Natural Born Killers

Rating:
Summary: A Great Movie!
Review: This movie is a slap in the face to the parents/people who like to put off responsibility blaming some form of media for people's actions. No one is born like this; no one is a natural born killer. There are bad parents out there, whether you want to realize it or not. I think this is why this move was more of a hit with the younger crowd and why a good portion of the older crowd slammed this movie at the time, some probably wishing it was banned and some of which refuse to watch this movie all together. People don't like looking at themselves or a reflection of society as a whole I guess. While a lot of scenes are extreme and unrealistic some of the scenes are realistic/reality for some people. Abuse exists, sometimes worse than what's depicted in this movie.

This movie also shows how dysfunctionality isn't limited to one group of people or one type of person. For example you have the investigator/inspector with the prostitute scene and the psychiatrist who was talking out of his (...) and everything he said was pretty much discredited by the statement he made saying he believed that child abuse wasn't a factor in Mickey and Mallory's case. Then there's the power tripping prison warden with his goons/guards, the despised sleazy selfish media reporter who capitalizes on anything and everything to boost his show's ratings plus his status as most popular reporter and of course the parents of Mickey and Mallory. All of which have something messed up in their heads which makes you question these characters; what's wrong with these people?

I also think that it was interesting how instead of making another action packed movie along the lines like Pulp Fiction Oliver Stone added something else to this movie. Like Mallory's 'comedic' family sitcom flashback scenes. He took the very serious subject of mental, physical and sexual abuse and put it in these different perspectives for people to look at. Sure a number of people thought this didn't come off good but this movie wasn't meant for a national debate. Movies are for entertainment purposes. In my opinion this was brilliant. It's like combining two opposite ends; making a scene seem funny while at the same time being very serious and dark.

If you're into Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick style movies see this. A great movie with great actors!

Rating:
Summary: So Much Great Talent, Such a Bad Movie
Review: The most disapointing thing about Natural Born Killers is how much great talent was wasted to produce this mess of a movie. Quentin Tarantino? Oliver Stone? These guys are great filmmakers, and yet this movie is absolutely horrible. Tarantino certainly cannot be blamed nearly as much as Stone since Tarantino only wrote the screenplay and even that was changed dramatically by Stone (for the worse) but it is still unfortunate that such a wonderful filmmaker like Tarantino would have his name attached to this garbage. And Stone, another marvelous filmmaker, how could he have not seen that this films message has been overused so much that unless there's something new to say (there wasn't) then audiences dont' need to hear any more about it.
I thought I was in for a real treat when i rented this but once the movie started I began to fear that I was wrong, but I told myself that it would get better, as most films do. I waited for character development, never happened(scenes displaying sadistic parents are not the same as character development), I waited for an actual plot (this movie has a premise, not a plot) and finally, i waited for Stone's point, for the great message that was supposed to be nicely conceiled within this "work of art" and guess what, it never came. OH MY GOD! THE MEDIA GLORIFIES VIOLENCE! ETC! ETC! Thanks Oliver, I'm glad you're here to tell us these things.
This movie (and notice i say movie, not film) could have been less of a trainwreck if a more serious approach was taken to it. Obviously, it would have to be over the top, but not so horribly over the top that it's nearly impossible to feel anything except impatience while watching it. The violence is much too cartoony (are we supposed to be appalled when Elmer Fudd runs off a cliff in a Warner Bro's Cartoon?) If we can't identify the world in the movie as our own, we can't feel the same impact as if we could imagine the events in the movie to be real.
Also, I thought the action was bad. A better approach would have been to make the action really cool and then throw it in our faces at the end that we liked the violence and therefor we are as desensitized to violence as the movie says we are. Hey, maybe I'll do that.
This movie is so far out there that it isn't enjoyable at all, and i found myself thinking: "only one and a half hours left." Yeah, it's that bad. And I'm pretty fond of violence and all that good stuff in films (I'm sure some of the films fans will think "AH-HA" to this, thinking incorrectly that this somehow strengthens Stone's message in NBK) I really liked a Clockwork Orange, which this movie sort of tries to be like, but not nearly as good.
Not that Oliver Stone would ever read this review or take offense that i disliked his movie, I would still like to say that he truly is a gifted director and I hope i don't think of this peice o' junk every time i see one of his great films.

Rating:
Summary: Natural Born Killers: The True Review
Review: I just finished reading some of the reviews and it is clear and easy to see that some of these reviewers have only seen half of the movie, or were not paying any attention while viewing it. This review will help the people like me who wanted an honest, and accurate review of a movie they may not have seen yet.
"Natural Born Killers" is the tale of two lovers who ran away from the unfair, un-cairing, un-loving, ways of their home to start a killing spree that started, and ended, in New Mexico. After making news hedlines, the two find their success a blessing, untill they are caught and locked up, only to later escape with a dumb witted news journlist.
Although the film is taken from a story witten by Tarintino, many Tarintino fans will find it to be, lets just say, not up to par. Although the violence is very well portrayed, it lost quite a few points with its awfull music score.
All in all, "Natural Born Killers" is no more than a one-time watch.

Rating:
Summary: All Greats Make a Terrible
Review: The movie had a great script. The Actors were all noteworthy, and rightfully so, for the acting in this movie was superb. Actually, everyone should rent this movie and fastforward to all scenes with Robert Downey Jr. who was absolutely fantastic. Oliver Stone is a movie guru who does everything from writes to directs to produces. All of these things put together should bring you a great movie, should it not?
No, apparently it shouldn't. The movie was ruined by one thing: Oliver Stone's attempts to make it artistic.
The satire was good, and everyone knows people like senseless violence, but not artistic senseless violence. Basically, this is because senseless violence is not at all artistic. Had the movie had more normal direction, the message still would've gotten across, like in "Kalifornia." If you want an artistic movie, check out "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams." If you want to be simultaneously confused, bored, disgusted, and most of all, dissapointed, watch Natural Born Killers. Tarantino is my favorite screenwriter, and the script in its raw form is outstanding, but this movie is ruined. Tarantino was furious with Oliver Stone for what he did to this script. I would be too if my fantastic script was reduced to something so utterly bizarre...in a bad way. And no, just because I don't like the movie doesn't make me a philistine. It's just a terrible piece of cinema.

Rating:
Summary: Oliver Stone has issues.
Review: Oliver Stone has made some fantastic and powerful fims, but this one made me question his sanity. Stone looks like he has more issues in his head than the characters in this movie. Over the top and bound to give you a headache, this is sadly a candidate as one of the worst films ever made.

Rating:
Summary: A true Cultish film
Review: Sorry if you are swayed by the bad reviews, but this movie is a fine movie if you can look deeper into it and see the art for what it is. Never have seen anything like it, never will. One of a kind, I am going to have it in my collection of great ones.
Keep this movie away from the mentaly disturbed, and small children

Rating:
Summary: kevin anderson has got it down!
Review: ole kevin rented this movie and told me it was "ishy". and that's exactly how i feel about it.

Rating:
Summary: It doesn't get any better than this
Review: Natural Born Killers (1994)

Version Reviewed: Warner Brothers Home Video, DVD, 2000, Oliver Stone Collection box set, 118 minutes,

My personal enjoyment rating: 10.5 out of 10

My recommendation rating: 10.5 out of 10. Explanation of recommendation rating: "Superb in every way. Everyone should be forced to watch it repeatedly."

As often misunderstood by its advocates as by its detractors, director Oliver Stone's _Natural Born Killers_ is an amazing, masterful tour de force that on one level, reads like an instantiation of an impossible feat: a unifying climax of all that has come before it in the field since the inception of film--and perhaps even all of the arts, and perhaps even in western culture itself--from the birth pangs of the 'motion picture' with the zoopraxiscope in the 1860s through the length of the twentieth century. It's appropriate, then, that such a film is released in the closing years of the twentieth century, and as a culmination, it's perhaps scarier than any official horror film could be. Although in the end, Stone seems to unbutton his shirt, put on a curly blonde wig, put his hands on his hips, pout his lips, and do a quick imitation of Robert Plant introducing 'Stairway to Heaven' (Hell in this case), saying, 'This is a song of hope'.

On the surface, the premise--and as much as I like to joke while watching almost every film by saying, 'It's a love story!' at ironic moments, this one really is a love story--is about Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), a serial killer tag team who are a bit like Bonnie and Clyde after attending way too many Dead Kennedys concerts. Well, or maybe G.G. Allin. They were both abused as children, emotionally and physically, and after they hook up, they quickly start stretching the boundaries of acceptable behavior. This reaches a peak when they go on a 50-person-plus murder spree over three days. Because they always leave one person alive to tell the tale of their mayhem, the media latches on to them, and they turn into anti-hero stars.

As should be obvious by my 'on the surface' qualifier above, or by simply watching the film or having any pop culture knowledge of it, there is much more to _Natural Born Killers_ than just a gritty story about two serial murderers and their pursuers. The deeper aspect that is always discussed, because it is the most conspicuous feature of the film, is its continual assault of frenetic, varied images. No matter what the main scene playing out on the screen, Stone uses what seems like 800 different film stocks, filters, processes, etc.--plus a lot of stock footage--and constantly inserts different images, sometimes just a couple frames at a time, sometimes for a few seconds (not many shots are left intact longer than a few seconds), sometimes as matte or rear projection backgrounds for other scenes, etc. On this technical level, the film is brilliant and visually beautiful, and deserves examination frame-by-frame, or at least in slow motion.

However, the point of the technique may be far more important. But let me first mention some of the common misinterpretations, at least in my view. Many detractors, if understanding the film at all, see it simply as artistic license gone haywire. They decry the film as over-the-top violence and excess in general, and see it as an attack on them, as viewers (in fact, when this film was in the theater, I saw more people walk out half way through or less, than for any other film I've experienced). Some of the advocates get it just as wrong by reading the film as an indictment of the celebritization of criminals by the mass media, and because of this, often have reservations due to what they see as a slight hypocrisy by Stone in popularizing a work that also seems to glorify violence.

In my view, Stone is doing none of these things, although they're understandable interpretations to reach. Rather, in one sense, Stone is holding a mirror up to the present hyperkinetic mass media culture and its mixture of violence and entertainment, not as an indictment at all, but merely as an artistic reflection. That's the reason for the barrage of images and film types, as well as the range of music types. If we're to reflect mass media, including the history of mass media, one logical solution is to show _all of it_ as a kind of cubist (in the formal theoretical sense) mosaic or pastiche. The final result is violent, dangerous, chaotic, and maybe immoral because that's the story of western culture and the evolution of mass media. There are no real heroes, in a traditional sense (and neither do there turn out to be real villains in a traditional sense), because everyone, including Stone himself as a filmmaker, is contributing to this culture.

If _Natural Born Killers_ is an indictment, it's an indictment of our entire culture at this point in history, and Stone is trying to both resensitize all of us to violence and its broader effects as well as ask us to reassess and consider where we're going. It's particularly poignant that the hinge of the film is when Mickey kills the Navajo Shaman. It's the final straw in a desecration of nature, the moral, and the sacred, and begins a spiral into a karmic hell that takes a revolution fueled by knowledge to escape. Much of the visual material and the overt action in this section symbolizes this.

Yes, _Natural Born Killers_ is difficult to watch--it has to be. Important films aren't necessarily going to be light, popcorn material. Stone has created what may remain the pinnacle of his career in this film--it is perfect from a purely aesthetic point of view, and it conveys its message, which is pithier and contradictorily subtler than most, extremely effectively.

Rating:
Summary: Violent & Shallow. A bad example for kids
Review: When I watched this movie nearly 10 years ago for the first time, I was a teenager. It had a profound impact on me. I thought it was the greatest. Now I'm 23 more mature and I bought this DVD. I was severely under-whelmed.

This is one of the movies that blame the media. Everyone blames the media today - I feel sorry for them for being scapegoated all the time, from the mentally ill down to everyone - all blame the media.
The only redeeming thing about the film is to see the directors and documenatries on the DVD "intellectualise" what is a shallow, useless so-called 'art' film that portays violence as something that is worth doing, as you can see with the fans of the serial killers at the courtroom scene.

This movie is also unrealistic. Straight away any western legal justice system would have hanged the 2 leads through capital punishment. I don't know how you can glorify the ending by setting them free. And don't tell me there are underlying, subliminal themes to this movie that is worthy of discussion and debate of morality - that's just a load of Hollywood propoganda . This film is not smart. It's dumb!

Other bad things about the DVD? Is the fact that the Region 4 DVD version has NO subtitles/closed captioing. They say Quentin Tarantito wrote the script, and Oliver Stone redone it. Well what's the point of doing all that when 50% of the dialogue during the film was incomprehensible...? Though still it's good to see the director's cut have special features. BUT ONCE AGAIN, non-US customers are once again severly short changed. We missed out on cast and crew interviews plus behind the scenes special.

Rating:
Summary: media hypocrisy spoils the fun of the film
Review: I'm not going to defend or assail violence in movies by trying to define what this film's meaning is - it clearly lacks any meaning. NBK is a movie which thinks it has a mission - to end the media sensationalism of violence. Unfortunately, it's a noble sentiment the script finds easier to preach to us than impose upon itself - as NBK proves so consistently and mindlessly violent that it becomes a fixture of the culture it assails. The plot is simple enough - a directionless psychotic and his willing paramour tear up the scenery and anybody getting in their way. Stone takes the idea and, with Woody Harelson and Juliette Lewis (as Mickey and Mallory) buffs it up for the 1990's throwing in tabloid TV and the hordes of vile and nameless morons meant to be common Americans who supposedly gulp this stuff down by the gallon (murder is bad, admits a long-haired kid meant to be the typical TV junkie, but among serial murderers, Mickey and Mallory are cool). NBK quickly hits an ethical stumbling block - decrying the violence and then quickly capitalizing on it: Americans who follow Mickey and Mallory are dim-witted sadists, but films about them are meant to be high-art and immune from similar critique. It's a mystery how Stone feels himself above the Geraldo-inspired character (played by Robert Downey Jr.) who supplies the public with their daily fill of Micky and Mallory.

In the film's brilliant (though unfortunately early) high-point, we witness the first meeting of Mickey and Mallory. In an extended sequence patterned on a sit-com (laugh-track and all) Mickey delivers beef to Mallory's vile father (Dangerfield), an unemployed loser who routinely and openly molests Mallory (Mallory's kid brother is actually her son!) and makes life a living hell for everybody else. Once Harrelson and Lewis exchange glances, the film goes into a sort of mystic "Apocalypse Now" phase meant to signal the birth of shock and awe (and also cluing us in that Mallory's dad is in for it). Touching off a multi-state murder-spree Mickey and Mallory quickly become celebrities, and the film details society's tightrope-walk between fascination and revulsion of them. Charting the media's pursuit of the leads, Stone turns the film into some kind of performance art - switching cinematography between the pseudo-verite style that everybody used until the mid-90's (overly grainy film with rapid and erratic camera movements and deliberately shortened cuts - a style favored for commercials and music videos because they gave a scene the illusion of being more dynamic than it really is) to a sort of slow-motion acid haze to animation. The film doesn't dwell on the deep causes of Mickey's and Mallory's homicidal tendencies - and probably wouldn't care about them at all - they're just devices upon which to reveal and excoriate America's fascination with violence, and the script takes their psychotic impulses as a given. "Natural Born Killers" seems to refer less to Mickey and Mallory than the rest of us - we're all naturally homicidal, but have been "civilized" and now rely on a select few to satisfy homicidal impulses for the rest us. Stone uses Downey's character to turn America into the real villains, with the public revealing their sincere adulation of Mickey and Mallory (way cooler than Manson!!) In short, NBK fetishizes violence, then turns around and slams its audience over the head for doing the same. This is typical Hollywood hypocrisy in which the media assaults us with product which is often uninspired, violent, sexist or just not very good for any other reason - then turns around and assails us for buying into its garbage. It's arguable whether Americans are as enchanted by violent acts and people as Stone would have us believe. Stone however isn't one for argument, and his "everyday Americans" are uniformly losers - slackers, tabloid TV devotees and other assorted morons who believe everything they hear and see and are drawn to hype like moth to a flame, but never make it to Hollywood power lunches. I wonder what Stone must think of those like me who gave NBK a chance knowing it was the gorefest. If Stone isn't quite as removed from the media as he thinks, the everyday Americans he populates his film with aren't quite as representative of the real thing, and no amount of "American Idol" will convince me that real people are as trite and utterly stupid as those in NBK. Nothing in NBK allows Stone the moral high ground. When the film sticks to the violence - specifically the myriad ways and times it can squeeze a surprise out of us - it's gratuitous, but spares us the moralizing. In short, this could have been the scariest flick to cast Steven Wright, instead of a big mess.