MY MOVIE SHELF: Natural Born Killers

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 89 Days to go: 59

Movie #351:  Natural Born Killers

Sex, violence, fame and exploitation are all jumbled together in Natural Born Killers. Does the media depiction of violence cause it to escalate in real life or do they merely glorify something that already exists? In this film, the message is that it’s a symbiotic system, cyclically feeding, growing and regenerating, over and over. One bleeds into another, and like two serpents intertwined, there doesn’t seem to be a beginning or an end.

The film is intentionally frenetic, employing a multitude of different film styles to imitate the seeming reckless abandon Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) have toward sex and life and murder. Director Oliver Stone uses animation, black and white photography, and psychedelic, seemingly random, unconnected images to drive home the feeling of unease and instability. To further blur the line between Mickey and Mallory’s real lives and their portrayal in the media, they are often shown on television shows (interspersed with commercials, of course) or on news coverage or even in TV parodies. There’s even the character of Wayne Gale (played by Robert Downey Jr. doing an awful — and possibly cocaine-fueled — British accent), an exploitative TV “journalist” more concerned with sensationalism and ratings than objective coverage of a story. Generally I don’t much care for this level of stylized nonsense in a film, but here it’s pretty effective in making the statement Stone wants to make about the culture of fame and infamy. Even Gale, when given a taste for violence, falls as easily into line with it as he was to having a hot TV show.

In this movie, everyone is corrupt. Everyone is a fame whore. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Whether it’s Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), strangling prostitutes and writing overblown bestsellers on himself, or Warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones) more worried about the press coverage of his prison than the safety and security of his guards and prisoners, no one is, as Mickey explains, innocent. In fact, Mickey and Mallory are veritable heroes of the tale, killing the wicked (like her awful parents or Scagnetti or Gale or whatever pervert sexually assaults her in a diner while she’s trying to dance). That angle is played up so much, in fact, (as opposed to the indiscriminate killing they do to just about anyone else) and they’re given such a triumphant ending, that the movie itself becomes another form of glorification, and that can get problematic.

Harrelson and Lewis are spectacular in their roles — hypnotic, compelling and convincing in their insanity as much as their frenzied lust for one another — and seem to take on the personas of their characters in every different iteration the movie places them in, be it a hammy sitcom or a drug-induced fever dream or an overblown, cinematic murder spree. And Lewis, especially, shows a lot of range, not just with her riotous anger but with her cloying insecurity about whether or not Mickey finds her sexy anymore when he wants to kidnap other women — and she can switch from one extreme to another at the drop of a hat. (Shout out to good ol’ Balthazar Getty as the gas station attendant who paid the ultimate price for his too eager, harried cunnilingus skills.)

Natural Born Killers is not a film I care for too much, but it does have its place in the landscape of the discussion about the culture of the media and the effect and role of sex and violence and sensationalism within it. That being said, though, I wish the film had wound up with Mickey and Mallory enjoying the fate that really awaits them in this murderous scenario of theirs: dead. That’s a happier ending, to me, than the one Oliver Stone thinks he left us with.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: Young Guns II

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 129 Days to go: 90

Movie #311:  Young Guns II

Here’s the funny thing about timing: Young Guns came out in 1988 and was rated R. I couldn’t see it. Young Guns II came out in 1990, had EVEN MORE of my teenage crushes in it, featured an exclusive soundtrack by sexy rock god Jon Bon Jovi, and was rated PG-13. And so I became a big fan of Young Guns II without ever having seen the original Young Guns.

I saw Young Guns II a bunch. I had extended, in-depth conversations about it with a friend, who also had a penchant for movies and cowboys, when we should’ve been paying attention in math, probably. And, yes, I had a Young Guns II poster up in my room, because I had a million posters and pictures and pinups and cutouts from Bop! and Tiger Beat magazine up on my walls. But it was a personal fave.

Eventually, of course, I did see Young Guns, but I’ve always thought Young Guns II was better, and not for merely the teeny-bopper reasons you might think. So I bought Young Guns II, way back about a million years ago, and added it to my DVD collection, without ever having the slightest inclination to buy Young Guns. Such is life.

Despite being something of a completist when it came to movie franchises — especially in the early years of my fixation with buying DVDs — I’ve never felt guilty about not owning Young Guns, primarily because Young Guns II is almost like an entirely different movie from the original, only with some of the same principal characters played by the same principal actors — but not like it’s actually a sequel at all. (I apply this same sort of logic to my brother and I, who have such a wide age gap between us I’ve often said we’re like two only children who just happen to have been raised by the same parents.) Young Guns tells the straight-up tale of Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez) and his band of vigilantes-turned-criminals (or, at least, it’s as straight up as a biography that’s as much legend as it is fact can possibly be). It ends with Doc (Kiefer Sutherland) moving back to New York and getting married, Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips) finding work in California, and Billy being shot in the back by Pat Garrett (played by Patrick Wayne in that film). Young Guns II, however, reunites the gang in a bit of literal revisionist history, by framing the tale as the memories of one “Brushy” Bill Roberts, a real man who, in 1950, claimed to be Billy the Kid.

Young Guns II, therefore, could either be a complete fabrication or a fascinating alternate history. It attempts to pick up where Young Guns leaves off, telling the travels of Billy’s gang after their time as Regulators in the Lincoln County War all the way up to Billy’s supposed death (in this film Pat Garrett is played by William Petersen). However, in this version, Doc and Chavez are still very much in the mix. There are references here and there to, for instance, Doc having gone off to New York and come back again, but the threads are never really connected all that well. It’s like the first film might as well not have existed (not a complaint, just an observation). And that seems to be an intentional feature of the film, too, because according to this one, Billy the Kid skipped out on his own funeral and stole Pat Garrett’s horse. It’s an interesting new perspective

For a hormonal teenage girl, however, the real draw was the cast of incredibly telegenic actors dressed up as scruffy cowboys. In addition to the main trio, Young Guns II also boasts Christian Slater as Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh (the greatest rhyming cowboy villain name I’ve ever heard). And if you were a fan of Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, well Alan Ruck is here too. There was also the confusing and alluring presence of Balthazar Getty as Tommy, who my friend and I had taken notice of in Lord of the Flies earlier that year (we HATED it, but there was something about him — it might’ve been the weird name). I swear, to this day I can’t decide if we thought he was cute or if we thought he was wimpy. But I know I’ve always paid attention whenever I’ve seen his name come up anywhere since. (Another fun thing about re-watching a movie from 25 years ago is finding all the actors in little roles who were nothing then but are totally noticeable now — Look at Viggo Mortensen hanging out with Pat Garrett!)

As for other merits, Young Guns II, as far as I’m concerned, does a pretty great job of looking more polished and put together than its predecessor, and that can actually go a long way in a person’s enjoyment of a film. If you need more than that, though, I also think the performances are strong and considered, with particular attention paid to the relationships of Billy’s gang, how Billy sometimes gets too capricious with the lives he takes in his hands, and how betrayed he feels by Pat. By that same token, the movie does a lot of work to make Pat Garrett a man and not just a figure — it portrays him as vain and as arrogant and as a showy, self-righteous, ultimate failure, but it rounds him out more than any other portrayal I’ve seen has ever done. And while there’s a dearth of women in the film, Jane Greathouse (Jenny Wright) conspiring with Billy and telling off Pat and riding off into the night wearing nothing but her boots certainly makes the most of her time on the screen.

Plus, have I mentioned “Blaze of Glory?” That song rocks. Young Guns never had a song. Now tell me which is the better film.