warmongers, and in turn, Americans now demand more militarism from their entertainment and government to satiate their bloodlust.

The DOD/CIA - Hollywood propaganda alliance guarantees Americans will blindly support more future failed wars and will be willing accomplices in the deaths of millions more people across the globe.

A version of this article was originally published on March 12, 2018 are RT.

©2018

Oliver Stone : Top Five Films

Today, September 15, 2015 is director Oliver Stone's 69th birthday. The ever opinionated, and often controversial Stone has been both lauded and loathed, celebrated and denigrated during his thirty plus year career as a writer and director. After nearly two decades of artistic and box-office mis-steps, it is easy to forget that at one point in time, from 1986 to 1995, Oliver Stone was arguably the most powerful force creatively, politically and financially in both Hollywood and the culture. It is also easy to forget that Oliver Stone is one of the most important filmmakers in the history of American cinema.

To celebrate Oliver Stone's birthday, let's take a look at his meteoric, tumultuous and often-times brilliant career. Here are what I consider his top five films of all time.

OLIVER STONE'S TOP 5 FILMS

5. THE DOORS (1991) 

Oliver Stone, like many of his fellow baby boomers,  excavated some of his most glorious inspirational treasures by going back to his formative years in the turbulent 1960's. In 1991 Stone went back to his, and my, favorite rock band, The Doors, and their iconic lead singer Jim Morrison.

Years ago I watched the dvd extras for The Doors which had a series of interviews with Stone and the actors talking about the process of making the film. It was pretty standard dvd-extra fare, until the very end of an interview with Stone. In it he talks about what Jim Morrison meant to him, both as a young man and as an artist, and Stone speaks eloquently about what Morrison represented, what he symbolized, and then he says, rather poignantly, with his voice breaking, "I miss him". It was a strangely moving, oddly touching and intimate glimpse into Stone, who is often portrayed in the media as a hyper-masculine, misogynistic boor. What that interview reveals is that The Doors was not just a bio-pic of Morrison, but also a deeply personal film for Oliver Stone and his artistic soul. That is what makes it both very good to some people (Me and John Densmore) and very bad to others (Ray Manzarek and Robby Kreiger). 

The Doors is a remarkably hypnotic film with Val Kilmer's magnetic performance as its center. The concert scenes are among the most vibrant and realistic ever captured on film. While the film is less a bio-pic of the band and Morrison than it is an exercise in cultural myth making and personal/psychological exploration, it still has a seductive and fascinating dark energy to it…not unlike its main character and its director.

4. NIXON (1995)

In 1995 Oliver Stone once again went back to the 1960's well and made a sprawling and peculiarly sentimental bio-pic about disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Shakespearean in its scope and execution, Nixon is a testament to Stone's skill as both writer and director. As a writer Stone is able to coherently and dramatically weave countless historical events amid intimate personal motivations all the while spanning multiple decades. As director, Stone coaxes a uniquely powerful and fantastically courageous performance from Anthony Hopkins in the lead, and Joan Allen as Pat Nixon. The supporting cast is terrific across the board, with James Woods and Paul Sorvino doing especially great work.

Nixon is a staggeringly ambitious film that only Oliver Stone would have made, could have made, or should have made. Nixon may be the last great film Oliver Stone ever makes, but even if it is, it is a worthy testament to his artistry and skill.

3. PLATOON (1986)/ BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989)

When Platoon came out in 1986, I went and saw it and like most everyone else, I was blown away by it. The four time Oscar winning film, including Best Picture and Best Director, was an original and unique perspective on the daily grind of the regular soldier toiling away in the morass of the Vietnam war.  Ten years later I caught the film again when it was on tv somewhere and was terribly underwhelmed by it, the film simply did not hold up to the test of time at all. The main problem was that visually, the film looked flat and washed out. I came away thinking the film was, like another Stone film from that period, Wall Street, a superb script, but unlike his early 90's films , JFK, The Doors, Nixon and Natural Born Killers, a rather cinematically sluggish film. I was more than happy to share my self declared brilliance with anyone who would be foolish enough to listen to my insufferable ravings on the visual failings of Platoon versus Father Time. Now of course, I am unable to rave too loudly as my throat is stuffed with crow. Why the change of heart you ask? Well, I recently saw a restored version of the film, and boy oh boy, it looks really magnificent. Stone's longtime cinematographer, the brilliant Robert Richardson, creates a subtly vibrant and layered look to the film that shows an incredibly deft and masterful hand on his part.

The film also boasts powerful performances from a wide array of actors, including Charlie Sheen, of all people, in the lead. Stone is such a great director that he makes Charlie Sheen seem like he could be the next big thing in acting. Sheen would have been wise to keep his wagon hitched to the Oliver Stone band wagon rather than venturer off into the land of Young Guns, ahhh…what could have been. Willem Dafoe and Tom Beringer also give standout performances as the ying and yang of the American psyche in regards to the Vietnam conflict and the conflict over Vietnam.

The one thing that does hurt Platoon in retrospect is that it is compared to other films of the same Vietnam War genre. In 1987, one year after Platoon came out, Stanley Kubrick's vastly superior Full Metal Jacket hit theaters. Oliver Stone joins a long list of other great directors, in fact, every other director, who has failed in comparison to the singular genius of Stanley Kubrick. Platoon is, without a doubt, a truly great film, probably the third greatest Vietnam War film ever made, behind Full Metal Jacket and  Francis Ford Coppola's iconic masterpiece Apocalypse Now.

In keeping with the Vietnam War genre, Stone's second foray into that most personal of wars (he was a Veteran of the war and Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient), was 1989's Born on the Fourth of July. The film is the story of Ron Kovics, a Long Island born and raised, flag waving patriotic son of America, who enthusiastically enlists in the Marine Corps to go fight in Vietnam.  

Born on the Fourth of July won Stone his second Best Director Oscar, and for good reason. The film is a remarkable piece of work for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is easily the best performance of Tom Cruise's long career. As good as Cruise is in the film, and he is in nearly every scene, it is an indication of Oliver Stone's power as an artist that you never feel like you are watching a Tom Cruise picture, but rather an Oliver Stone picture.

Like many of Stone's films, Born on the Fourth of July covers a staggeringly vast amount of history, and it is also able to personalize that historical struggle by poignantly showing the gut wrenchingly emotional struggle of its main character Kovics. 

The film is really a love story, with the love being between a man and his country. The man, Kovics, discovers that his lifelong love, America, has betrayed him by not living up to it's values, the war in Vietnam. This is wonderfully portrayed in a secondary narrative of unrequited love between Cruise's Kovics and his high school sweetheart played by the luminous Kyra Sedgwick. The film is at once heartbreaking and invigorating, and only Oliver Stone, with his deeply intimate relationship with Vietnam and America could have made the it. 

2. NATURAL BORN KILLERS

Yes, I know, Natural Born Killers at number two? Many people, maybe even most people, would more consider Natural Born Killers AS a number two rather than AT number two. I realize I am in the minority, but I don't mind. I think Stone's frantic, ultra-violent assault on the media and the culture is a genuine and daring masterpiece prescient in it's foresight.

The film precedes and perfectly captures the vile cable news era and the odious reality tv era. Remarkably the film came out a mere month after O.J. Simpson's wife was murdered and well before the sickening media and cultural circus of his trial. (As an aside, I hope you join me in praying that they find  the real killers!!).

Critics thought the film was a bombastic and vacant orgy of  sex and violence. Of course, what makes the film so genius is that it is a satire of American culture, which is a bombastic and vacant orgy of sex and violence. If you don't believe me, turn on any cable news channel at any time of the day, a reality show or a prime time network sitcom. In fact, one of the most inspired parts of the film is when it wonderfully eviscerates the vapid and insipid sitcom which had become the staple of the American tv diet at the time.  

What Stone did with Natural Born Killers was show how hyper, frenzied and frenetic our culture had become and how toxic that was to our collective and personal psyche. Of course, since 1994 our culture has only become more frenetic and frenzied. Our thirst for violence and our hunger for the salacious has increased infinitely since Stone showed us our true and more base impulses gyrating up on silver screens in cineplexes across America in the fall of 1994.

Once again the brilliant Robert Richardson does masterful work with the camera and gives the film a muscularly vivid visual style. There are also some great performances from some surprising places, most notably Rodney Dangerfield, (who you may remember previously "got no respect")  who deserved not only respect for his performance, but a Best Supporting Actor trophy for his work as a disgustingly repugnant sitcom dad, sadly he didn't get nominated. Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore and Robert Downey Jr. all give inspired and memorable performances as well.

You may hate Natural Born Killers, and you wouldn't be alone, but the reality is that Stone accurately depicted the rot at the heart of the American culture, and that rot has only grown more aggressive and malignant as the decades have passed.

1. JFK (1991)

JFK is Oliver Stone's masterpiece. It is also the film that garnered him the most criticism and made him a marked man of both the Washington and media establishment. With JFK, Stone did the near impossible, he made a uniquely original, intensely captivating, coherent, heart pounding suspenseful drama of President Kennedy's assassination, all the while challenging the establishment narrative in the form of the Warren Commission and it's lapdogs in the media with his own self described "counter-myth". He also forced the movie going public to actually sit down and watch the Zapruder film, over, and over, and over again, making sure there was no doubt there now dead President's head snapped "back and to the left". 

Stone wasn't saying that JFK was the absolute truth about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, what he was saying was that his film, an acknowledged piece of fiction, is as close to the truth as the Warren Commission, a supposed work of investigative non-fiction.

The best way to know that Oliver Stone was on to something with JFK, was in seeing the reaction of the establishment to it's release. The Washington and New York chattering classes went absolutely apeshit. Stone was attacked across the board, from those on the left, the right and the center. "Serious" people from "serious" news organizations told us that Stone was a mere "conspiracy theorist", so anyone who wanted to be taken seriously on any other subject, had to show their bona fides by knocking Stone as an unserious person and attacking the the film. This sort of thing has become old hat for the establishment. It is also a sure fire sign that the person they are attacking is cutting them close to the bone. If Stone were such an unserious kook, then ignoring him would have sufficed, but he wasn't and isn't, so the knives had to come out.  

As a result of the success of JFK and of Stone's tireless public work on the subject, Congress was persuaded to release some of the files relating to the JFK assassination. At the time it seemed like things might be changing, that all of the files might be released. That was over twenty years ago and still nothing has changed. The JFK assassination was over fifty years ago, yet we have barely gotten a glimpse of the vast seas of paperwork that remains classified on the subject.

As far as the film goes, Stone's script was, once again, Shakespearean in it's epic scope. His brilliant use of newsreel footage mixed with dramatic footage created an intense immediacy that brought the viewer ever closer to the edge of their seat. JFK was also cinematographer Robert Richardson's masterpiece as well. His use of multiple film stock was as vital a reason for JFK's dramatic edge as anything else, as was his impeccable camera work and framing. Editor Pietro Scalia also was a key figure in bringing this dramatic beast under control. Both Richardson and Scalia won Oscars for their work.

The acting was stellar across the board. Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald was particularly brilliant. Tommy Lee Jones was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work as one of the alleged conspirators Clay Shaw. 

In many ways, all of Oliver Stone's other films, including his Oscar winning pictures, pale in comparison to JFK. JFK was a cinematic, artistic and cultural bellwether. It is one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all-time, and it is a towering monument to the legacy of Oliver Stone.

(For more on the JFK assassination, the media and Oliver Stone, check out this article from my archive. JFK AND THE BIG LIE  )

FINAL THOUGHTS

In many ways, Oliver Stone reminds me of Francis Ford Coppola. Both men won Oscars for screenplays, Coppola for Patton, Stone for Midnight Express, before they had tremendous runs of artistic and financial success as Oscar winning directors. Then both men, for reasons that I can't quite explain, fell off a cliff creatively and never recovered. Coppola of course, had his incredible run in the seventies with both Godfather films, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, while Stone had his from '86 to '95 with the films listed above (among others).

I think it is a great loss for filmmaking that Oliver Stone has lost his cultural relevance. Cinema, and the culture, were much more interesting when he was at the top of his game and relevant. His willingness to stand for what he believes and to challenge the culture that bred him, are traits sorely lacking in todays Hollywood. My birthday wish for Oliver Stone, is that his next film, Snowden, lives up to his stellar previous work, and is as worthy a film as the subject at its center.

I tip my cap to you Oliver for your brilliance!! Happy Birthday!!

ADDENDUM:

I received a few emails regarding this post. One from a reader named "Captain Big Guy" and another from a reader named "Johnny Steamroller".

Capt. Big Guy wrote " In each of the 4 movies leading up to the 5th (#1), you described your thoughts on the lead actor - which I really enjoyed - BUT WHY NO MENTION OF COSTNER IN JFK?" In keeping with that thought Johnny Steamroller wrote, " Dude, you got me sooooooo interested in what you were going to say about Costner in JFK, your #1 movie!! Seriously, I kept reading. You do mention Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones by name but zero mention of the lead actor in "Oliver Stone's masterpiece"?? Arggggghhhhhh!!!"

Both the good Captain and the esteemed Mr. Steamroller make an excellent point. In my haste to post this piece I overlooked Kevin Costner's performance in JFK . It was an egregious oversight. Maybe not as egregious as Waterworld, but egregious none the less. 

So without further adieu…my thoughts on Costner in  JFK .

Let's be clear, Costner isn't Marlon Brando. With that said, he didn't need to be Marlon Brando in JFK. What makes Costner effective in JFK is the fact that he was maybe the biggest movie star  in the world at the time of the films release. In addition his persona was that of an all-American, squeaky clean guy. His image and persona were a key part of why he works in JFK and why he was cast. Casting Costner accomplished two things for Oliver Stone in his most ambitious film. 1. In terms of the business, it got the movie made. I am sure the studio was much more at ease making this rather challenging film with the biggest movie star in the world, at the height of his fame and popularity, on top of the marquee. 2. In terms of creatively, casting Costner made Stone's challenging the establishment, and the public, much more effective with the persona of the all-American good guy making the case to the public for Stone. It was a very wise move on Stone's part to use Costner and all of the good will he had accrued with the public through his earlier work.

Remember, just two years before JFK, Costner had starred in Field of Dreams, which is as mythically and archetypal an American film as has ever been made.  And the year before JFK was released, Costner had won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for Dances With Wolves. In many ways, not the least of which was symbolically, by the time JFK came out Costner had become the modern day Jimmy Stewart.

Costner's acting in the film is pretty paint-by-numbers, leading man stuff. As in all of Costner's work, he doesn't have too much range or depth. But because of the intangible traits and very particular image Costner the movie star (as opposed to Costner the actor) brought to the film, I believe he ends up being very much a net positive for the film, and a very wise and shrewd casting choice by Oliver Stone.

So thanks to Captain Big Guy and Johnny Steamroller for the emails!! Hope my answer was satisfactory.

 ©2015