The Killing of John Lennon
It almost pains me to report it, so much was my love for Chapter 27, but this may actually be the better of the two movies – I’d heard as much but I’d put it down to general Lindsay hatred and the fact that this one just came first.
While they’re actually both similar in far greater ways than I’d thought – even down to the Jude character played by Lindsay in 27 who I hadn’t actually realised at the time was based on a real girl, Judith Stein – this one seems to me to do a better job of at once displaying fascination for what went on in Mark David Chapman’s head through the months, days and hours leading up to that moment of madness whilst at the same time making no such podium for the man himself.
I would have to see 27 again to be more sure of this, but I know that this movie made me genuinely despise Chapman more than the other movie, even while I was intrigued by his reasoning. It seems perhaps this is why 27 was threatened with boycotts etc while this one slipped out relatively unnoticed – the star cast of the other, particularly the presence of Lindsay when she was at her worst, can’t have helped either.
I know a lot of people think both these movies should be ignored because they give the killer, “what he wanted.” It’s a toughie, I have to admit – and again, it was in this telling that I gave that feeling more thought, where I realised more: Chapman’s still alive, and Lennon is dead. The guy broke history, the world, art, in two when he pulled that trigger, like if there are parallel universes just imagine how vastly different the one is where this didn’t happen. But my conclusion is always – we can’t not talk about it. And amazingly, like I said despite my thinking 27 was an amazing piece of work, it seems that the need to talk about it is so great that there actually is room for more than one movie – even one so strikingly similar in places as this – about it.
I wouldn’t recommend watching them both in tandem or anything – it would likely be either overwhelming or confusing and in any case diminish the impact of both – but if you have any kind of interest in Lennon, “Catcher in the Rye”, the mind of an assassin, then you owe it to yourself to see both eventually. I personally find them both phenomenal, but for now for the way and degree to which it made me feel the “right” sentiment towards the killer, this one just has the edge over 27.