Wednesday, August 7, 2024

'Who benefited?'


Donald Sutherland was a truly great actor, because every movie he was in was better when he was in it. The stoned ramblings in Kelly's Heroes, the hopeless desperation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the effortless cool of M*A*S*H. Everything was better with some Donald in it.

And for all that, it's his 16-minute scene in JFK that still hits hardest. Stone's film is stacked with incredible talent - Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci chewing the movie up and spitting it out, Jack Lemmon doing his thing to chilling effect, John Candy being truly amazing in it - and then Big Donald blows them all away with a hugely charming and unsettlingly menacing monologue, blowing the whole movie apart with an infodump of biblical proportions.

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