Sherry Stuckey Woody Harrelson executes the role perfectly leaving the viewer wondering if LBJ is a man with a good heart, or a good political agenda, or both.

mherrin-43253 BJ: Directed by Rob Reiner and written by Joey HartstoneThis biopic comes not long after Jay Roach made his version of the LBJ with Bryan Cranston entitled All The Way. That was a much better film. It focused on one aspect of his life and his presidency rather than offering just fragments of who the man might be. This was a distracting meander through the Wikipedia page of LBJ from before he ran with Kennedy as vice president to just after he became president and addressed congress.This is also one of those movies where they use make up in an attempt to make the actor look like the real person. It doesn't work. Instead they look like wax figures come to life delivering dialogue and trying to emote through their plasticine mask. The performances are fine if you're able to ignore this insane red dot of distraction staring you right in the face. Woody Harrelson is just too much himself in this film. The way he talks is so distinctive that it is almost impossible for him to disappear inside of a character. Normally I'm okay with this but that horrendous make up job is attempting to mask his normal persona which his voice betrays.This is also a rather schmaltzy dull movie. The score swells in the areas they wish you to respond at. It didn't work for me. It usually doesn't and much like the make up, this was glaring in its shameless attempt at pandering to base emotions. This could have been really good especially if it dug deep into who LBJ was as a person outside of his public persona. It tried to do that a little bit but it isn't enough.One of my favorite movies is Nixon from Oliver Stone. That movie is so visually interesting and it moves like a bullet while still retaining the humanity of someone society views as detestable. Anthony Hopkins sounds like Nixon somewhat but he focuses more on becoming who Richard Nixon was behind the scenes. This movie needed to take pointers from this film. I know it is too late for this lesson. I'm merely shouting to the ether any cosmic filmmaking god who might be listening for future presidential biopics.Skip this one and check out Bryan Cranston in All The Way instead. I give this movie a D.

Kris LBJ in many ways parallels Robert Caro's book 'The Passage of Power' which tells the story of Lyndon Johnson at the tail end of his days as Senate Majority Leader, Vice-President and President up until August 1964 with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Those interested in this story would be well-advised to read the book before watching this movie but even for those who don't, the film is about as historically accurate as you can get for a two hour effort. Many of the quotes in the script are true to words actually spoken by Johnson at one point or another in his career and the scenes between the Kennedys and Johnson are not far off the mark either with my only gripe being that Johnson's speech on civil rights given at Gettysburg in May 1963 was omitted from the film but one that was given a week before JFK's landmark speech on the same topic. My impression of the film is that overall it was done as well as could be without straining to bore an audience, and a select audience at that, who would watch this movie however I still believe that Bryan Cranston gave the best performance of LBJ in All The Way and that the over-reliance on makeup and prosthetics on Harrelson and even Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lady Bird Johnson was somewhat a distraction. Indeed I'd say Reiner made Harrelson look like LBJ would've by 1968 after the weight of the office and the war in Vietnam had taken its toll rather the way he appeared in the early 1960s but these are minor quibbles. In the last analysis movies like this will never measure up entirely to the written material out there that provides far more context and understanding of the events described. For example Johnson's reluctance to submit a civil rights bills in late 1963 to Congress along with other measures Kennedy had sent up was rooted in the fact that LBJ knew that every other bill would be either stalled or killed along with civil rights legislation which he would insist be the only thing on the congressional agenda. This explains why in January 1964 he made it a priority to get JFK's tax cuts passed before he would put the full weight of the effort into a civil rights bill. Fundamentally he understood legislative strategy but JFK would never use Johnson in that way because he instinctively knew that by delegating the legislative agenda to Johnson he would be giving him a power centre that would make Kennedy reliant on his vice-president to get anything done and that was something no sitting president could abide by. Still its good to see LBJ getting his proper due for his achievements that overshadowed anything JFK did and may never have done had he lived. Much changed on November 22, 1963, some for the worse but also much for the better.

lavatch This superficial film portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson oozes sentimentality, as opposed to seeking to present historical truth. The film completely misses the truth that LBJ was a political opportunist, who was skillful at promoting himself at the expense of human values or the will of the American people.The film conveniently bypasses the unsavory story of LBJ's rise to power, including:(1) the way that he forced himself on the Democratic ticket through virtual blackmail, in order to become JFK's running mate in 1960;(2) the way that he changed course in his personal beliefs to support the civil rights platform in order to enhance his prestige as the architect of The Great Society. Political expediency was all that matters to LBJ. He was not an agent of social change or a humanitarian, as depicted in the film;(3) the way that he steered America into the disastrous Vietnam War. No mention is made of the disgraceful Gulf of Tonkin pretext for the war or LBJ's desperate attempt to win the war primarily out of trying to avoid being the first American president lose a war, as we learned from the Pentagon Papers.The crooked past of LBJ was completely ignored in the film, as well as the deep loathing that he felt for the Kennedy brothers. Sorensen's State of the Union speech written for LBJ identified the death of John F. Kennedy as "the foulest deed of our time." But this Hollywoodized treatment of the JFK assassination and the "accidental" presidency of Lyndon Johnson fails to present the tectonic shift of history of our nation that occurred on November22, 1963. A large portion of the shift is due to the disgraceful conduct of Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most despicable figures in American history.