WashPost Celebrates Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ as Great Cinematic ‘Conspiratorial Tradition’

Sunday Washington PostAnn Hornaday, an oh so-liberal chief movie critic, wrote another pro-Oliver Stone piece. This one celebrated the 30th anniversary his bizarre conspiracy movie. JFK. 

‘JFK’ at 30: Oliver Stone and the lasting impact of America’s most dangerous movie

Oliver Stone did what Washington, Hollywood, and even history expected to do in order to create his JFK drama. Its legacy endures.

Hornaday recalled visiting Stone in his Brentwood, California home on a “warm day in October,” where Stone has been re-reading the journals he kept while he made his cuckoo concoction. Her investment in suggesting that this film still has great historical significance is a testament to her commitment. 

It was released in December 1991. JFK’s influence can still be detected, on everything from Washington policy to Hollywood world-building. It was an important film for baby boomers because it tapped into the still-raw generational losses. It was the end of Kennedy’s story for Gen-Xers. Visual language was pushed to new heights by its form. Its contents helped create a new generation. America’s long conspiratorial tradition. JFK It is with us in spirit and substance.

It is possible to believe in conspiracy theories. These paranoid thrillers work well when they are pushed by a baby-boomer leftist message. Stone “would lend a florid, expressiveistic voice to residual traumas and disenchantment from his generation.”

Hornaday went so far as to claim that “JFK’s images were so convincing, and infiltrated viewers’ imaginations so thoroughly, that the film morphed from one filmmaker’s alternative interpretation of events into the events themselves.Stories were internalized in public memory. This became a form consensus history. 

Elle added that “in 1991, JFK’s critics called it the most dangerous movie in America. These warnings aside, the movie would undoubtedly be one of most important.”

Hornaday and her editors from The should be asking this obvious question. Post: You would promote a movie that glorifies deep-state paranoiacs about assassinating a presidential (implicating the vice president), and then say it’s dangerous for Trump to ask questions about the “deep states” of the FBI or the CIA. It’s hard to rail against conspiracies-driven misinformation, and celebrate it when Hollywood leftists do it. 

PS. Hornaday conducted a interview with Stone earlier this year about his memoir. He began by addressing the fangirl side: 

HORNADAY – It is wonderful to meet you. Full disclosure: I did not read the book. I merely inhaled it.

STONE: Oh, good.

HORNADAY – This book will be a hit with our readers. Get out of your daily grind, find a comfy chair and start reading. You take us along an amazing journey, just like in your films.

Hornaday composed a short piece for Stone’s 2012 documentary series. The Untold Story of America, He was especially focused early on Henry Wallace, the socialist vice president of Socialist America. This made it difficult to imagine how far America may have moved (sigh).

Hornaday, a former president of the United States, complained that Trump had ruined his idealistic movie about a liberal president earlier in the year.