JFK Oliver Stone Kevin Costner Joe Pesci Sissy Spacek DVD Robert Richardson DP
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| Reference Number: Avaluer:23127081 |
Oliver Stone's narrative & editorial masterwork, J.F.K., is a pleasure to absorb as it tangles and unfolds in its inward and outward gorgeously constructed formal system of concentric circles of cinematic storytelling. Kevin Costner feels like a bonafide classical era film star here and has aged well with the film, while Joe Pesci gives some of his most phenomenal, hilariously idiosyncratic performances in this film — as do both Tommy Lee Jones and Jack Lemmon — and Gary Oldman acc...omplished the unbelievable feat in making his Oswald believable. In addition, the colossal string of character actors who run through JFK are recognizable mainly from sitcoms and bit parts in small budget dramas throughout the '80s are all pretty stellar as ensemble players. Technically, it's amazing how much was accomplished in a film of this scope and narrative scale, from its green lighted leap into production to its December release, literally mere months later. Astonishing, even with a studio pipeline, because if one considers the era, JFK achieves maximum density rather rapidly. The great DP, Robert Richardson, operating his own camera, created lush textures within his renowned "loud" high key lighting scheme and multi-format scope — of 8mm, Super8mm, 16mm, and 35mm — and produced the film's emotional planes within the mixture of these film stocks, using the grain structure of those formats to heighten viewer awareness and cue temporal frames and the subjective states of memory. All of this is nested in the phenomenal structuring that Pietro Scalia and his co-editors sculpt for the narrative(s). JFK is a "Hollywood-of-the-'80s/'90s" with a studio period-era sense of indulgence by mavericks who moved too fast to be stopped. Stone is at his most virtuosic, having arrived technically at the point where he could truly drive the machine of cinema ultra fast and still stay on the road. I would have loved to have seen the first impressions of an American storytelling behemoth like, say, Coppola and see his real time reaction viewing this film's massive yet paradoxically intimate atmosphere. Paul Schrader — who has never exhibited this degree of virtuosity — was among the first to say he underestimated Stone until JFK. Gorgeous work. Una Penumbra. Shipping: choose either USPS Media Mail or USPS Priority Mail.
