[Moderator pounds gavel on desk to get attention] ::: BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!:::
Look, you can insult the movie all the want, or the actor or the director or the camera crew. The movie is a work of art/entertainment, and it’s fair game for praise or insult.
HOWEVER (he said, very loudly for emphasis), you may NOT insult other posters who have different opinions than yours. That’s what art/entertainment is all about – different perspectives are OK, and even encouraged. Say what you want about the art/entertainment, but in this forum and on these Message Boards, you are polite and well-mannered towards other posters, and treat them as you would want to be treated yourself.
I’m glad y’all seem to have resolved this amongst yourselves with me having to pull you apart physically and whomp you upside the head.
As an aside, I have never understood the phrase “only a movie”, and even started a thread to that effect with in the past year.
IMO, the much-sought-after distinguishing characteristic separating humans from other animals, is that we are the animal that tells stories.
We are fortunate to live in an age when what would have been the glow of the campfire accompanying the voice of the lore-master has now resolved itself into the very image of the story itself, a truly magical time to be alive.
All the more disappointing, then, when we feel our investment in our own culture has been betrayed by unsatisfying work.
Oh, NBK certainly sold tickets when it came out in August. But Pulp Fiction handily knocked it out of the top films in short order once it came out in October. And cost about 1/6th as much to make what I consider to be an infinitely superior film in the same vein.
The lasting effect of the camparative retrospective popularity: I can see Pulp Fiction on DirecTV pretty much any day of the week on some channel or other. Whither Natural Born Killers?
Actually, Cinemax was running NBK pretty much constantly a couple of months ago. I had kind of forgotten about it, but I watched it one night in a fit of boredom and rediscovered it. So blame premium cable for my defense of Oliver Stone.
What about the ending, with the Winnebago, the bong & the kids? I go the point Stone hammered into my head with the japanese monster that looks like a hydra, but the people who really liked this film didn’t. I also realized at the time that this sequence was a fantasy, something else the kids who loved the film didn’t.
Does anybody else remember hearing news stories at the time about copy-cat spree killers?
Different tastes, I suppose. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant to me (and FTR I find pretty strange things interesting). It magnified the feeling of sympathy for the killers the movie was trying to generate. When the ending credits rolled, and I remembered that I was watching a movie and all that wasn’t actually happening, it really magnified the “Holy shit, I was just sympathizing with them??” feeling. It took noticably longer to realize that, though.
For the record, I prefer the alternate ending to the theatrical ending. It’s far more in line with the craziness and stupid pointlessness that Stone sets up.
Possibly. There are alternatives however, such as the possibility that the film simply didn’t speak to you the way it obviously did to someone who liked it. No one likes to hear this, I realize, but it’s true that not understanding a film or the filmmaker’s intent often leads to dramatically reduced appreciation.
Visually speaking, NBK is an experimental work, particularly its montages, pop/MTV-emulation, textures and grain, mosaics, pastiches, and integration of film and animation. It’s meant to be confusing and disorienting, all the more to make the viewer identify and sympathize with Mickey and Mallory without necessarily realizing it at first. Its soundtrack has moments of greatness, such as the appropriate use of two Leonard Cohen songs someone mentioned earlier, as well as moments of abysmally poor noise that ought not to be called music at all. However, what may be contributing to your and others’ dislike is that NBK’s story and treatment comprise of points by antithesis. A lot of people simply do not like this approach because it typically leads one outside of conventional popular narrative that asks the viewer to identify with the “good”, be that protagonists or ideals; Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers” is often thought to be primarily antithetical, yet many readers react to the themes therein with quite some hostility, as if being presented with the point of view from within a fascist future society is somehow an affront to the reader.
I took NBK as I think it was intended – as an antithetical dark comedy and satire – and I enjoyed it. I haven’t seen it in several years, so I can’t get too specific, but I liked the disorientation and confusion – it seemed appropriate given that we are watching the crossroads of mass media and violence, and the loss of control resulting from choices of violence. Above all, it was something quite new in a popular Holliwood film, which I definitely appreciated.
Ultimately what you like depends on your preferences, but I think that if NBK were really as atrocious as you make it out to be it wouldn’t still be generating discussion a decade after its release… or if it were, it would be doing so along the lines of Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I think whether or not one likes the film depends on how much he does identify with the main characters. If you do, even a little, then chances are you’ll find some merit in the film.
Myself, I never identified or sympathized with Mickie or Malorie. Not even for one second. In fact, that’s why the movie repulsed me so much: not only was I disgusted by the actions and personality of the so-called heroes, I was revolted by the fact that some filmmaker expected me to root for them. I felt as if Stone was treating me like some easily-manipulated simpelton, who cannot make his own judgements. Did he actually believe I have no moral sense of my own?
And whether or not one identifies with the main characters is, I think, determined by one’s ability or willingness to isolate different aspects of their personality from the others. There’s the Crazy Psychotic Murdering Monster aspect, then there’s the Lost And Confused In A Crazy World aspect.
Well, sort of. I didn’t really identify with them so much as saw them as forces. To me, viewing them as evil would be sightly akin to viewing an avalanche or meteor strike as evil… they were just “things” that swept down on humanity, did their thing, and then departed.
See, though, that’s the reaction I thought the movie was trying to get across (not that that in and of itself is going to make you like a movie you just didn’t like). The mere fact that these miscreants are presented as heroic or sympathetic in any way is disgusting, but why don’t we have that same reaction in films like Bonnie and Clyde (tagline: they’re young…they’re in love…and they kill people!) or Badlands, or Springsteen’s darkly beautiful balladization of Starkweather and Fulgate’s killing spree in Nebraska? The idea that these are people who are given artistic treatment a semi-positive light is one we take for granted, but the fact was that they weren’t what these movies make them out to be. They were killers who should be vilified (either that or villers who should be kilified, I get them confused). To borrow from SPOOFE, they’re not so much people as things: killers doing what killers do.
Natural Born Killers starts out from that same basic premise: both the format of the movie and everyone in it seem to consider Mickey and Mallory as rebellious, anti-heroic figures when they clearly aren’t even anti-heros. They’re just vicious murderers who don’t deserve the treatment that the movie gives them, and the fact that the movie holds them in a place of regard that they don’t deserve is repulsive. To borrow from SPOOFE, they’re not so much people as things: killers doing what killers do.
:rolleyes: That would read better if I had cut and paste like I had intended and not just copied. The bit about SPOOFE should be at the end of the second sentence.
But does the movie really hold Mickey and Mallory in high regard? I think the conclusion that it does is most likely an artifact of the viewer. It is the audience that holds violence and killing and explosions in high regard, not necessarily NBK.
And Juliette Lewis is incredibly annoying, I always thought that was why she got the role.
I’m sure Juliette Lewis is a nice person but has she ever played a charater that wasn’t molested/dropped on her head as an infant/generally fucked up? If I saw her play a nice, normal person that would be jarring.
Hard to define what a good movie is. My wife hated NBK because it does precisesly what I think Stone intended; makes her feel like she’s been smacked around for two hours straight. I’m not saying I like a steady diet of it but I’m glad not every movie is It’s a Wonderful Life. I agree that Pulp Fiction was vastly suprior because beat up its audience with finess while NBK did it with a board with some nails sticking out of it.
Natural Born Killers was a horrible, horrible movie. Juliette Lewis is repulsive, I simply cannot stand her in anything. Yes, here she is supposed to be playing a repulsive character. Good casting, no? No. She is repulsive, and I hate her. Woody Harrelson can play non-repulsive when he tries, I wasn’t repulsed by him on Cheers. But every movie role he has been in has repulsed me.
I can’t understand why anyone likes this movie. Oh, vicious repulsive murderers shouldn’t be glorified by the media? Thank you Mr. Stone. I did not know that. Oh, action movies glorify the actions of killers who in real life would be put in jail? Thank you Mr. Stone. I did not know that. Now please go fuck off.
For all those who say that Natural Born Killers was a dark satire of the celebration of violence by the media are missing the point. The movie glorifies violence, then smirkingly pretends to condemn the glorification of violence. Bah Humbug.
I feel like the movie does, in that it presents their bond of love as ridiculously stronger than the chains that hold them and presents them as badasses in nearly every single way. Mickey is the darling of the prison, entertaining the guards mightily by telling a crude “Little Johnny” joke that was old before I was in second grade, before exploding into a whiz-bang ass-kicker that busts himself and Mallory out of prison because, of course, no cell can lock up their true love. In real life, such things don’t happen, of course; high profile killers become targets for others looking to make a name and lovers turn on each other once incarcerated. Starkweather was actually mad that he was getting the death penalty and his girlfriend wasn’t, saying “if I get the chair, Caril should be sitting on my lap.” M&M aren’t just killers, they’re cartoonish uber-killers.
I think we’re actually in agreement, strangely enough, except I liked it and you didn’t. We’re in agreement that the movie was disgusting by glorifying violence that obviously shouldn’t have been glorified, and by engaging in the very glorification that it purported to condemn. The only difference is I thought it was clever, and you thought it sucked.
No disagreement, but I still don’t think the movie necessarily holds in high regard Mickey and Mallory. Does A Clockwork Orange? I submit not, even though it tracks a youth of revolting habits and invites us to sympathize with him. Kubric’s film, is, like NBK, also quite cartoonish – witness the accelerated sex scene and the ridiculous battle between rival gangs.
Lemur866, you got any actual arguments or discussion to offer, or are you just venting?
I don’t. Did this really happen? I certainly remember the critics of this movie predicting that it would inspire copy-cats, but I don’t think I ever heard of any.
