Hello, Peeps…
Being rich, famous and sleeping with hot women isn’t enough for most people in Hollywood.
They also need respect. And how do you get respect? You make a movie about a serious topic no one is really interested in anymore and hope it wins you some awards.
Well, Chris Pine, best known to everyone as being the second-best Captain Kirk ever, has decided it’s time to make a grab for some respect in the business, so he’s agreed to play Walter Cronkite in an upcoming film called Newsflash, which will focus on the legendary reporter’s coverage of JFK’s assassination.
According to the studio…
Newsflash takes place on November 22nd, 1963, when Walter Cronkite put everything on the line to get the story right as a president was killed, a frightened nation wept, and television came of age.
The film will be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, whose latest film, The Current War: Director’s Cut, is in theaters now.
The assassination of JFK was a major milestone in television reporting at the time and often cited as the moment in America when the still-new medium of television finally “grew up.”
I’m usually the first person to tell everyone they should wait until something comes out before they start complaining about how bad it is, but Chris Pine as Cronkite just doesn’t seem like a fit to me.
I already had a hard time buying him being serious in The Outlaw King on Netflix, so here, I don’t think so.
Plus, he does not really look like Cronkite at all and one of the easiest ways to throw people off and not have them buy into a character is for the actor playing them to look nothing like them. But I guess that’s what makeup is for.
Though the film focuses not on the actual assassination of Kennedy but the reporting of it, do we really need another film on the topic?
Love him or hate him, Oliver Stone already made JFK, the definitive film on the subject. It’s a bit heavy on the conspiracy theories, but it’s one of his greatest films and a masterclass in editing.
When I was in high school, I had to take a speech class and for the speech requirement at the end I chose the JFK assassination. I really did not know much about it at the time and got most of my info from Oliver Stone.
The speech lasted ten minutes, but I only spoke for two because the stuff I was saying was so crazy people were stopping me every two seconds because they didn’t believe anything I was saying.
Yet somehow I got an A in the class. And now I’m here writing about it.
The circle of life.
