MONDO EXTRAS

So this sure-to-be-a-travesty opens with a quote from JFK Jr.: "People keep telling me I can be a great man. I'd rather be a good one," and the tinkly piano that is going to get on my nerves for the next two hours kicks in. We listen to an obviously staged phone call of some guy from Martha's Vineyard airport calling Bridgeport flight service to inquire about JFK Jr.'s plane and being told that the flight service doesn't give that information out to people over the phone. And we watch news footage that I vaguely remember from July 17, 1999, and shortly thereafter, which was when the plane went down, and there is something about old news footage of a tragedy that affects me, no matter how over-the-top this movie's producers are making it with their maudlin music. I mean, watching the Kennedy family deal with yet another tragedy and having to do so under intense public scrutiny is really rich material for drama, so there's lots of potential here. We watch the Kennedy family all on a boat being taken, I think, out to the crash site, where JFK Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and Carolyn's sister Lauren were all killed.

And from the moving actual footage, we go to staged footage of a makeshift memorial outside JFK's apartment. And I know that the late twentieth century has given rise to people parading their grief in front of television cameras -- which is not to say people weren't genuinely saddened by John's death -- but this was weird because it was obviously faked, but filmed like it was real. And here I'd like to state that any criticism I direct toward the "characters" in this movie are directed at the portrayal of the characters, and not the real-live people themselves.

Well, except for these two moron "mourners" who are going to narrate the movie for us -- some brunette who tells us her first reaction was, "Oh no, not again" and her friend, a redhead who says she came down to the fake-o memorial because although she never met JFK. Jr., she felt like she knew him, which is of course the underlying mentality behind the world's ever-growing celebrity culture. The redhead says "he was such a good man" and the brunette nods sagely even though these two didn't actually know the guy, and all I can say is I didn't know Carrot Top had a sister.

Annoying Narrator #3 is this old guy sitting in a chair doing an interview, claiming to be a friend of "Jackie." He's blathering on about how the whole world knew John's name before he did himself, which can't have been easy. He's identified as "Richard Lawton: Kennedy Friend," and I'm pretty sure this guy is an actor but I couldn't quite make him out in the credits at the end and the IMDb only lists four people from the cast. However, this guy furrowed his brow and paused for effect a little too dramatically not to have been an actor.

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So this sure-to-be-a-travesty opens with a quote from JFK Jr.: "People keep telling me I can be a great man. I'd rather be a good one," and the tinkly piano that is going to get on my nerves for the next two hours kicks in. We listen to an obviously staged phone call of some guy from Martha's Vineyard airport calling Bridgeport flight service to inquire about JFK Jr.'s plane and being told that the flight service doesn't give that information out to people over the phone. And we watch news footage that I vaguely remember from July 17, 1999, and shortly thereafter, which was when the plane went down, and there is something about old news footage of a tragedy that affects me, no matter how over-the-top this movie's producers are making it with their maudlin music. I mean, watching the Kennedy family deal with yet another tragedy and having to do so under intense public scrutiny is really rich material for drama, so there's lots of potential here. We watch the Kennedy family all on a boat being taken, I think, out to the crash site, where JFK Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and Carolyn's sister Lauren were all killed.

And from the moving actual footage, we go to staged footage of a makeshift memorial outside JFK's apartment. And I know that the late twentieth century has given rise to people parading their grief in front of television cameras -- which is not to say people weren't genuinely saddened by John's death -- but this was weird because it was obviously faked, but filmed like it was real. And here I'd like to state that any criticism I direct toward the "characters" in this movie are directed at the portrayal of the characters, and not the real-live people themselves.

Well, except for these two moron "mourners" who are going to narrate the movie for us -- some brunette who tells us her first reaction was, "Oh no, not again" and her friend, a redhead who says she came down to the fake-o memorial because although she never met JFK. Jr., she felt like she knew him, which is of course the underlying mentality behind the world's ever-growing celebrity culture. The redhead says "he was such a good man" and the brunette nods sagely even though these two didn't actually know the guy, and all I can say is I didn't know Carrot Top had a sister.

Annoying Narrator #3 is this old guy sitting in a chair doing an interview, claiming to be a friend of "Jackie." He's blathering on about how the whole world knew John's name before he did himself, which can't have been easy. He's identified as "Richard Lawton: Kennedy Friend," and I'm pretty sure this guy is an actor but I couldn't quite make him out in the credits at the end and the IMDb only lists four people from the cast. However, this guy furrowed his brow and paused for effect a little too dramatically not to have been an actor.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20Next