ARTS *The Michigan Daily Monday, January 13,1992 Page 5 Oliver Stone poses troubling, unanswered questions in JFK JFK dir. Oliver Stone ' by Marie Jacobson cluding Sissy Spacek, Donald Su- therland, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon and Joe Pesci. This talent, woven together throughout Stone's fact-packed, fast-paced synthesis of real and recreated footage, culminates in what is arguably the most riveting On November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m., President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas' Dealey Plaza. This much is clear. But 28 years later, the greatest 'whodunnit' of the century remains plagued by ongoing speculation and debate. Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, as the Warren Commission insisted? Was the assassination a coup d'etat executed by the Pen- tagon and the CIA? If so, was the Mafia involved? Where did the fatal shot originate? Could one bullet have wounded both Kennedy and former Texas governor John Con- nally? And finally, the question that has echoed across the span of nearly three decades: why? Enter Oliver Stone, the Oscar- winning director of such films as Wall Street, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. His latest offering is JFK, a disturbing, powerful exami- nation of the controversial theories that have emerged to counter the in- consistencies and weaknesses trou- bling the Warren Commission's conclusions. At the helm of Stone's melo- drama is Kevin Costner, America's premier politically-correct nice guy. Costner plays New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, who prosecuted the only Kennedy assassination trial ever held - and lost. Costner is flanked by an impres- sive lineun of acting luminaries, in- Oswald owned the rifle that fired the bullets that hit Kennedy and Connally. According to Stone, Garrison was the people's champion, self- lessly crusading for truth and jus- tice in the face of cover-up and con- spiracy. Although his investigation was certainly courageous, critics dismissed Garrison's ever-changing conjectures. According to Stone, presiden- tial hopeful Robert Kennedy died in full view of the American public immediately following his final, fateful speech. Any history major will tell you, however, that Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy in the kitchen, not the lobby - and that he was de- clared legally dead the following day. These are issues of fact, and in his defense, Stone has admitted to al- lowing himself a certain amount of dramatic license in order to advance his main theories. What Stone can- not answer, in his conception of a complex, cold-blooded conspiracy, is why both he and Garrison escaped unscathed to expose the terrible "truth." Although Stone filters history by carefully highlighting only the facts that support his own theories, JFK nevertheless poses questions about Kennedy's assassination that cannot be comfortably dismissed. In Stone's world of king-makers and king-takers, where do you fit in? See the fiction, search for the facts. JFK is playing at Showcase and Briarwood. Stone movie of the year. But while JFK is a fascinating film laden with heady amounts of verifiable factual data, it is nevertheless given to flights of wild, even neurotic, conjecture: According to Stone, Kennedy would have withdrawn American troops from Vietnam. A power- hungry military and its voracious defense contractors countered with the assassination plot. In reality, however, there is little solid evi- dence to suggest that Kennedy ex- pressed any such resolve to recall American soldiers. According to Stone, Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be upon his arrest: a "patsy," a scape- goat. Nevertheless, ballistics show Look, it's the old music world order holding the younger generation by the throat. Violence! Guns! Evil! Surf Nazis should live, baby! Youth fascism will never die! (photo courtesy of Surf Nazis Must Die) by Annette Petruso Jaka's Story Dave Sim and Gerhard Aardvark-Vanaheim The term "graphic novel" is a fairly new one. It has developed within the comic book industry to describe comics of greater length and, generally, greater artistic ambi- tion and seriousness than one finds in the average comic book. . There are, however, graphic novels and then there are Graphic Novels. At 486 solid pages of remarkable art and emotionally wrenching fiction, Jaka's Story is one of the latter. Jaka's Story combines the skills of two men. Gerhard created the background art for the book, and his work is remarkable for its complex- ity and detail, whether it depicts a Channel Z Enlarge your mind tonight with an interesting PBS special. Ameri- can Experience (9 p.m., Channel 56) presents an episode titled "Love in the Cold War" about an American couple who gave up their ,child due to their devotion the American Communist Party. Truly TV worth watching. But as usual, you cable-hooked folks are luckiest: The Grapes of Wrath (9 p.m., TNT) starring Henry Fonda will air alongside Fonda on Fonda (8 p.m., TNT). Jane Fonda opens up (she dishes the dirt) on her famous family and the rocky, yet loving, relationship between she and her father. Convenient choice of network, Jane. panoramic view from above a city or a simple wooden wall. The book was written by Dave Sim, who also did the foreground artwork, allow- ing him to apply his talent for sho- wing emotion in the faces of his Jaka's Story may well become one of those private joys that somehow mean more than those over- analyzed books that the rest of the world has read. characters. The story consists of three men in love with the same woman named Jaka - a love square, if you will. A fourth man (who happens to be ho- mosexual, a rarity in the realm of comic books) happily watches and manipulates the others. This situa- tion and its results are played out in the midst of an extremely repres- sive medieval society. The characters make the piece all the more powerful. As Sim says in his foreword, "It contains no heroes and no villains; merely people set in motion and orbit around each other." They are indeed "merely people," figures that we cannot help sympathizing with when the little world they construct around them- selves begins to fall apart. Jaka's husband - the ultimate example of "ignorance is bliss" - See BOOKS, Page 9 "'If noise is where language ceases, then to describe it is to im- prison it again with adjectives." - Simon Reynolds in Blissed Out - the Raptures of Rock British music critic Simon Reynolds is in his late 20's and as such has a very different perspective on music - and writing about it - than the generation of critics that came before him. This includes fel- low Brit Charles Shaar Murray (Crosstown Traffic, Shots from the Hip) and respected American critic Greil Marcus (Lipstick Traces, Dead Elvis). While age affects a music critic's writing approach, the fact that mu- sic is produced by an industry is al- most more important. The industry, which is affected by the market, regulates what kind of music is pro- duced. In turn, the business side af- fects who and what gets written about. If language imprisons mu- sic's noise, the industry shackles it and almost beats it to death. The interview is the most sus- ceptible part of the music journal- ist's reportage to the business side of the music industry. Murray says, "A lot of (interviews) are done in very neu- tral settings like a room in a record company office or a hotel room and the setting doesn't tell you any- thing about that person. It's neither their own place nor is it a place they've chosen to be and there's only so much that somebody can tell you in forty-five minutes and if they happen to be a fair to medium good bullshitter, you don't really learn anything ... "All you come away with is, like, a very quick snapshot of that person participating in what is es- sentially a PR process. You don't make any real human to human con- tact with them. You're just sort of different cogs in a PR process ..." Some writers bypass the inter- view altogether and simply write what they think about the music. Marcus, for example, doesn't see the interview as part of his creative pro- cess. "I don't care what the people I'm writing about think," he says. "I mean, there is that arrogance that goes into writing criticism, that is you are ultimately trying to re- spond to the music ... You're trying to make sense of your response and talk to other people about it and you're trying to bring your knowl- edge and your ability to spend your time obsessing about this subject," Marcus says. "I don't care what Van Mor- rison thinks he's doing. If Van Mor- rison moves me with a song about Jesus, I don't really want Van Morrison to tell me how he came to Jesus. I don't give a damn about Jesus ... But I want to know what's going on in the music that it can move someone who doesn't care about Jesus ..." But who is making this noise, Marcus or Morrison? Even if the in- terview is ultimately a PR exercise for the New Album or the New Tour or the New Record Company, it is the only organized way of find- ing out what's going on in the band's head (unless you happen to know the musician personally and can just call him or her up at your leisure). The critic is just as important as the musician in the world of music criticism/journalism, but how much does "obsessing" about the music have to do with the music itself? Isn't it co-opting the music, tearing it from its parents and adopting it as one's own, giving it a new identity? Is this bad or just different? Murray: "It's a completely dif- ferent discipline, being an inter- viewer, than it is sitting at home, letting the phenomenon of the mu- sic ... get to work inside your skull and start firing neurons and making connections." Marcus: "To me, it's just think- ing. It's not sitting down and say- ing, 'Now, I will take this apart and See ROCK, Page 8 4 Send it. '\atx llliN~l'H r 1 1, I Read it. -1 I !% \ r, IZ 74kK Post i. 17 //l \ * Any time, any way you want to correspond with anyone, think MCI Mail.*- ---- - - - - - - - - - - - Out of stamps? Send a letter home instantly. Thinking about Spring Break? Fill out and mail this coupon with a copy Finalize a visit to a friend's school. Getting busy signals at the pizza place? Fax them student ID to MCI Mail today. Question your order. MCI Mail lets you do it all-right from your personal computer. It's easy,Your Name inexpensive, and turns your PC or Mac into the ultimate messaging machine. Street Address (no P.O. Boxes) For just a $10 registration fee and $5 a month you can send up to one hundred City- 7,500-character e-mail messages. That's a lot of talk for less than the cost of sending Mother's Maiden Name (security validation) 20 letters. Plus, MCI Mail lets you select other economical delivery options, like fax, telex, even postal-delivered letters. Without MCI Mail your computer is just an expensive typewriter. 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