everythingsbetterwithbisexuals: So last night because of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s…
everythingsbetterwithbisexuals:
So last night because of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination I watched “Parkland,” and it was actually really good and I highly recommend it.
I think the best part of the movie is when the Secret Service finally gets to see the Zapruder film after it’s quickly developed following the shooting. When Kennedy is struck, there’s a collective gasp throughout the room, and the shock is just strange. I mean, understandable, of course, but at the same time those of us who weren’t alive then and have seen the Zapruder film aren’t as affected by it anymore. It’s unsettling to watch, yeah, but we’ve seen it probably dozens if not hundreds of times by now. Imagine what that was like to see it the first time. No wonder even experienced Secret Service agents would be freaked.
It made me think of 9/11, and how on the fiftieth anniversary there are going to be so many people alive who weren’t alive at the time to know just what it felt like to see that second plane hit the tower. I wasn’t kidding when I said the other day that no matter how many documentaries I watch about 9/11, the one thing I notice is that if you watch amateur videos of the second plane hitting, nearly every video has someone saying, “That’s terrorism! It’s terrorists!” Because up until that point you could convince yourself that it wasn’t — that it was another bomb, that it was an accident, that it was a regular fire.
The way “Parkland” treats that part of the story is really telling. The Secret Service is just hoping there’s clear evidence on that film. Zapruder knows better. He filmed a murder, and an incredibly violent one at that. He filmed someone’s beautiful wife crawling onto the back of a convertible to recover a piece of his skull just in case. He knows something the Secret Service doesn’t, even those who were there. He caught everything, and everything he caught was awful.
It all just reminds me of that sequence in “Titanic” when Bodine is enthusiastically explaining the sinking through computer simulation and at the end Rose says, “Thank you for that fine … forensic analysis, Mr. Bodine. The experience of it was … somewhat different.”
I also watched Parkland recently, not knowing much about the film, and was really affected by it. Paul Giamatti as Zapruder is, well, Paul Giamatti as anyone: amazing. The sequence of him actually taking the film, where they just show him (Zapruder), and nothing of what he was filming, was kind of breathtaking and horrifying at the same time. And that was all him, the actor, working with the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of what he was seeing.
Would definitely recommend.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/67860903133.
Tags: parkland.
