The Killing of John Lennon (2006)
Country: GB
Technical: col/Panavision 114m
Director: Andrew Piddington
Cast: Jonas Ball, Krisha Fairchild, Mie Omori
Synopsis:
Extracts from the prison diaries of Mark David Chapman narrate how he came to identify himself with the central character of The Catcher in the Rye and become the man who shot John Lennon.
Review:
The testimony of sociopath Chapman does little to explain how this relatively fortunate Honolulu resident, married also to a Japanese woman, came to do what he did, save for a fairly unpersuasive argument to the effect that Lennon was 'a phoney' because he had lots of possessions, as if the man had to be Mahatma Gandhi just because he preached a utopian ideal. There is the hint that Chapman's childhood was far from happy, and that his mother was as flighty as he appears to have been, but the film is far from being a justification of a murderous act. At the same time the very act of producing a film from the point of view of an assassin carries with it weighty moral questions, and Ball's is a charismatic performance, for all his character's flesh-crawling oddness. The visual style incorporates cinematic tricks of Oliver Stone ilk to convey the fractured psyche of this individual and his paranoia, and there are nods in the direction of Taxi Driver: for film buffs it is a gripping watch, if a guilty one.
Country: GB
Technical: col/Panavision 114m
Director: Andrew Piddington
Cast: Jonas Ball, Krisha Fairchild, Mie Omori
Synopsis:
Extracts from the prison diaries of Mark David Chapman narrate how he came to identify himself with the central character of The Catcher in the Rye and become the man who shot John Lennon.
Review:
The testimony of sociopath Chapman does little to explain how this relatively fortunate Honolulu resident, married also to a Japanese woman, came to do what he did, save for a fairly unpersuasive argument to the effect that Lennon was 'a phoney' because he had lots of possessions, as if the man had to be Mahatma Gandhi just because he preached a utopian ideal. There is the hint that Chapman's childhood was far from happy, and that his mother was as flighty as he appears to have been, but the film is far from being a justification of a murderous act. At the same time the very act of producing a film from the point of view of an assassin carries with it weighty moral questions, and Ball's is a charismatic performance, for all his character's flesh-crawling oddness. The visual style incorporates cinematic tricks of Oliver Stone ilk to convey the fractured psyche of this individual and his paranoia, and there are nods in the direction of Taxi Driver: for film buffs it is a gripping watch, if a guilty one.
Country: GB
Technical: col/Panavision 114m
Director: Andrew Piddington
Cast: Jonas Ball, Krisha Fairchild, Mie Omori
Synopsis:
Extracts from the prison diaries of Mark David Chapman narrate how he came to identify himself with the central character of The Catcher in the Rye and become the man who shot John Lennon.
Review:
The testimony of sociopath Chapman does little to explain how this relatively fortunate Honolulu resident, married also to a Japanese woman, came to do what he did, save for a fairly unpersuasive argument to the effect that Lennon was 'a phoney' because he had lots of possessions, as if the man had to be Mahatma Gandhi just because he preached a utopian ideal. There is the hint that Chapman's childhood was far from happy, and that his mother was as flighty as he appears to have been, but the film is far from being a justification of a murderous act. At the same time the very act of producing a film from the point of view of an assassin carries with it weighty moral questions, and Ball's is a charismatic performance, for all his character's flesh-crawling oddness. The visual style incorporates cinematic tricks of Oliver Stone ilk to convey the fractured psyche of this individual and his paranoia, and there are nods in the direction of Taxi Driver: for film buffs it is a gripping watch, if a guilty one.