"Oswald's Ghost" just demonstrates how Kennedy's death is still being white-washed. The writer, director Robert Stone gives the viewer a series of repeating, talking heads with differing opinions about what happened in those days. Mark Lane is given a goodly amount of screen time. But Norman Mailer gets to put the final nail in Lee Oswald's coffin and if he was still with us should be ashamed for his part in the cherry-picking Mr. Stone does in the continuing obfuscation of what happened in Dallas.I believe you can get a much better sense of the Kennedy and Oswald assassinations by seeing "JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America." You'll be able to see for yourself what was going on in Dallas those few days, without talking heads trying to make up your mind for you. The Police work in Dallas that day was so amazing in how they found their man and all the evidence they needed to convict "their man" with certainty within hours while at the same time the President and his "assassin" were murdered in their jurisdiction. I wasn't aware the "powers that be" are still trying to make sure we end up believing the official version.

I was in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper's library when I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination. Thus began a great mystery in the U.S. and around the world that continues to this day. Trillions of words and thousands of books have been written about the assassination, and that alone tells us that there is no one satisfactory theory about why or how Kennedy was murdered.Robert Stone's documentary is both odd and disjointed. As someone else on this board has already noted, director Stone starts off with a reasonably balanced view of the assassination, leads us through various conspiracy theories and talking heads, and then, boom, just like that, in the final 10 minutes, allows noted author Norman Mailer to wrap it up for us: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.Mailer offers his 'evidence' more from a novelist's point of view than from one of evidence. Mailer's 'proof': Oswald was living in desperate straits, he was frustrated but bright and articulate, he had delusions of grandeur, he wanted a permanent place in American history, he worked in a building on the parade route, and voila: it all came together. Director Stone ends his movie focused on Mailer's fanciful artistic interpretation of events (Oswald's ghost knows the answers, but a ghost will not tell us). It's quizzical to say the least.Mailer (and ultimately filmmaker Stone himself) leaves out a glaring contradiction that still stares at conspiracy theorists today. It's a glaring contradiction not wrapped in Maileresque language: the famous Zapruder film (now digitalized for even more vivid inspection), which clearly shows that Kennedy had the top of his head blown off by a shot from the FRONT, not from the Texas Schoolbook Depository in the rear, where Lee Harvey Oswald was purportedly firing three shots in six seconds.It is peculiar that Mailer, Stone, Elliott Jay Epstein (author of a book on the murder), former student radical-activist Todd Gatlin, and disgraced former Senator Gary Hart have all attached themselves to the 'single gunman' theory. Oswald may well have been involved up to his skinny little neck, but it still doesn't explain Zapruder's remarkable film, which has nothing to do with Oswald the Man, but merely frightening evidence that something else was happening on that fateful day in November 1963. That 'something else' has never been explained, and this film basically ignores it.This film ultimately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. Exactly what we needed: even more questions about the Kennedy assassination.'Oswald's Ghost' left me with this uncomfortable feeling that too many people are desperate to put this whole messy business behind us. It is, after all, much easier, and much neater, to blame it all on a single shooter who also happened to be crazy.

It's impossible to review this film without having a bias. I do believe a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy but, as always when dealing with these matters, I do keep an open mind. While the film ostensibly is not on the whodunit but that question has done to us, Oswald's Ghost has a definite bias in it. And that bias is what kills the film.Director Robert Stone seems to have done his homework. His interviews cover many proponents of both sides of the argument. He also goes a step further to present unseen or rarely seen / heard materials including news clips and the actual Dallas police recordings. Stone also chooses to employ some interesting visual techniques in the film as well. For example there is the whirlpool of Oswald and Warren Commission images at the start of the film, the (apparent) black hole of conspiracy books, and the positive / negative effect on stock footage during the playing of the recording of Perry Russo's sodium pentothal questioning. These are all well done, but their use in Stone's context is questionable.Thus the film's fault lies in its bias. Stone seems convinced that the mystery is solved and has been for nearly forty-five years. The film then proceeds to essentially say that independent researchers (that is to say conspiracy theorists) have led the public on a wild goose chase of truly epic proportions. Stone seems to use the film and virtually every frame to saying this. Stone's film is not just, as he claims, a study of the effect of a mystery on the public. For the most part the film feels like an indictment of those who dare not agree with his point of view.Would the film have been better without this bias? That's hard to say, really. I suspect that one's own opinion on the topic determines how one interprets the film. While one can argue over the factuality of the film, it is visually striking in its presentation as if to shock and awe. Does it succeed in that aim? I'll leave you to be the judge

Hi! We are going address the physical evidence in this case...right...well we are just not in this film. This film barely deals with the physical evidence at all. Except to say that he was shot from the front...except Norman Mailer says he wasn't so the case is now closed. Nope...sorry son it ain't. This film looked fantastic but did nothing to change my mind or anyone else who has one. One of the problems with this film is that it glosses over so many issues it really isn't funny. First of all the massive amount of information that has been released about this case was never covered in here. Secondly, (and I know this was mentioned before) was the fact that we get no history of anyone on the Warren Commission before or after the assassination. This would be irreverent if it were...say...the OJ jury but instead it's some people that Kennedy fired and others who didn't want to be there...you know LIKE EARL WARREN!!!! Who, by the way, did not believe his own report...but hey who cares? Thirdly, the choice of people interviewed for the film. Patricia McMillian is CIA. She applied in the fifties and her family housed the biggest defector in the known universe Stalin's daughter. So she is very well connected if you know what I mean. Then, we get to Jim Garrison. They present a theory I have never heard in the fifteen years I have studied Garrison, then say he hypnotized someone and drugged them, (which is standard police procedure), then make him crazy because he thinks the media ganged up on him. Wow imagine that the media ganging up against someone that has never happened ever in this country! Nope! (They then use his half hour commercial-free statement that he had to sue for because a biased report to get as proof of this) Have no fear there is not a shred of government documentation that states this is true. I mean except for the ones that have been released...that state this. And then there is the other evidence that something was trying to stop him...you know like his inability to get warrants served that he has issued. And the fact the Richard Helm's admitted under oath that Shaw was a CIA agent...but don't worry about that? Outside of all of this...the film looks fantastic. That is why I gave it a three. If you want facts though go elsewhere say to JFK or Beyond JFK or JFK a revisionist history or something like that...Now do me a favor and trash JFK for me...let's bring it on!!!