There's enough fact bending and half-assed moralizing in this futile attempt to tell the story of Jack Ruby – the man who shot the man who shot Kennedy – to make Oliver Stone's JFK seem like a model of clarity. Danny Aiello gives Ruby, a Dallas strip-club owner with Mob connections, his patented once-over as a lug with a heart of gold. Though Ruby is tough on hoods, he's a sucker for stripper Sheryl Ann Dujean (Sherilyn Fenn ofTwin Peaks). He dubs her Candy Cane and features her on special freebie nights for the Dallas police. That's when Officer Tippit (David Duchovny) – the cop later shot by Lee Harvey Oswald – also develops a yen for Candy, who is soon going places in Vegas and the White House.

Candy, by the way, is a figment of screenwriter Stephen Davis's over-worked imagination. Ditto most of the movie, ponderously directed by John Mackenzie. Davis's theory about the assassination, which he sees as a Mafia-CIA plot, is credible enough. But his human take on history is laughably misconceived. Given all the guesswork, we learn only that Ruby died of cancer in prison in 1967 without ever talking on the record. Tell us something we don't know. Somebody. Please.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."