Natural Born Killers

[modage]

I like this film a lot too ... and the DVD cover is just too awesome...and by awesome I mean totally sweet

are you a ninja by chance?

[Pas]

Well...

1.    I am a mammal

2.    I fight ALL the time

3.    My purpose is to flip out and kill people

So I guess I am

[modage]

Way disapointed by this one ... Depp almost saved the movie, well, he did at least save every scene he was in. Orlando Bloom's character could have been played by any daytime drama "actor". When you know how Depp completly crafted his character, it's frustrating to see how less work Bloom put into his. Rush was way underused too, he really hadn't any good line/scene.

And did the two English morons annoy you as much as they annoyed me ?! They were disgusting.

Still, pretty entertaining, but could have been wayyyyyy better. Pirate movies need their Braveheart.

no wonder you didnt like Pirates of the Carribean.

[NEON MERCURY]

I really have no definative answer to to pitn of this film ..i alwasys assume the media/violence angle is what it's all about but.....This film is great  FIRES ON ALL CYLINDERS is a way to describe this film  

[bonanzataz]

i'd like to know what that song is that plays during the "I Love Mallory" sequence. The cheesy one that plays in every movie and show, you know it... thanks.

[ElPandaRoyal]

I think we all have to agree on something... NBK is unlike anything we've ever seen before, right?

[AK]

I think we all have to agree on something... NBK is unlike anything we've ever seen before, right?

I think not...I always look at it as A clockwork Orange of the 90's...except it is way too much violent but less impressive (IMO) as Kubrick's work....

[chinaski40]

I always looked at it from the point of the native americans.  and how we took a new land from them and just became so overwhelmingly violent and irrational and turned it into a circus and begin killing each other and so on and so forth.  plus the media aspect, from both sides.  the media exploits and the thrill that the two characters get knowing that everyone is paying attention to them.  but you never know with oliver stone.  i would like to see tarantino re-do this film sometime down the road.

[Gold Trumpet]

An excellent review of NBK by Stanley Kauffmann that makes me respect the movie more:

Natural Born Killers

Oliver Stone's  Natural Born Killers is mainly about itself. It has a narrative, quite commonplace. It has characters, all of them stock. It has dialogue, most of which is either banal or straining not to be. It has themes, with which we are too familiar. What makes this film an explosive event is the way it is made and why. It's as if Stone deliberately chose material that is run of the mill because he didn't want to be distracted by novelty of plot or character. To do justice to such novelty would have derived him and us from the central matter, the film's very being as a film.

Its texture can be called a collage in forward motion. Here Stone brings to full frenzy a stylistic approach that was signaled in The Doors and JFK. He mixes every kind of technique - color and black-and-white, blunt verism and animation, historical quotation and computer distortion are only some of them - and mixes them continously, in order to blast us out of usual film-viewing coziness. The surrealists of the 1920s wanted to shock expectations so sharply that the artist's real purpose could slip past the surprised sentries of convention. Except that the term "surrealism" now has other resonances, Natural Born Killers might be called surrealist. If we can imagine surrealism blended with expressionism, as if Un Chien Andalou were folded into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and then boiled, we get near to Stone's intensity.

Even before the full intent of the film becomes clear, we sense tremors. Stone is agonized by the same frustations that tormented Godard in his early films. When his film leaves his hands, it is finished, but he wants to be as wild, as unpredictable, as seemingly spontaneous as anything can be that is put into cans and shipped into thousands of theatres. In very great measure, in what could almost be called appalling measure, he succeeds.

The subject, or at least the foreground subject, is coarse film-world fodder: maniacal violence. (Stone almost chuckles as he puts these cliches before us.) The structure is still another variation on the Bonnie-and-Clyde form. Somewhere in the Southwest, young Mickey and Mallory encounter each other when he comes to her family's home to deliver meat. (Remember Stanley's first entrance in A Streetcar Named Desire?) Mallory's home life, with a lacsivious father and a non-protective mother, makes her hungry for break-out adventure. Mickey's home life, as we learn later, has primed him for the same outburst. They begin by drowning her father in a goldfish tank and incinerating her mother in her bed. Then they cut loose in a red roaster, killing blithely in diners and service stations and conveniance stores. Fifty-two deaths in three weeks. At last they are captured.

A year later, when they are both lifers, the host of a TV program called American Maniacs gets the right to interview Mickey in prison. Mickey's behavior on camera ignites his fellow prisoners to riot. Mickey seizes the chance to grab a shotgun, kill guards and escape. He also seizes the chance to break Mallory out of her cell; she grabs gun and joins him. Through the storming riot, accomponied for a time by the TV host who is trying to keep the event on the air, they make their way out together and flee.

The screenplay is by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski and Stone, from an original story by the new guru of gore, Quentin Tarantino. But the film screenplay couldn't have possibly mapped the film in detail: what we see, in all its whirligig horror and humor and fascination, must have been created by Stone as he proceeded.

Which is what makes my synopsis above misleading. The action is not sequential: the film begins well into three weeks. The telling is not orderly. Almost always the camera is tilted one way or another, a shot is interrupted with the same shot in black-and-white and/or by the addition of background that amplify - glimpses of jackals and snakes, of great betrayers (Stalin, Hitler, Nixon), of pop and film quotations (a bit of The Wild Bunch inevitably). Each figurative note on the film is an implicit chord, just as each moment of our consciousness is more than what see or say immediately. Each screen moment dramatizes Stone's feverish struggle to mine every possible visual reference and connection before he is forced to move on to the next shot.

The lightning-stroke explanation of the couple's minds discloses more than they knew was in them. One element dominates - the tyranny of television. Not just the usual flashes of TV news with the figuratives watching and relishing the reports about them. Stone saturates his film with our society's media saturation. Mallory's home life at the start is seen as a sitcom, in a phony setting, with exaggerated makeups, with canned studio laughter and with a credit crawl at the end. At one point in the Mickey-Mallory rampage, their adventures are re-enacted by look-alikes on TV, with the words "A Dramatization" superscribed. Layer after layer of media degradation is piled upon us. If we feel at first that Part Two of the film, in prison a year later, may be overextended, we soon see that it was necessary to show how their lives and TV really connect - TV causes a riot - and I use "really" here just as porously as possible.

Stone suffers from a sentimentality, one that often plagues the ruthlessly tough - a belief in the grand simple wisdom of nature and of those who live close by it, like American Indians. The opening of his film, like that of The Doors, is set in the desert, with animals; the very last image, under the closing credits, is an immense close-up of a rabbit. The only regret for a killing that the killer-pair express is for an Indian seer.

But Mickey and Mallory are not visionary. They are driven by demons - the word is sometimes flashed on their chests - that are specified only by their upbringings. (Mickey's father was an oddball who killed himself.) But no clinical attempt is made to justify their homicides. They live in a time piled higher with temptations of mindlessness than any age in history. These two people are simply unable to bear the beguilings of quick animalistic gratifications that most of us are still able to resist.

Stone's cinematographer was once again the superb Robert Richardson. The editors, sine qua non, were Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan. The music itself is a collage - of many contemporary numbers and cool "references". Example of the latter: after the opening murder sequence in a diner, the lightning changes (it changes constantly), and in a soft glow, Mickey and Mallory waltz to La vie en rose. The prison riot rages over a background of A Night on Bald Mountain.

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play the leads and supply all that is wanted. It's not acting in any integrated, resourceful sense but the presentation of familiar planes off which unfamiliar lightning and frenzy can bounce. Robert Downey Jr. plays the TV host with his usual painfully revved-up energy. Tommy Lee Jones plays the prison warden with a calculated exaggeration that condemns all previous performances of smilingly brutal wardens.

This brings up the matter of satire. The term has been used by some, including Stone himself, to describe the film. Trusting the tale and not the teller (who may have been just supplying a term to mollify critics), I disagree. Jones's performance isn't satirical: it's a cultural comment on that long line of wardens who have helped to make phony artifacts of so many prison films. Natural Born Killers is much closer to free-flying-fantasy - on grave themes - than satire. Under the closing credits, for instance, we see a comfily furnished van, with Mickey driving and Mallory pregnant, accomponied by small children. This isn't satire, it's a peripheral lost dream. But the ultimate element that distinguishes the film from satire is the position of Stone himself. He doesn't hold Mickey and Mallory at arm's length, looking down at them. He moves with them, fantasticates with them, rages with them. He himself, we feel, is one of the Dante-Dore creatures.

This is also what distinguishes Natural Born Killers from the avant-garde work that has used comparable collage methods. Stone isn't investigating techniques. He's on fire. He means it. His film slashes its way back into the dark jungle in our brains from which it sprang.

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Again, excellent review. Mine feels nearly shot of credibility.

~rougerum

[Alexandro]

I'm shocked that people around here don't know "the point" of it...I mean subtelty is not one of this movie's characteristics...

It's clearly a satire, but a very bloody one, of the media frenzy and the violent culture of the United States...back in 92-93 when they started to shoot the movie, it was a completef antasy...by the time it was done, with the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson scandals, it seemed that reality had catched up with fiction...today reality is probably worst than anything Stone imagined on NBK...

I don't think this is a modern Bonnie and Clyde, cause that movie was actually glorifying it's criminals. Mickey and Mallory are never seen as a truly romantic couple, they believe that, but that's only cause their standards of romantic and freedom have been shaped by the society they live in. The fact that they become media super stars condemns not only them but also the whole american public and media. No one is innocent in this film, cause Stone argues that this empty violence stardom obssesed culture it's a result of everyone's contribution. There's not one frame wasted on this movie, and every use of every different film technique has a meaning behind it. Stone shows us that we've been taught to like violence since childhood in every possible way: from films, from cartoons, from our family lifes, from the war culture of the United States, etc...

Tarantino didn't like the way Stone treated his screenplay, but he has never seen the film from what I hear...I understand his anger towards this but I think he should give it a chance. I mean for me, as a writer, it would be intersting to see what a director does with something I wrote, and doing it completely different. Using my work to say something different. This happens on theatre all the time, as a director you take a text, someone else´s text and you do your own thing, use it for your own porpuses...Kubrick did this on EVERY FILM. The fact is that Stone took Tarantino's screenplay and made a great movie from it. Maybe Tarantino's version would be better, we don't know...I think they just would be different. Stone made a social commentary...I bet for Tarantino this was more a celebration of a film genre, and more about characters...

[AK]

It's clearly a satire, but a very bloody one, of the media frenzy and the violent culture of the United States...back in 92-93 when they started to shoot the movie, it was a completef antasy...by the time it was done, with the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson scandals, it seemed that reality had catched up with fiction...today reality is probably worst than anything Stone imagined on NBK...

Satire is an ironic censorship and  i think as a satire the movie goes well except till Oliver Stone starts to try to give a slap in the face of the audience...maybe this would be the main difference if Tarantino would direct it...

And believe that what is showed in the film it was an antasy till those scandals is ridiculous.... when talking about violence we always think the movies are too fictional...big mistake...

I don't think this is a modern Bonnie and Clyde, cause that movie was actually glorifying it's criminals.

Bonnie and Clyde were criminals too, and sometimes the movie show them as heroes...makes you don't  want them to be shot in the end...

[Alexandro]

Satire is an ironic censorship and  i think as a satire the movie goes well except till Oliver Stone starts to try to give a slap in the face of the audience...maybe this would be the main difference if Tarantino would direct it...

And believe that what is showed in the film it was an antasy till those scandals is ridiculous.... when talking about violence we always think the movies are too fictional...big mistake...



Bonnie and Clyde were criminals too, and sometimes the movie show them as heroes...makes you don't  want them to be shot in the end...

But the audience is part of the satire...the audience is the american public or the average moviegoer who makes this violence and nonsense the tv an dmedia food we all eat in the comfort of our homes. It's like in Wag The Dog...they're mocking the government and hollywood but they 're also mocking everyone who believes their shit and sing their songs and cry with their heroes....

And it was a fantasy not in the level of violence but in the way media treat these events...it turned into a complete circus where everything was possible and everyone could be a super star by doing horrible things...O.J. never had the fame he had until that scandal...he was big, but this made him super big...

On the Bonnie and Clyde thing...of course, that works in Bonnie and Clyde, it's nice...but in NBK these two kids, raised by Bonnies and Clydes and war and weapons and violence everywhere have this idealized view of murder in which is something romantic...but it's all perverted, and it's a product of the culture they're in...

[Gold Trumpet]

I don't think the film was satire for this specific reason, as quoted from the critic Stanley Kauffmann's review:

This brings up the matter of satire. The term has been used by some, including Stone himself, to describe the film. Trusting the tale and not the teller (who may have been just supplying a term to mollify critics), I disagree. Jones's performance isn't satirical: it's a cultural comment on that long line of wardens who have helped to make phony artifacts of so many prison films. Natural Born Killers is much closer to free-flying-fantasy - on grave themes - than satire. Under the closing credits, for instance, we see a comfily furnished van, with Mickey driving and Mallory pregnant, accomponied by small children. This isn't satire, it's a peripheral lost dream. But the ultimate element that distinguishes the film from satire is the position of Stone himself. He doesn't hold Mickey and Mallory at arm's length, looking down at them. He moves with them, fantasticates with them, rages with them. He himself, we feel, is one of the Dante-Dore creatures.

~rougerum

[Alexandro]

Yes, Stone is one of thos ecreatures too...we all are in a way...we can even identify with mickey and mallory...but that doesn't mean it's not a satire...one can mock at oneself too...I remember Robert Altman saying on the Player commentary that for satire to work it needed the audience to see themselves in it...if you're gonna mock something, you mock of something you know and understand...then it works...

[mutinyco]

Yeah, I always thought satire required humor. This movie isn't that funny. While I respect Stone's visual command, Tarantino's script was A LOT better than what Stone concocted.