Wasn't This Supposed To Be About Movies?

For a few years now, Slate has offered a year-end colloquy of critics to discuss the year in film. Sounds like a good idea--critics rarely talk to each other directly, and it's good to see them challenged. Needless to say, the whole thing too often turns into a shouting match about politics (with all parties playing on the same side of the net). This year, I don't even think there was a feint toward film talk before host David Edelstein started in.

This is too bad, since this sort of mindless talk is already widely available on the net. Don't these people realize no one cares to hear their political opinions--that they're lucky enough to get paid to talk about film as it is?

I won't go over every little line--what's the point, you've heard it before. But Jonathan Rosenbaum (a critic I respect) really goes overboard in trying to explain the usefulness of politics in the movies:

...serious questions about the assassination of John F. Kennedy were allowed to become front-page news the moment Oliver Stone decided to make a movie about them, and not a moment before.

This is insane.

For decades Americans had been openly questioning the facts behind JFK's death--well after it ceased being news, in fact. In truth, the Warren Commission did an honest and fairly successful job, essentially getting it right. (If it weren't for Jack Ruby's intervention, most of the mystery would have disappeared as the overwhelming evidence against Oswald was released in court.) There were many well-meaning but misinformed people (including a later Congressional investigation--so much for some official news blackout), and a large complement of crackpots (one of whom Oliver Stone decided to make a film about) who kept trying to claim something else happened, and they did an excellent job of fooling the American public.

But let's forget that lying crackpots essentially won the day. No matter what you believe, the idea that the whole thing was hidden from the public until Oliver Stone decided to make his delirious JFK (1991) is a crazy notion no matter how blinkered your worldview is.