Natural Born Killers
<PERSON> had a lot of chips in 1994 and he cashed them in on a movie that on some level is his crowning achievement, though if like me you think he's often a fundamentally unserious filmmaker - a zeitgeist-surfing, fast-twitch opportunist as opposed to a vanguard artist - that's not a compliment. Points for managing to shove something mostly free-form and story-less into several hundred American cinemas, and for a few effectively quasi-surrealist touches, like the sitcom of the damned starring <PERSON>, which really does make you sit up straight and pay attention; it’s appalling, and inspired as satire. But for the most part, NBK's hyper-formalism, switching formats and framings, shoehorning in Godardian text and turning numerous scenes into rear-projected palimpsests, only exacerbates the material’s essential and irrecuperable paltriness. Having worked very hard with a host of talented people to develop a distinctive cinematic language, <PERSON> uses it to simply say the same thing, over and over again, and not too convincingly. While it might seem like a cop out to ding a movie like this for its gratuitousness, it's more that said gratuitousness - on every front, from acting to editing to gore to needle-drops - is ultimately the wrong kind of alienation effect for this material, which needs, to paraphrase <PERSON> on Peckinpah, to have some sting in its death. 698
<PERSON> gives us Wild Bunch -style scorpions aplenty, but no sting; instead of using cartoon stylization to deepen and contextualize real-life horror (sexual and emotional abuse; the predations of the carceral state) he ends up reducing (and banalizing) his subject and its potentially juicy complexities into a display of lizard-brained showmanship. I thought on this viewing of <PERSON> tough, unyielding Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and how one short, horrifying scene involving a television suggests most of what <PERSON> is preaching about here and more; I thought of the shivery lyricism of Badlands and the blocky naturalism of The Honeymoon Killers and the bravura camerawork of Man Bites Dog and even the po-mo pedantry of Funny Games, which has aged into even more of a critical pinata than NBK (<PERSON> having <PERSON> to go full-scold mode against "enemy films" that had their gore and ate it too) and realized I'd rather be watching its precisely-tuned situationist shtick. For a movie that means to castigate the history of representation and the complicity of mass media in a culture of violence, Natural Born Killers lags behind the pace-setters in its own genre and even looks draggy compared to unpretentious inheritors like <PERSON>/Taylor, whose movies are far less pious about revelling in shit in order to say something about our collective pungency. One note about <PERSON> Aussie let TV trash-humper <PERSON>: this could have been a brilliant performance if it had been allowed to stand apart tonally from the rest of the movie, on its own plane of reality, <PERSON>-style. Integrating the character into the second half of the film - and into the prison riot section that finds <PERSON> going for broke and getting there, especially via <PERSON> rape attempt on <PERSON> -is a real mistake, one among many. 698