Fin: Phillies of the Flower Moon, the imaginary persecution of Oliver Stone, and low-stakes fake news

Getting ready for the Philadelphia Film Festival with some news and notes.

Watching the Phillies win the NLDS at AMC Fashion District

Those of us who love both movies and sports are sometimes forced into some tough choices. Gene Siskel used to often skip screenings to sit courtside at Chicago Bulls games, and last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, I made a point of clearing my schedule one night to go to a Blue Jays game, and finally visit the spot of the 1992 and 1993 World Series (and Wrestlemania 6 and 18.) 

I had one such moment Thursday night, when the early screening for one of the fall’s biggest movies, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, fell opposite Game 4 of the National League Division Series, between the hometown Phillies and the Braves. 

The three-hour movie and three-hour game were originally supposed to happen entirely at the same time, but the start time was moved back two hours, so after the film — review to come next week — I was able to watch the last three innings of Phillies-Braves. And since there’s no sports bar anywhere in that vicinity, I watched the game in the mostly empty lobby of the AMC Fashion District theater. 

The Phils won, setting up, for the second straight year, a Phillies NLCS and possible World Series run directly opposite the Philadelphia Film Festival. I know there was a reason they put a big TV in that theater when it opened back in 2019, although the Fashion District theater is slated for demolition if the new basketball area is built on that spot. So hopefully this won’t be that location’s last moment of local sports glory. 

I grew up rooting for the Minnesota Twins, and now live in the land of the Philadelphia Phillies, and across both, I retain my longstanding contempt for the Atlanta Braves while enjoying their tendency to win exactly one World Series for every ten years that they’re good.

Their fans’ racist chant doesn’t help either; during the 1991 World Series, I saw a Twins fan start to move his hand down like the Tomahawk Chop gesture, only to abruptly switch to the “dismissive wank” motion. That about sums up my attitude towards the Braves ever since- and my annual cheering of their playoff exit.

Also, their mascot sucks.

JFK didn’t ruin Oliver Stone’s career 

And speaking of 1991… 

Back in late 2021, my least favorite political pundit in the world, Glenn Greenwald, posted a tweet about Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which was then marking its 30th anniversary with a new documentary.

“In 1991, Oliver Stone was the most celebrated director in Hollywood, having won 2 Oscars in 4 years,” Greenwald wrote. “Instead of cashing in, he used his platform to make ‘JFK,’ the first mainstream cultural product to question the official JFK narrative. He was pilloried and destroyed for it.”

This was, in just about every sense, not true. Stone was “pilloried,” in the sense that a lot of commentators questioned his history and facts- which they should have, because almost nothing in JFK is true.

“None of what Glenn is saying here is remotely true, which is very much in the spirit of Oliver Stone's JFK,” Scott Tobias, now of The Reveal, said of the tweet.

I happen to love JFK- it’s an expertly produced film, and I’ve rewatched it often. But it is, in no uncertain terms, a pack of lies. It lionizes an unethical, out-of-control prosecutor, who falsely accused a completely innocent man, Clay Shaw, of plotting the assassination of the president of the United States.

This scene is the film in microcosm: Brilliant filmmaking, and utterly false:

But even more ridiculous is the idea that Stone was “destroyed”- which is only true in the sense that he was “criticized a lot.” JFK made a lot of money, was nominated for lots of Oscars, and was a massive topic of discussion for many months. 

Stone continued to be a filmmaker of consequence for about 15 more years after JFK, directing zeitgeist-capturing movies like Natural Born Killers, Nixon, and Any Given Sunday. Stone only fell off the A-list when his movies stopped being hits and - let’s be honest - were no longer any good. 

His George W. Bush movie had nothing to say about Dubya that Maureen Dowd hadn’t been bleating about for a decade by that point, while his Edward Snowden film — featuring Glenn Greenwald, of course, as a supporting character — added nothing we hadn’t seen two years earlier in the Oscar-winning documentary that dramatized all the same events. Stone of late has been making laudatory documentaries where he interviews loathsome despots like Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin, while his last film, a documentary arguing for nuclear energy, played at festivals last year but has no distribution. 

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a better Oliver Stone movie than Stone himself has made since the ‘90s. 

Now comes word that a documentary series called Citizen Stone is in the works, which will follow the making of JFK and, per Deadline, “the director’s undoing.” 

“While the film could not be erased from existence, it could be marginalized, and the campaign against JFK tarnished Oliver Stone’s reputation in the United States and forever altered the trajectory of his career. Citizen Stone peels back the layers of where Hollywood, the media, and Washington intersect and highlights the unholy alliance between fact and fiction and the fight for who ‘owns’ history… Citizen Stone is about the making of an epic motion picture and the unmaking of one of cinema’s legendary directors.”

That sounds like, for lack of a better term, total horseshit. If there was a media conspiracy to undermine JFK, the media did an especially poor job of it. Discussion of the film was all over cable news and op-ed pages for months afterward.

Stone didn’t get “marginalized”; he remained a top director for many, many years. And the people who said his film wasn’t true were right, all along, to do so. 

That said, I expect to watch the docuseries and probably even enjoy it, despite knowing that the premise behind it is a bunch of dishonest nonsense. Kind of like what I’ve done with JFK itself for the last 30 years. 

A World Class trailer 

The worlds of high-brow independent film and indie professional wrestling haven’t crossed nearly enough over the years, except Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. And I guess Beyond the Mat probably played some art houses back in 1999. 

This December there’s going to be another such movie, with the arrival of The Iron Claw, an A24 movie about the Von Erich family. They were a family of Texas-based professional wrestlers in the 1980s who saw glory in the ring, and a shocking amount of tragedy outside of it. Zac Efron plays Kevin Von Erich, and Jeremy Allen White (Carmy from The Bear) is Kerry- a star wrestler who LOST HIS FOOT IN A MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT AND SECRETLY WRESTLED FOR SEVERAL YEARS WITH A PROSTHETIC FOOT. AEW star Maxwell Jacob Friedman plays “Lance Von Erich,” an unrelated wrestler billed as a brother of the others.  

The trailer arrived this week and it looks quite good: 

A nice touch to include Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” which was Kerry Von Erich’s entrance music in his pre-WWF career, and his nickname was even the “Modern Day Warrior.” Watching him was the first time I ever heard Rush or that song.

The film arrives in December. But unfortunately, it sounds like A24 is about to no longer look much like A24. 

Against low-stakes social media misinformation  

When it comes to the situation in Israel, I said most of what I had to say earlier this week in the Munich piece (thanks once again, everyone, for the positive response.) There’s a big problem with online misinformation about that particular conflict, with video footage from previous wars, or even video games, often going viral, especially (but not exclusively) on the former Twitter. 

But it’s not just a problem on X, nor is it only a problem with important things that are matters of life and death. I’ve noticed lately that when I open Facebook in particular, the first thing I’ll often see is news, from a page or group that I don’t follow, that isn’t true. It’s mostly pretty low stakes, but it’s still very annoying and makes social media even more unreliable than it used to be. 

Sometimes it’s a “satire” site not understanding what satire is, missing the part about doing a joke or parody, and just plain stating a bit of untrue news. For some reason there’s an entire constellation of sites and groups that are obsessed with The View, often falsely reporting the firing of Whoopi Goldberg or Joy Behar. I’ve seen it reported, multiple times over several months, that Roseanne Barr is playing to launch a Fox talk show to go up against The View (she’s not.) And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen bogus posts about Denzel Washington denouncing “wokeness.” 

The sports ones are even worse. Fake trade rumors reported as fact, by “suggested” accounts, are a constant. One trick is to report a trade, include all the players, and then end the very long headline with “proposed trade says,” in which the trade was “proposed” by the guy who wrote the post. And twice this week, the first thing I’ve seen at the top of my feed is a site “reporting” ESPN news of a nonexistent NBA trade that has sent James Harden to the Clippers. 

I know Facebook has killed links to real news sources, starving them of revenue. But in their place, why the fake sites? Why not just feature, you know, our friends? 

Best Buy dropping physical media 

Before Best Buy was the place to buy a new TV, it was the place to buy CDs or DVDs. I remember the days when it had an entire set of aisles devoted to CDs, and a wall somewhere else with DVD sets of whole seasons of TV shows. 

Times have changed, and such media has become less and less of Best Buy’s offerings over the years. This has coincided with Best Buy becoming the last remaining national consumer electronics chain (RIP, Circuit City, hhgregg, Comp USA, Tweeter, and so many more.) 

The Digital Bits reported Thursday that Best Buy plans to exit the physical media business in the first quarter of 2024. This will include both in-store and online sales. 

It’s not a huge surprise, although it does represent a sad end of an era. And with the economic viability of the streaming model in doubt, the exit of Best Buy, just months after the death of Netflix’s DVD business, will make life harder for those who continue to collect physical movies. 

Chaos on the set of Aquaman 2?

There was a big story in Variety this week about supposed trouble on the set of Aquaman and the Lost City, the last of the DC comic book movies from the previous, pre-James Gunn regime. The story alleges many things: That star Jason Momoa showed up drunk to the set, that he dressed as Johnny Depp around co-star Amber Heard, and that Elon Musk — who formerly dated Heard — had threatened to “burn the house down” if Heard wasn’t allowed to appear in the sequel. (Momoa has denied wrongdoing, although he pretty much played his villain part in this year’s Fast and the Furious sequel as a drunken Johnny Depp, so it may be true.) 

A prediction: This is the most interesting that Aquaman 2 will ever be. It’s hard to imagine anything in the movie itself catching up to the Variety piece in terms of drama or surprise. I’d love to be wrong, but I’m reminded, once again, of Gene Siskel and the test he devised: “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” 

Besides, the pretend version of Aquaman from Entourage — directed by James Cameron — was much better:

Wilkommen to the CVS makeup aisle

I have a feeling this display was designed by someone who has never watched Cabaret all the way to the end:

The Cabaret stage musical, its movie adaptations, and various revivals have used a few different endings over the years, but I assure you: None of them were happy.

This week’s writings 

This week, here at The SS Ben Hecht, I reviewed Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Dicks: The Musical, along with a quartet of documentaries: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, Mister Organ, and Uncharitable. And I wrote very long about the situation in the Middle East through the prism of Steven Spielberg’s Munich.

For Splice Today, I reviewed Totally Killer.

At AppleInsider, I looked back on recent Apple-related crimes, including the recent Apple Store looting in Philadelphia and the carjacking of a member of Congress.

For 19FortyFive, I looked at Trump signing on to another Obama conspiracy.

Next week: I’ll be previewing the Philadelphia Film Festival, reviewing the new Scorsese movie, another big film, and an intriguing new documentary. As always, thank you for your support.