Natural Born Killers
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Movie Reviews of Natural Born Killers
Movie Review: The Good & Bad Of 'NBK'
Summary: 3 Stars
This is so stylishly-filmed it's unbelievable. The wild camera techniques - quick flashes, sudden changes from color to black-and-white and back, distorted sound bytes, tilted camera angles, wild colors and symbolic images, distorted sound bytes - are all fascinating to watch. Then there's the crazy story, which ranges from really good to really bad. It's good to see the tabloid media mentality mocked for the trash it is, glorifying evil just to get ratings and the evil killers feeding off that media frenzy. Most of the characters in this film, as bad as they are, are definitely attention-getting. The two leads, "Mickey and Mallory" are two names that now go together, thanks to this film and the ultra-sleazy portrayals of them by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.
The "bad news" is that most of the people in this film, if not all, are so vile, so profane, so morally bankrupt, so disgusting you may want to take a shower after watching this film. Even the film critics who gravitate toward evil were repulsed by this movie. I actually enjoyed the story up to a point: about the halfway mark. After that, it becomes one gigantic mess, almost too difficult to watch in one sitting. I am mainly referring to all the scenes in the prison including the drawn- out riot/prison break, which goes on way too long.
Overall, in order to stomach this film, you have to look at it as some outrageous satire on violence and the media and take these characters as extreme cartoon-like people and nothing else. Take nothing seriously here.
Movie Review: Love this contraversial film
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this contraversial film, it was a real headline runner when it came out. The mixed message from Stone of dream, soap opera, media cirkus is probably more valid today then when it first came out.Movie Review: The MTV generation has found its film
Summary: 5 Stars
A crazy, zany movie that looks as if it only got made after the inmates took over the asylum. Quentin Tarantion penned a script that Stone and his associates bought and remade into what we now know as Natural Born Killers. A crazy film that needs to be seen multiple times to understand. Once is definitely not enought.
The movie's point is hidden behind the violence and gore but it's very effective in its message. It's a movie that needs no explaining. The title itself makes it one to watch. The scenes, the angles, the characters, you will not forget this movie if you see it.
The DVD features a commentary from Oliver Stone, a few deleted scnes, including a shocking one with Ashley Judd that'll leave you in awe, and a feturette.
The bad thing is, it's non-anamorphic. This is the only Director's Cut that I know of and it sucks that it's not anamorphic.
However, I still recommend this movie.
Movie Review: Got myth?
Summary: 3 Stars
This film's theme is a common one. Catcher in the Rye, Clockwork Orange, Dubliners, Fahrenheit 451, Idiocracy, Waiting for Godot - the list goes on. The theme is what happens when a society no longer has a myth. If you miss this point you miss the film's point. People who pan this film typically aren't getting the point; instead, they're seeing it through a sociological lens. Oliver Stone - long-time disciple of mythologist Joseph Campbell - presents another depiction of this postmodern theme. The death of mythology is old news: Giambattista Vico predicted this four centuries ago, author James Joyce attempted to refecundate myth though his works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Joseph Campbell observed we're currently waiting for the new myth to arrive. The NeoCon establishment - disciples of Leo Strauss - have attempted to build a new myth of "public presumption" of endless war of Good against Evil. But because it's a lie it won't last long. Or it will destroy us. Which brings us back to Natural Born Killers.
In a world without myth we create our own. Natural Born Killers depicts with considerable black humor how people living in a cultural vacuum of dead mythologies violently struggle to create their own living mythology. The killers, Mickey and Mallory, are psychotic, schizophrenic - (who knows?) - but schizophrenia is at root an inability to derive meaning from symbols. The pair run amok in an awful symbolic void, latching onto a smorgasbord of comic heroes, game shows, sitcoms, childhood memories, and courtship rituals. What's happening to them is exactly what happens to primitive societies exposed to "white man's culture": They collapse, succumb to vice, and disintegrate. Meantime, Mickey and Mallory struggle to establish a meaningful personal mythology of their own throughout the film: Marriage vows on a bridge, the "communion with angels" scene, reverence for any small kindness done them, the ritual act of mercy at each killing.
The film raises hairs on the neck - and it's meant to - because Stone depicts what we've become and where we're headed. Beneath tawdry commercialism, career mania, suburban flight, vapid FOX news, political correctness, endless war and all we've come to accept as "normal" there is a very real and disturbing primal chaos that finds no living symbols or mythology to focus and balance its energies. This is an unprecedented development in the history of mankind and so what we face is unprecedented.
Shocking, violent, finely directed with a fine soundtrack. A powerful film of the chaos of being human in a dehumanized world.
Movie Review: A frenzied, bent out of shape film...
Summary: 5 Stars
The NYTimes said this film was the "most radical film released by a major studio since A Clockwork Orange", and they were right. This one is actually more radical, especially in the way the story is told. While A Clockwork Orange is brilliant (and better than this film), its story was told in a rather straightforward manner. Here Oliver Stone goes crazy with 35mm, 16mm, video, and even animation to comment on America's love of violence, and the media's obsession of it. The film has some of the most intense editing ever, and it becomes completely surreal in the final third where it stops making logical sense and becomes something you can only experience (there was a guy who said "what the f***" very loudly in the theater during this last third). The film is rather ugly (it was based on a script by Tarantino), but Stone makes the most of it, making it much more interesting (the sitcom parody with Rodney Dangerfield is a brilliant bit of casting) and memorable than if Quentin had done it. There are some really stupid scenes (when Mickie and Mallory feel sad after killing a Native American, but feel no remorse towards any of the other killings), and there are times Stone overindulges himself, but it's definitely worth watching for the great performances (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Rodney Dangerfield (my favorite standup by the way), Robert Downey Jr. as an Aussie tabloid reporter, and Tommy Lee Jones) and the hallucinatory frenzy of it all...