Tueurs nés

Natural Born Killers is a disturbing film. It is a great film as well. Visually it looks great and between all that violence there is a message. Criticizing the influence of media with another form of media called film.

With a lot of cuts, strange camera angles, different colors, the kind of music and a lot of symbolism the sick world of mass murderers Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) is presented. And the sick world of how people react to their violence. Director Oliver Stone shows it to us with this satire in a great and really disturbing way.

Harrelson and Lewis hit the right tone for Mickey and Mallory. Tom Sizemore as a cop, Robert Downey Jr. as a journalist (representing the whole media) and especially Tommy Lee Jones as the prison warden are great too. Originally written by Quentin Tarantino, although he was not too happy with the result in the end, this is one of the best satires I have seen. May be it is not for everyone, the images are not always that nice, but the meaning must be for everyone.

...people really need to take another look at "Natural Born Killers."

The plot: Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in roles that are a little too convincing) are a husband/wife pair of serial killers whose vicious crime spree across the country has made them into media superstars.

This movie is a barrage of frightening and surreal images, and is damn near hypnotic to watch.

I can see where the controversy surrounding this film comes from but what I don't understand is where the hate is coming from.

1994's "Natural Born Killers" has to be one of the best movies of the 90s - its sole purpose on this planet is to showcase America's fascination with violence.

But lets try to understand the hate. This movie is here for one reason and I think that we can all agree on that reason. Oliver Stone is a competent and accomplished filmmaker and most of the hate seems to be directed towards him. Stone, who is working from a script that has since been virtually disowned by Quentin Tarantino, pretty much took over and shaped the screenplay to his own vision.

I can understand why fans of Tarantino have a right to be p*ssed off, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that they truly hate the finished product, and the same goes for Tarantino. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Tarantino fan myself, and I'm sure he didn't appreciate Stone re-writing his script, but he should be proud of what was done with it.

The message, if you can call it that, is that we are obsessed with violence, and Stone exposes our love for it and spits it back in our faces. To quote Marlon Brando - "The horror, the horror." I say to hell with the hypocritical people who find this movie offensive for they are the ones that this movie is truly aimed towards.

Yes, horrific images are displayed in this movie and terrible things happen to people all throughout, but it's giving us we want, and we hate it. The hate surrounding this film is extremely misguided. My high school paper recently did an article about sex and violence on television and one of the supposed outlets of that violence would be our fascination with the war in Iraq and the Jessica Lynch story.

It said that we are much, much more concerned with the sex (I personally don't think today's teenage girls are THAT impressionable, but who knows?), rather than the violence (which apparently seems to be causing a misguided sh!tstorm of controversy, too, and like the sex, I don't think that people are that impressionable), namely the kind that is seen in music videos and such. Though the article refused to go into specifics (but we know who the people being discussed are and I'm sure they do, too), it brings me back to "Natural Born Killers," which I think people need to take another look at.

In this day and age, violence on television is becoming more and more commonplace, and this movie's relevance seems to make its viewing that much more important. Before we go and continue to bash the hell out of it again, people need to come back and take a look around themselves and watch "Natural Born Killers."

This film had nothing going for it, even for entertainment value. And if you're going to call it a satire on "Social Criticism", that's just like saying Disney is a spoof on William S. Burroughs! Oliver Stone essentially made a bad movie on purpose, and assumed that the "cult art house" audience would make up a meaning for it and turn it into a religion.(I once knew a girl at work who wore a sterling coiled snake ring for a full year, shortly after the movie's release.) Folks, this movie wasn't supposed to have a meaning, it was a flat out awful turkey, just like it was made to be!

I've nothing against experimental movie-making. But here technique overwhelms everything else, leaving us with cinematic chaos and maybe a headache. All the rapid- fire jump cuts, color changes, and camera angles add up to an anti-movie mess. It looks like somebody's self-indulgence run wild. To me technique should enhance story, not overwhelm it. Or, in some cases, it might get us to see a familiar theme in a new way. But since there's no real story here, just a sequence of chaotic events, there's ironically no real conflict, just a two-hour waste of film and viewer attention. To be fair, I guess there is a message, something about the media creating a faux reality that sucks people into its seductive realm. That's certainly a worthy, if not novel, theme, especially in our fraught day and age. But unfortunately this movie mess overwhelms the idea without either enhancing it or seeing it in a new way. Too bad.

(In passing—Most folks think of Mallory and Mickey as modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Nevertheless, B&C's main purpose was robbing banks, not killing people, a-la M&M. To me, the apt comparison is with the less well-known, teenagers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. After killing her parents and a baby, their murder spree spread across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958, and appears motivated by little more than a perverted joy of killing, a-la M&M!)

Greetings from Lithuania.

"Natural Born Killers" (1994) was and still is a messy on purpose and highly stylized action thriller take on media and its approach to violence. The way media sometimes glorifies violence and murders only to get their ratings higher, and a viewer / consumers who is basically responsible for that. In that regards "Natural Born Killers" do work. I also always liked acting of actors in this movie - its like they are having fun despite of controversy subject of the material. This movie also works as extremely dark comedy. Pacing in pretty good and at running time almost 2 hours this movie never looses its steam. Editing and cinematography were crazy - no other way to put it, but of course it is done on purpose.

Overall, "Natural Born Killers" (1994) is a cult classic movie at this point. Even 28 years after its release its still works i think. Acting is entertaining by everyone, directing is unique and on spot and editing as well cinematography are like no other. Good movie but not for everyone's taste.