I’m not sure if your responding to my comments on the hypocrisy of NBK or the joy it took in innocent people’s suffering.
If the first, sure you’ve got a point. NBK is hardly the first film to do this. A Clockwork Orange, another overrated, bombastic, stupid, badly made movie is just as bad on the hypocrisy front. But few movies seem so proud of themselves for making such obvious points against the media. If I want to see how lurid and hypocritical the American media is when it comes to crime, I can just watch Greta van Sustern or Bill Kurtis, or Google Scott Peterson like you . I don’t need Oliver Stone explaining it to me like I’d been living in a cave for the past few decades.
If the second, yes that is a problem, and I’ll admit there is a bit of hypocrisy of my own. But in most action movies I like, the victims are mostly bad. When the innocent suffer, it is rarely reveled in as it is in NBK. It serves as a vehicle for revenge, or redemption. (Some of the best action films are about tragedy and redemption.) I enjoyed the thoroughly creepy Audition, but there we were made to feel for the victim. His suffering became our suffering, not something we could happily watch as in NBK or, I guess, Bad Boys 2. (I don’t think “NBK, it’s no worse than Bad Boys 2!” is a line Stone will use to promote his film.)
Some of this may be subjective, I’ll cheerfully admit. Why did I dislike NBK but love Kill Bill? Probably for purely subjective reasons. But I still maintain that Tarantino told a story of revenge and redemption in KB, while Stone preached the obvious while assailing us with a blizzard of pointless brutality in NBK. Also, Stone sucks as a filmmaker (Platoon being a possible exception), while Tarantino is, IMO, brilliant.
That’s not hypocrisy, that’s just pointing out the obvious. (Did anyone really leave NBK going “My god…The violence in movies… It’s…Why, it’s exaggerated! God Bless you Oliver Stone for pointing that out!”)
The Hypocrisy comes when you’re making a movie that is nothing more than a relentless gore fest that glorifies serial killers while pretending to be decrying relentless gorefests that glorifies serial killers.
He wasn’t pointing out the violence in movies so much as he was pointing out how the mass media in general loves violence. Police chases? Guys blowing their heads off on live TV? The craze of news reporters getting the latest atrocity straight from the war zone?
Sure, it’s an obvious point, but I felt it was pointed out in a really amusing manner.
Hmm. Well, I don’t want to get into too much of an argument over this. There ain’t nothing wrong with liking what you like, after all, and if you like NBK, well, more power to you.
Besides I gotta go. I need to get tix to see Clutch and Stinking Lizaveta tonight. Later!
Aside from Rodney Dangerfields fantastically creepy performance, I disliked it. It was like sitting through a crappy two-hour music video.
I think it was the part where Juliette Lewis’ character is taking an onscreen (or partially onscreen) piss while declaring her love for Woody Harrelson’s character that made me decide they were shoving the message right down my throat. If that was supposed to be all vulgar and shocking, well, I guess in a way it was, but enlightening- it was not. It just made me angry. Pointless in-my-face crudeness mixed with colorful cinematography and a thumping soundtrack- and what was the point again? She can urinate while pledging her troth? Brilliant!
I liked it, and actually thought that the message it was trying to get across was semi-deep. It is weird how we romaticize what should repulse us. Our killers are celebrities and their victims are reduced to MacGuffins in their stories. We go ga-ga over Bonnie and Clyde or Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fulgate; we make movies where they’re played by or beautiful people like Warren Beatty, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Faye Dunaway, when in real life they were just thug killers doing what thug killlers do. Natural Born Killers tried romaticize the criminal while repulsing you at the exact same time. As a result, it came off as creepily pornographic, which is how we ought to be viewing our obsession with the whole thing in the first place. I thought the media angle beat the viewer over the head a little heavy, too, but overall I kin of saw where it was coming from and liked it.
I wouldn’t say “romanticize”, but I see you’re point. I liked how it portrayed Mickey and Mallory’s very presence as sort of Rabble-Inducing… just by having them nearby, other people are swept up in a sort of delirium, as if the mob is just of one mind and is waiting for a spark to come along and get them worked up.
I think Oliver Stone just tried to raise the bar… that is, instead of portraying a realistic world with two minorly heinous dicks running around, he portrayed the world as disgusting and barbaric, so his pair of absolute disgusting monsters seemed relatively minor in comparison. Not a particularly deep storytelling device, but again, it amused me.
I guess that’s a valid point, I still don’t like the movie or think it was in any way nobile, but I don’t have a problem with other people liking it.
Rodney Dangerfield did a really good job. I hated that part, but was supposed to. The laugh track coming in everytime he said something really bad made it even more disturbing. That part was successful, but I still didn’t like it.
I noticed that too. I personally hate movies that do that, they piss me off. That’s another reason I didn’t like this one.
I think there could be a really good movie about killers that become a media sensation and points out the evils of the media, but to me it wasn’t this one.
For the record, that wasn’t in the original script. Stone added that because…well I don’t know. It probably had something to do with peyote. Anyway, I agree it’s useless, and I think it’s one of the reasons QT took his name off the script. If Stone had adhered closer to the original script and reigned in his technical fireworks (read:wanking) a bit, it would have been a much better movie. (Although, I admit, I think Stone’s weird montages and changing film textures are pretty cool in small doses.)
And that’s not the point I was trying to make. The violence against the innocent in Bad Boys 2 and other movies of its ilk is unexamined, casual, and held up as some kind of heroic virtue. “This cop won’t be restrained by rules to get the job done!” Well, Mickey and Mallory Knox won’t be restrained by the rules, either. But they’re psychopaths. But Mel Gibson’s character Riggs in Lethal Weapon is referred to several times as a psychopath, he’s incredibly violent, and yet we’re supposed to love him.
And actually, as far as sympathizing with a serial killer, I think your reaction to Mickey and Mallory are pretty much what Stone was going for. I think the audience is supposed to see the charasmatic Harrelson justifying his actions, say “Hey, I kind of see his point…”, and the recoil in horror at both the character and their own reaction to the character.
And it’s interesting that you bring up Kill Bill, a movie with violence every bit as cartoonish as the violence in NBK. It’s so cartoonish, you know it’s not supposed to be taken seriously. The same with NBK. It’s a comedy–Mickey and Mallory do everything except drop an anvil on somebody’s head.
I’m talking about this movie like’s it’s freakin’ Citizen Kane or something. It’s not. It’s an Oliver Stone wankfest. But it’s also a very underrated and misunderstood movie.
I didn’t say it affected me “deeply”, I said that’s what Stone was going for and, in Larry Borgia’s case he was apparently successful. The movie is about the intersection of media and violence and its relationship to American society. Bad Boys 2 is about how cool it is to blow shit up. Both contain explicit violence, but they treat it differently and the way the violence is treated says something about how the movie is intended to be read.
The “heroes” are a pair of serial killers. In many American movies, the heroes kill a whole lot of people. Sometimes they kill people in a very sadistic fashion, and the audience is expected to enjoy it and even laugh or be uplifted by the sadism. In Natural Born Killers, that’s out there in your face. It is made explicit. Does it make you uncomfortable? It’s supposed to.
And you didn’t have to be such a fucking jerk about it. I wasn’t being condescending to you or anybody else. I wasn’t disparaging your or anyone else’s perceptivity, taste, or intellect. I was trying to discuss and defend a movie, fer cryin’ out loud. That’s what this forum is here for. Do you have a counter argument that doesn’t involve the caps lock?
vibrotronica, I apologize to you and the other posters in this thread for my uncalled-for outburst.
I do indeed have a counter-argument.
You say
And yet, I did not have this reaction to this film, and apparently neither did you. Is that because we
the film, when we were “supposed” to see something else in it? I think not.
The entire obligation of a moviegoer is to pay the ticket price, sit down, shut the hell up, and give the film its entire running time and a reasonable suspension of disbelief so it can say what it has to say. I have only failed in this obligation once, when I walked out of the afore-mentioned “Cook, Thief, Wife, Lover”.
The rest of the obligation for the quality of the experience is up to the filmmakers. It’s not your job or mine to give Stone what you or anyone else claims is what he was going for. It HIS job to take us there in spite of ourselves, and this is he failed to do. I did not underrate this film. Stone presented me with one of the five worst pieces of shit I have ever seen. The only film mentioned so far that it’s better than is Bad Boys II. There’s a reason for that. The same reason that this film sank without a trace 8 weeks after its premier, when Pulp Fiction (a film that really DID make me stop and think about why I was rooting for who I was rooting for) premiered. NBK is just a bad film.
What he got across was ham-handed direction on every level, actors who aren’t even trying, no discernible point whatsoever and lots of lights, funky camera angles and loud music attempting to cover up the fact that he had not one clue what he was doing. We can speculate all we want about what he might have thought he was TRYING to do, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to forget the fact that he didn’t actually do it, and charged us admission for the priveledge of finding that out. There are any number of films that have effectively made points about the media’s (and by extension, the public’s) love of people who do bad things. This film does not belong in that pantheon by any stretch of the imagination.
I thoroughly enjoyed Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Oliver Stone makes great films about the experience of the Viet Nam war soldier. If he stuck to those, I’d pay to see more of his films.
Apology accepted. I get worked up over movies, too. No hard feelings.
I agree that Stone’s direction can be ham-handed. I once compared the experience of watching The Doors to getting pounded on the head with a gold brick. The brick is beautiful, but it hurts and I wish he’d stop hitting me with it!
I don’t agree with the rest of what you said about Natural Born Killers, but you are not alone in your assessment of the movie, just as I am not alone in thinking it was an artistic success*. It didn’t work for you, it did for me. It’s still a divisive movie ten years after it came out.
. I don’t need Oliver Stone explaining it to me like I’d been living in a cave for the past few decades.