JFK

The JFK assassination … 56 years ago today.

I first became aware of it sometime around 5th grade or so. Must’ve been 1978, 79. It was one of those SRA kits we had to do back then. An SRA kit was a big box of about a hundred laminated cards the size of a regular sheet of paper. Each card contained a mini-article or a short story that sequentially got more difficult, harder and harder, as you progressed through them. You read through them, answered questions, and every now and then the teacher moved you up a level. Memory is vague, but I believe my first encounter with the events of November 22, 1963 was from one of those cards.

Then nothing for twelve or thirteen years. Oliver Stone’s JFK came out around Christmas 1991, and I saw it with pals and girlfriends in the theaters. It intrigued me, me who knew little of it as back then I was in the thick of my musician / band phase, and I rarely had time to crack a book (and if I did, it was of the horror King – Koontz variety).

Then again nothing for six more years till, one Memorial Day weekend, stood up by friends, I found myself alone doing laundry at my parents’ house. My stepfather had some books on the assassination, and on a whim I cracked one open. (Six Seconds in Dallas, by Josiah Thompson.) I was riveted, and read through the other two or three he had until the wee hours of the morning.

Then again nothing for nine years, till the bizarre fascination returned with a vengeance. From about 2006 to 2011 I bought a dozen or so books on the assassination and read or skimmed through them all. Not sure why, exactly, but I was taken in with the immensity of the alleged conspiracy. The little micro discrepancies as well as the big picture stuff. Like my childhood interest in Squatch and aliens and the paranormal, I was never a true believer, but I enjoyed the creepy campiness of what I was reading.

Then, in 2011, I read Gerald Posner’s book on the assassination and chased it with chunks of Vincent Bugliosi’s. Both men are firmly in the Lone Gunman camp, and both wrote with precision, power and passion and I was persuaded.

But I still appreciate a good conspiracy now and then.

Over the years I’ve posted a bunch of stuff on the topic here at the Hopper:

Overview, written on the forty-fifth anniversary

How I’d investigate the assassination, had I a couple million dollars cash laying around

Elm Street slow-down

How the cult of conspiracy has crept into our culture

Review of the exhaustive Norman Mailer book, Oswald’s Tale

How deep the rabbit hole

And yesterday’s entry into the labyrinth, White SuitConspiracy.

I think I’ll follow up this post with a list. Bloggers like lists! I like lists! I think I’ll list the best books on the JFK Assassination I’ve read, for those who may be interested in dipping a toe in the water or comparing notes …

Stay tuned.

White Suit Conspiracy

OK, I was slumming for a few days. I read a Jesse Ventura book on the JFK assassination. For those in the know, it was slightly closer to reality than the Jim Marrs book Oliver Stone used as background for JFK. But only slightly. Ventura’s book details 63 reasons to believe the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. Much was interesting, much was a rehash of the stuff I read during my JFK heyday a decade ago, and a lot was straight out of left field. It was a quick read, finished in about three hours.

It did mention a new take on small part of the assassination, one thing I had never read or heard before. I don’t believe it for a moment, but it struck me as intriguing.

Remember the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department? He’s escorted out, handcuffed to a detective, into the midst of what seems to be a mob of a hundred men. One lurches forward, a nightclub owner name of Jack Ruby, a man who has absolutely no business in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, and fires a bullet at close range right into Oswald’s abdomen. The alleged presidential assassin dies an hour and 45 minutes later at Parkland Hospital, the same hospital that attempted to save Kennedy.

According to Ventura (or a source in his book, can’t remember which), all the men are wearing dark suits and hats except for one. One man is in a white suit and hat, and he’s the man cuffed to Oswald. The theory states that Ruby was sent in to kill Oswald and would recognize his victim because he would be to the right of the man in the white suit and hat.

Creepy. But I don’t think it’s true.

Take a look at this photo taken the instant Ruby fires at Oswald:

Yes, the detective next to Oswald wears what appears to be a white suit and hat (some describe it as “tan”). But in this picture I can see two guys with white/tan hats, one next to Oswald and the other immediately behind him, and at the right-side edge maybe another man with a white/tan suit. So perhaps this micro-conspiracy is a little half-baked.

But boy does that detective in the white suit and hat stand out.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

© 2019

One major part of my life growing up in the 70s, between the ages of, say, eight and ten, was Godzilla. The original Japanese gorilla-whale. How I loved Godzilla as a kid! From the murky, mature, somewhat adult original Godzilla of 1951 to the acid-rock 1971 Godzilla vs the Smog Monster to all those silly “monster island” movies with baby Godzilla, aliens with funky sunglasses and mecha-monsters such as Mecha-Godzilla and Mecha-Kong. My all-time favorite, which I still watch every couple of years when it’s on regular TV, is 1963’s Godzilla vs. King Kong. Every Saturday morning there’d be a Godzilla flick on, and WABC channel 7 would play a Godzilla-themed week several times a year as their 4:30 movie.

So, a half-dozen years ago, the little boy in me was quite excited when it was announced that a “real” revisioning of Godzilla was coming out. Forget that 1997 Roland Emmerich mistake. This time, though made by an American studio, this new Godzilla would be phenomenal and iconic.

Well, I reviewed that piece of garbage here. My wounded inner child graded it a C-minus.

Then, two years ago, that damn little kid got all worked up again over the Godzilla sequel, where the King of the Monsters would prove he was, uh, king of the monsters by kicking the combined asses of Ghidora, Rodan, and Mothra.

I was more than willing to forgive them for 2014.

Then, last week, I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

I hated it. Hated, hated, hated it.

But not in an emotional way. More in an existential way. Not as in, “why does this movie exist?” Yes, we all know, to cash in on the hopes and dreams of middle-aged men who grew up on Godzilla decades ago, and also on their CGI-indoctrinated children. But as I watched the flick I was blanketed with a Satrian sense of ennui. Boredom. Existential boredom, where I questioned my own existence. Why was I watching this film? What did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong? Was I being punished for something? If existence precedes essence, why the hell is this sentient entity stretched out in his favorite comfy chair munching on his daughters’ Halloween candy doing watching this wretched excuse for cinema?

I had to take my revenge.

Therefore, I did something I never did before. Before the movie was over, around the halfway point, in fact, I reached for pad and pen and began taking notes on everything that I despised about and disappointed me with this movie.

In no particular order –

– Fat Godzilla’s back. Man, is he huge. More whale than gorilla. BMI greater than the number of Tokyo elderly. It was literally embarrassing to watch him on the screen. All jokes aside, fat monsters are not intimidating. How frightened were you of Jabba the Hut?

– Blurry CGI. Every special effect is seen either in the rain, or through a dust cloud, or at night, or on a TV screen in the movie, or through a camera lens. I know it’s to hide the cheap shoddiness of the final product. It annoyed me early on and all the way through.

– Roller-coaster camera work / camera never stands still. This is perhaps the number one thing I despise about movies today. I’m dizzy after ten minutes of any movie made after the Bourne Identity movies. It’s all shaky cam, even a Godzilla movie. I watched LA Confidential while I was laid up with a sprained ankle this past weekend and the static, unmoving camera work amazed me. I could enjoy the dialogue, the plot developments, the action, on a placid screen without reaching for a barf bag.

– Color-washed film with drab colors. Ugh. Why must the entire movie be various shades and hues of blue? Or sepia? Is it to instill a sense of unreality in the viewer? Not this one. It just took me out of the film entirely.

– Un-scary monster roars. Another peeve of mine. Monster roars are not scary. This goes even for Jurassic Park. Every flick with a monster bigger than a man has to have it roar at 110 decibels. Not scary. Godzilla’s roar is iconic. It is not scary.

– Unrealistic diversity and Mary Sues. Know what a “Mary Sue” is? Google it if you don’t. As soon as I saw the bald 105-point hit woman – the bad guy’s right-hand-man – I began counting all the diversity checkmarks in this film.

– Technically proficient teen daughter cliché. This was a cliché way back in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Teen girls don’t do Information Technology. Sorry, feminists and beta comic book fans. I have two daughters, fifteen and eleven, and though they could work their iPhones in a sandstorm during a midnight apocalypse, they laugh at computer nerds. So do their friends.

– Monsters still second fiddle to humans. This was not as bad as the first movie, where Godzilla was only seen in the background on TV screens in the film, but it was still bad. No one cares about the scientist family. The audience of this movie wanted to see 250-foot tall monsters beating the hell out of each other.

– Obligatory self-sacrifice scene with operatic dirge. This was just schmaltzy. Plus, I am not quite sure the sacrificee had to be sacrificed. But by that point I was completely out of the movie, and probably missed some important detail. Or maybe not.

– Something like ninety percent of the movie filmed before a green screen (background effects digitally added). Nothing seemed real. Everything looked kinda fakey-fake. I wouldn’t be surprised even if the kitchen scenes were done in a green-screen studio.

I do not hate you, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. That would imply much more enthusiasm than I have for you. No, you simply underwhelmed me and wasted two hours and twelve minutes of my life.

Grade: D.

N.B. They’ve been teasing a Godzilla versus King Kong remake, and Kong actually had a two-second cameo (on a video screen, natch, in a military war room) in the movie. Please hold me to this vow not to see that sure atrocity when it arrives in three-to-five years!