Customer Reviews

The Killing of John Lennon

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This film is strange. It retraces Mark Chapman's motives that lead to his killing of John Lennon in 1980. You are invited into a maniac's head to witness thoughts that are begotten in the depths of his mind. All spoken words and verbalized ideas that are put into the main character's mouth actually belong to Chapman himself: no writer's distortion. One can ask the rhetoric question, do we need to increase Chapman's ignoble renown?

John Lennon appears only as Chapman gets opportunity to see him personally. Of course, as a viewer, you know the forthcoming tragedy in the finale, and the film abets suspense by reminding you occasionally how many days or hours left before the murder. You find yourself meditating upon every turn of Chapman's mind, but in the end you realize nothing could save Lennon from this determined psycho. You witness all his weak, ludicrous motives, and don't expect that you'll feel any sympathy for him. No, understandably there's no touch of the sorrowful greatness of a tragedy: the story is told from Chapman's side.

The film is very well made, the camera work and casting are excellent. Jonas Ball playing Chapman is perfect; all characters Chapman encounters with - from street girls to taxi drivers - are greatly developed. Paradoxically, Hawaiian colours and atmospheric musicscore complete the eerie feel of the story. It's not a movie to watch over and over again but I highly recommend it to everybody who is interested in this tragedy and who appreciates good acting.

C'mon and ride on the Blame Train, shall we?
Was it the mental hospital that evidently released a criminally insane Chapman into society just 3 years before he killed Lennon despite the fact that he was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia? And hey, why didn't the Honolulu Scientology Center involve the cops when he was harassing them with death threats just 4 months before he shot Lennon? That would have at least initiated some sort of paper trail. Was it the mother who raised her son as a `best friend' (i.e. couldn't care less about him) instead of son? Perhaps a father who couldn't be bothered unless it was to push his face into a plate of spaghetti?
Look, I place most of the blame on the wife. She knew what her husband was up to, knew he was flying to NYC to kill John Lennon but never told anyone even though she knew he had a gun and stayed up all night listening to Beatles albums plotting against John, going on tirades about what a phony he was for owning prize Holstein cows. I would have had him reading 'Catcher in the Rye' in the state hospital quicker than you could say `annulment'.
I could go on and on but why? See the film yourself, I'm giving it 5 stars.
Finally, as important and influential as John Lennon is in our culture, for 25 years (since 4th grade, people) I've felt a lot of anguish around his passing. Even though I'm very spiritual and I know he was, too. This film goes a long way in explaining where MDC was at when this horrible act of violence took place. Now I'm not angry anymore.

as a lennon fan, i was extremely reluctant at first to see this film. However after some prodding by beatles friends of mine who had seen the film, i decided to rent it and was astounded with how brilliant the film was. Everything from the casting to the directing was top notch. I really enjoyed jonas ball as well as the slew of impressive supporting actors who lended their keen talents to the screen. To me personally, aside from Jonas, who is fantastic, I found the psychologist and the taxi driver to be extremely talented supporting acts as well. All in all I found the Killing of John Lennon to be an extroardinary film and I recommend it highly.

Deeply informative dramatization of Beatles' John Lennon murderer Mark David Chapman from his start in Hawaii to his incarceration in New York. Newcomer Jonas Ball plays Chapman without going too far over the edge, though at times people who are familiar with the appearance of Chapman would wonder why they picked an actor who is at least thirty pounds less than the real McCoy. But what really got me about this film is it was written with Chapman's own words through police interviews and private memoirs. But when the filmakers decided to use the actual locations that where Chapman and Lennon walked twenty-five years earlier, they didn't account for the backgrounds would now be totally different, and a sharp eye will notice a 70's-make cab for instance driving by the 2006 ABC Network's JumboTron and it's newly lit-up Times Square. Even though these may take you out of the movie, it's the dark and insane words of Chapman that will keep you in. In fact, it's so detailed that the actual assassination doesn't take place till an hour and ten minutes into the movie, and yes, it's extremely hard to watch, even 25 years later.

I'd like to comment that I personally feel that as a society, we shouldn't turn these types of killers of famous people into stars themselves, forever attaching them to the person who truly earned that fame to begin with. But that is the nature of the beast. You'll find no sympathy or concern for Chapman after watching this, but it does explain very well his method of madness.
(RedSabbath Rating:8.0/10)

The film begins in September of 1980 when Chapman discovers a book in the local library. It ends with his sentencing in August of 1981 for the murder of John Lennon. Through it all, it is artful and brilliantly done. The music adds to the madness that is Chapman's mind and is sometimes eerily inappropriate (such as the Christmas music playing in the background as Chapman is being interrogated at the police station after his arrest). There weren't a lot of witnesses to the crime and nearly 30 years later, only a few interviews from those who were at the scene. This film helps put the pieces together and makes you hate Chapman as he takes pride in himself for becoming the hottest story in the city.

I went into `The Killing of John Lennon' wanting to be illuminated. A reenactment rather than a documentary, I was surprised by how much I remembered about Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman. Looking and feeling like many fictionalized Hollywood films, this lurid account provides a great deal of authenticity. After watching this film, I felt like I had walked in Chapman's shoes, or at least followed his footsteps, and I'm at a loss to state whether I'm better off for having taken that walk.

For stylistic techniques, the movie is edited with fastidious finesse. We get near breaking edge fast-forward, slow motion, and artistic ensemble framing. Writer/director Andrew Peddington spent a great deal of time and care on this film, and editor Tony Palmer should get some semi-prestigious prize for his outstanding work. From the beginning, we get the horrible tragedy and then back up again. They retrace Chapman's life before he made his fateful decision. Interspersed, we see the shooting again, and then again, as the movie marches forward to its inevitable conclusion. Many times they show a collage of split-second John Lennon pictures frantically flipped across the screen. I was wondering: Are they going for suspense or for appreciation? Wisely, for part of the last thirty-five minutes or so, they give us plenty of old news reels to help us grieve once more. It may actually be both, but I'd be hard pressed to say the filmmakers didn't care about Lennon or his legacy. It's dramatic because it's momentus. But then they do end mostly with Chapman.

Jonas Ball plays Chapman, and he becomes as fragile and as insecure as we might expect him to be. As he narrates, we get a chilling reading of Chapman's thoughts. I obtained most of these accounts from newspapers, magazines, and TV news magazine shows before. For me, he's the best reason to see (really hear) this reenactment. At certain points, the movie's mood even captures the banality of Chapman's life. We get an insightful portrait of a truly conflicted man. In a mental institution in 1977, unstable for his personal life or employment, and delusional and impulsive at best, we discover a misanthrope who eventually confessed, "I was mr. nobody until I killed the Biggest Somebody on earth." From self-aggrandizement to regret, the dichotomies of this anguished man are sadly pathetic, but clearly presented.

Personal Reflections: I'm being self-indulgent, but you may agree with me. As a freshman in college, John Lennon's murder hit me like a ton of bricks. I was facing my first college exams and concentration was difficult at best. I saw `Ordinary People' on Christmas Day, the biggest tear-jerker in my life. It is no surprise that initially Chapman turned around and headed back to Hawaii after seeing this film. The power of my favorite movie doesn't surprise me, but I wish it had sustained him. Grief took me measurably in December of 1980. Where were you when John Lennon got shot?

Electrified by `The Catcher in the Rye,' Chapman used the twisted justifying context of Holden Caulfield to conclude, "The phony must die." All this because of the brilliant man who wrote and sang about "no possessions" had plenty himself. Besides some real estate, to paraphrase Roy Carr, he gave his money away almost "recklessly". We need idealists to set the high bar in life. Did Shakespeare live a life up to his sage writings? Does anybody? Even phonies don't deserve the death penalty. Lennon, so known for his gut-felt honesty and confessional songs "Help!," "Love," "I'm a Loser," and "Jealous Guy" was gunned down. I may be beating my head against a wall grappling with Chapman's rationale, but they only demonstrate how we're still processing the repercussions of his assassination even today. It's like trying to make sense of senselessness. At least the movie makes an admirable attempt.

Anybody who loved john Lennon shoul watch this movie. It's a very close reanactment of the events that occured. I also suggest the bookAlbert Goldman "The Lives of John Lennon"

"The Killing of John Lennon" takes us into the mind of a cold-blooded assassin. I speak, of course, of Mark David Chapman, the mentally disturbed 25-year-old who shot down the former Beatle in front of his apartment in the Dakota building on December 8, 1980. The movie achieves its goal by restricting itself pretty much to Chapman's actual words, which flow forth mainly in the form of voiceover narration, as he comments on his thoughts and deeds.

We're first introduced to Chapman in September of that year as a moody, darkly introspective near-loner (he was married at the time) living in Hawaii, who calls people he doesn't know with threatening messages, and becomes so obsessed with "The Catcher in the Rye" that he begins to fancy himself another Holden Caulfield, i.e., a uniquely insightful observer and commentator on people and life whom no one else seems to understand. We learn of his being raised in a loveless family by self-absorbed and disinterested parents, where emotions and physical affection were seen as inappropriate and to be avoided at all costs. We see how he first begins to focus on Lennon as the representation of all that's wrong with the world and his own life, viewing the singer/songwriter as a hypocrite and a sell-out for preaching the gospel of love-over-materialism in his music ("Imagine no possessions...") while living the lavish lifestyle of the rich and famous himself. Like Holden, Chapman came to see himself as on a mission to expose and bring down the "phonies," and Lennon was the one he alit upon.

We then follow Chapman to New York City, where he methodically closes his trap, carefully following in Holden's footsteps all along the way (for instance, Chapman stays at the Waldorf-Astoria and orders up a hooker simply because Holden does those things in the novel). Chapman comes to see himself as fulfilling Holden's quest to "kill the fat man in the hotel" - only Chapman will take that act out of the realm of fiction and fantasy and make it a reality.

Written and directed by Andrew Piddington, the movie, which has been shot largely at the actual locales, provides both a chillingly detached portrait of a man who was a self-described "nobody" until he "killed the biggest somebody on earth," and an unsensationalized account of his actions before, during and after the murder. Jonas Ball, who is on screen virtually 100% of the time in this film, effectively captures the loser-like nature of what is essentially a nondescript pipsqueak with delusions of grandeur who's determined to make himself noticed by a world that's paid little or no heed to him up to this point.

It is probably impossible for anyone to successfully get into a mind as warped and twisted as Chapman`s. But the makers of "The Killing of John Lennon" do give it a valiant try.

While the film CHAPTER 27 was in production, there was a tremendous outcry that a movie was being made about John Lennon's demented killer, Mark David Chapman. I don't really remember why. I think there were arguments that any attempt to give Chapman the celebrity he felt he deserved would be realized with a film about Lennon's death.

I haven't seen CHAPTER 27 but the reviews aren't good. I'll probably see it though, just to compare to THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON. (Both films came out the same year, similar to the CAPOTE/INFAMOUS and TOMBSTONE/WYATT EARP films).

But I doubt if anyone can watch THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON and come away thinking that Mark David Chapman is anything but the crazy "killer nerd" who should be locked away for the rest of his life (credit author Albert Goldman for labeling him a "killer nerd").

The film opens with the announcement that all of the words belong to Chapman himself. I find that totally believable. Chapman's descent into madness leading up to the murder is as sad as it is fascinating. Scraping by with a goofy mother and a hapless wife, Chapman spirals into his craziness by first stumbling on to "The Catcher in the Rye," so identifying with its disenfranchised narrator that he sees the book as holy, and then stoking a furious hatred for John Lennon for "betraying" his fans. "The guy who sang that 'imagine no possessions' had millions and millions...making him a phony."

The film also feels authentic from the actual locations where everything took place. I stopped by the Dakota on my first visit to NYC and it really made a difference watching this film.

There isn't a false moment in this honest yet stylized film. It felt like a documentary about a very sick, twisted mind and how it single-handedly changed music history.

Check it out.

Let's get this out of the way right now for the legions of Beatles fans who believe that this movie should never have been made. These fans, as I understand it, are outraged not only that the movie exists, but that it's been getting glowing reviews since it premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2006.

"The Killing of John Lennon" is not meant to please Beatlemaniacs. It's not meant to be in "good taste." It's not even meant to be entertainment in the traditional sense of the word. It is, rather, a difficult, disturbing, and at times nauseating movie to watch, even if you never cared about the Beatles or Lennon, even if you weren't yet born on December 8, 1980, and even if you have little sense of who Mark David Chapman--played with chilling accuracy by Jonas Ball--was, what he did, and why he did it.

Why did Chapman do it? Because he was an emotionally disturbed and probably insane individual. He wanted to steal Lennon's fame, his identity. He saw himself as the reincarnation of Holden Caulfield, the hypocrisy-hating narrator of J.D. Salinger's classic novel of disaffected youth, "The Catcher in the Rye." Chapman thought Lennon was a phony who deserved to die for misleading a generation. And, as I said in my own John Lennon biography "Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon," he thought that if he killed Lennon, he'd write Chapter 27 of "Catcher" in Lennon's blood--"Catcher" ends on Chapter 26--and literally disappear into the pages of the book.

Most of this is very well explained in the movie.

But let me make one other thing really clear, too: Writer/director Andrew Piddington has chosen to show the act of murder in graphic slow motion. Chapman's five bullets, fired at close range, are seen tearing apart Lennon's flesh amidst a shower of blood, in the archway of the Dakota, as the ex-Beatle and his wife, Yoko Ono, are returning from a recording session.

So what is this filmmaker up to? Piddington has said that he wants his movie to generate "controversy, adverse criticism, and scorn." Well, that may be his marketing plan, so to speak. But he's also said that it was his intention to put on-screen an unflinching presentation of the truth as seen through Chapman's eyes, as he goes from his dead-end job as a security guard in Hawaii to the aftermath of the murder and his solitary confinement in Attica. Piddington accomplishes this by basing his impressionistic and at times surreal screenplay on the murderer's journals, statements he made to the police and psychiatrists, interviews, depositions, and court transcripts. The director says that there's nothing in the script that he didn't corroborate three times.

That's an almost impossible standard to employ for any work of journalism, especially for a documentary-like feature film shot on a miniscule budget of $500,000. But it perhaps explains why a number of well-known events and crucial bits of information are missing from the movie. They include:

--Chapman's belief that his head and the walls of his room are populated by a civilization he calls the "little people."
--Chapman, on his flight to New York from Georgia, sees Lennon on the cover of the November 1980 Esquire magazine, and after reading the article describing the ex-Beatle as little more than a rich businessman, becomes even more enraged by Lennon's "phoniness."
--Chapman meets John's son Sean and his governess in front of the Dakota.
--Chapman, in his hotel, reads the January 1981 Playboy interview with Lennon and learns that sometimes he hires fans off the street to work for him.
--Chapman asks Lennon for a job as Lennon autographs his record album.
--Chapman, on the morning of the murder, sees Mia Farrow walk in front of the Dakota and takes that as yet another sign that he should kill Lennon. (Farrow played Rosemary, who gives birth to the devil in the Dakota, in the film "Rosemary's Baby.")

The absence of this information is, in the scheme of the film, a piddling criticism that takes nothing away from Ball's uncannily realistic portrayal of Chapman. And only people intimately familiar with the story (like me) would notice it's missing.

"The Killing of John Lennon," shot on location in New York, Honolulu, and Decatur, Georgia, is a minor miracle of genuine independent/guerrilla filmmaking and should be commended as such. It couldn't have been easy for Piddington to shoot in front of the Dakota, and that's undoubtedly why many scenes that in real life took place on the sidewalk directly in front of the building were staged down the block or across the street. And, presumably, it was beyond the limits of Piddington's budget to shoot the crowds of Lennon fans that haunted the Dakota daily, their numbers swelling after Lennon released "Double Fantasy," the album that marked his return to the public eye after five years of seclusion.

And even with its numerous anachronisms--the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, modern subway turnstiles, and the occasional 21st century car--the film doesn't look cheap; it looks real, and real scary. If anything, "The Killing of John Lennon" serves as an illustration of the problems associated with low-budget filmmaking and how they can be creatively overcome by a determined and talented filmmaker.