The Killing of John Lennon (2006)

Mark David Chapman, a 25 year old security guard in Hawaii, bought a plane ticket to New York with the intention of killing the world's greatest musician and dreamer: The Beatles' John Lennon. Camping outside Lennon's apartment in New York waiting for an autograph, Chapman's childlike obsession with this "celebrity phony" descends into madness. Both gritty and dreamy, The Killing Of John Lennon is a stunning examination of a stalker's mind just before the kill.

It Took a Village...

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. December 22, 2008

brilliant

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. December 20, 2008

A Detailed Look At The Mindset Of An Icon's Assassin...In His Own Words.

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) December 7, 2008

SICK and Trash

I got it because of the previous review on it. I did not even finish to the end to watch it. This film was very depressing and sick. Forget it. I trashed it in the garbage can. November 26, 2008

I Saw a Film Today, Oh Boy

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. August 19, 2008

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