Comments by "Itinerant Patriot" (@itinerantpatriot1196) on "Top 10 Historically Inaccurate Crime Movies" video.
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I like The Untouchables and Argo mostly because of the interaction between the characters. Sean Connery is brilliant as the wise old cop and the way he changes Kevin Costner from a straight-laced by-the-book G-Man into a freewheeling crime buster makes the movie for me. Talk about a character arc, going from a goody-two shoes to a guy who tosses Frank Nitty off the roof of the courthouse, simply saying when asked where he is: "He's in the car." It's not quite Michael Corleone going from a war hero to a ruthless mafia don but it's entertaining. As for Argo, the back and forth between Afleck, Goodman, Arkin, and Cranston is a hoot. Yeah, it's a lot of BS but it's fun watching Ben get the better of the incompetent Iranians, especially the made-up car chase between the Revolutionary Guard and the Swiss Air jumbo jet. I would have included American Hustle to the list but that's me.
As for JFK, a quick glance through the comments shows what a good job he did presenting total BS as fact. When the movie came out I was a casual student of the case who tended to be more on the conspiracy side. I saw it at the theater and it piqued my interest and the more facts I learned the more annoyed I became with the film. The most egregious thing he did was sell Jim Garrison as some sort of "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" type hero. The guy was a ruthless political animal who destroyed a lot of peoples lives when he was the DA of New Orleans. He was mobbed up to the hilt and he went after men like Ferrie and Shaw knowing good and damned well they were innocent. Most of the investigators who worked the case with him quit because the further it went along the more they became convinced the guy was a sociopath bent on revenge against his political opponents and glory for himself. His craziness went so far as to claim there was an entire army division hiding out in Dallas ready to kill the world.
Stone approached real assassination scholars and investigators who had looked into the case but he dismissed all of them because he felt the truth lacked flair. Instead, he went with the looniest character of them all as his protagonist and blended every crackpot theory from the garbage Mark Lane put out there to the crazy nonsense Jim Marrs published into one big steaming pile of pig dung. Then he went with Robert Groden, the screwball "photographic expert" to put together the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza. OJ Simpson was so impressed by that charlatan that he hired him as part of his defense team in the civil suit brought against him for butchering his wife and the poor guy who just happened to be returning her glasses. His "analysis" got ripped to shreds and OJ lost big time. But I digress. As for JFK, characters are made up, events take place that never happened, and testimony that was completely debunked as a load of crap was put out as fact. The jury in the actual case against Clay Shaw came back in half an hour and they said they would have come back sooner only they wanted to make it look like they took the charges seriously. An innocent man, who had saved his money and was about to retire, had to spend $250,000 of his retirement fund defending himself against Garrison, an evil, corrupt, DA who ruined more than a few lives. That's Stones hero.
Stone has had a hard on for America dating back to the Vietnam War. He has a special hate for LBJ and he does his best to indicate LBJ had JFK whacked. Stone prefers Castro to Washington or Lincoln and he was also chummy with Hugo Chavez. Draw your own conclusions about that. Everyone who was actually there or covered the assassination in real-time called Stone's fiction total BS. Cronkite was so pissed they used footage of him that he considered suing Stone. But people still eat it up and treat it like a f*kn documentary. I learned long ago that hard core conspiracy believers are impervious to facts and evidence so I don't even bother debating with them anymore. Ask for proof, actual hard evidence to back up their claim and they will throw some crap from some BS dime-store novel passing as truth back at you. Challenge that and they go to the default position: "Of course I can't produce evidence because it was all covered up or destroyed by the government." Even now Trump is wasting more money looking at JFK records and each time they do Gerald Posner's take on it becomes more crystalized: "I should change the name of my book to Case STILL Closed."
But people are going to believe what they want to believe, and the idea that a three time loser with a mail-order rifle could take out a president is just too much for em to swallow. And yes, I have read a ton of stuff on the conspiracy side, more than the other side actually. Like I said I started out believing in a conspiracy. In the end, I came away with Lee Harvey Oswald and his 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano, a rifle that is a lot more deadly and accurate than the "experts" who go to the JFK conventions will have you believe. Well this has been quite a rant and most likely nobody will take the time to read it. Can't blame em really. I was just in a mood and anytime that piece of dogsh*t fiction Stone produced gets brought up I guess, to use the parlance of the day, I get triggered. Back and to the left...back and to the left...back and to the left..🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣Like Dorothy with her slippers. Repeat it enough and it will all come true.
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