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: JFK

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: 221  Days to go: 220

Movie #156:  JFK

It’s important to remember two things about JFK. First, screenplay co-writer and director Oliver Stone has a long and storied (perhaps justified, perhaps overblown, perhaps both) bias against the Vietnam War. Second, JFK, like any biopic, is a feature film, not a documentary or even a historically accurate reenactment, and therefore embellishes and exaggerates certain material while altering or cutting out altogether other material all in the name of artistic license.  That being said, however, there is no way I believe the long-held stance of the federal government that John F. Kennedy was killed by a single gunman, and therefore I have a lot of interest in the story of the man who sought to prove otherwise.

Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) was District Attorney in New Orleans when President Kennedy was shot. Based on some reports and tips that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) had ties to New Orleans the previous summer, he questions a few people in the days following Kennedy’s death but ultimately leaves the initial investigation to the federally appointed Warren Commission. Upon the Commission’s findings, however, Garrison concludes that the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination was one of the sloppiest, most hurried and most railroaded investigation he’d ever known. And so in 1966 — three years after that fateful day in Dallas — he opens his own investigation, and ultimately proves to be the only person ever to bring anyone to trial for the Kennedy assassination.

The movie sets about building an elaborate structure of people and facts, actions and timelines that all seem to refute every possibility of Oswald acting alone — or even, possibly, acting at all. But whether you believe Oswald was an assassin or part of a conspiracy to assassinate or simply a convenient fall guy, Oliver Stone’s film is a thrilling and impressive mystery. There are so many people involved, so many facets to the conspiracy theory that the film suggests, it could all easily get bogged down in its own sprawling logic, and yet Stone layers the film so expertly that it never once feels out of control. It’s a long film, to be sure, and it probably could’ve been streamlined a bit in that area, but it doesn’t drag. It’s well-paced and captivating, accompanied by a rolling, thumping, insistent score that quickens the pulse and urges the film along.

JFK also boasts an impressive roster of actors — it being one of those linchpin movies that makes Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon so easy to play (or hard, if you’re trying to find people with more than two or three degrees of separation, tops) — from Joe Pesci as a peculiar little man named David Ferrie who was a possible co-conspirator, to Tommy Lee Jones as the man, Clay Shaw, whom Garrison brought to trial, to Sissy Spacek (as Garrison’s wife) to Ed Asner (as Guy Bannister) to Jack Lemmon (as informant Jack Martin) to Walter Matthau (as Senator Long) to Laurie Metcalf (as Susie Cox with ever-enlarging hair) to Wayne Knight (as Numa Bertel) to John Candy (as Dean Andrews). And of course, Kevin Bacon as male prostitute Willie O’Keefe. My favorite supporting performance, however, comes from Donald Sutherland as a former CIA operative who only refers to himself as X and who goes a long way in building a case for a government conspiracy to tie the assassination to the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and, as President Eisenhower warns in the footage that opens the film, “the military industrial complex.” Sutherland’s character is both secretive and authoritative, shown as having a wide knowledge of confidential procedures, protocol and information, and he’s largely responsible for connecting Garrison’s somewhat small-time collection of information to a much larger motive.

And actually, the mere act of establishing motive for the killing goes a long way into making the film feel as credible as it does. For all the hard-line declarations of Oswald as the lone gunman that have been offered as fact in our country’s history, no one has ever really established, or even attempted to establish, anything remotely like a strong enough motive — for JFK’s death or for the death of his brother Robert or for the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., which the film tangentially attempts to connect to this military industrial complex conspiracy, albeit rather unsuccessfully. This historical lack of any strong and clear motive on Oswald’s part certainly leaves the door open for people to create one, and that’s where Stone pounces, though he finds his greatest leverage more in the physical science of the case than in his elaborate suppositions. The most effective, logical point the film makes is when Garrison stresses the action taking place in the Zapruder film and details the supposed path of the infamous (and absurd) theory of the Magic Bullet. That’s his most compelling argument, by far, and it underscores why the jury was left believing there was a conspiracy at work, but couldn’t find any kind of proof that Clay Shaw was involved, thereby acquitting him of all charges.

I’m a person who likes answers. I like certainties. I like knowing what’s ahead of me and I like knowing the reasons for what’s come before. It can be a pretty frustrating way to be in real life, actually, but I’ve come to terms with it. When I’m stressed about money, I run all sorts of mathematical scenarios in order to calm myself. When I need a break, I plan vacations, even if I can’t take them. When I have writers’ block, I come up with character names for every letter of the alphabet and try to decide who each one is. These activities soothe me. I don’t like not knowing things, and I used to daydream that when I die, all the unanswered questions I’ve held onto in my life will be clarified. I’ll know why this relationship really ended and what happened to that thing I lost out of nowhere and who stole the money out of my purse that one time during gym class and, yes, who really killed President Kennedy. It’s a fantasy, I realize, but like I said, it soothes me. So in its way, JFK soothes me as well. It provides answers and options that weren’t there before, that hadn’t been provided before with anything other than illogical nonsense. It likely doesn’t get to the truth, but I feel like it gets closer than the currently accepted theory does. And more than that, it promotes Jim Garrison’s actions as necessary and patriotic — though he was often accused of the opposite — precisely because he doesn’t accept a government answer that doesn’t make sense. I admire that, I really do. And I hope someday, some more reliable answers will come to light.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Any Given Sunday

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #20: Any Given Sunday

There’s a crass joke that hangs out in bawdier environments, that if a man could suck his own dick, he’d never leave the house. This movie is two and a half hours of director Oliver Stone sucking his own dick, over and over and over and over.

Because I hardly even know where to start with this one, I will start with the description on IMDb: “A behind-the-scenes look at the life-and-death struggles of modern-day gladiators and those who lead them.” Jiminy Christmas.

This is a movie that takes itself way too seriously, that sees itself as a gritty actualization of a greedy, corrupt, morally bankrupt society, that purports to be an indictment of the world of professional football and all involved. What it actually is, however, is an overwrought, self-involved, overwhelmingly cynical yet hilariously clichéd, run-of-the-mill sports film. Not even a good sports film, or an emotionally satisfying sports film, just a boring, painfully average, unoriginal sports film.

The opening scene sets the tone immediately. We’re near the end of the first half of a game between the Miami Sharks and the Minnesota Americans (my hand to God, those are the team names — either the NFL wanted nothing to do with this movie or Oliver Stone didn’t want to compromise his “artistic integrity” by kowtowing to the corporate machine). Seasoned (read: old) quarterback Jack “Cap” Rooney (Dennis Quaid) takes the snap, can’t find an open receiver, and gets sandwiched between two defenders before falling hard to the ground. He fumbles the ball, and the Americans (seriously, the dumbest name) scoop and score. To make matters worse, Rooney is on the ground, writhing in pain. Team doctor James Woods (as Dr. Harvey Mandrake — who thought these up??) comes out onto the field and berates Rooney for not getting up, for being a pussy, for playing to the cameras, and for being a pussy some more. He pretty much does everything but kick the poor guy in the balls, never once even remotely acting like a doctor — not even for the cameras, as he so cynically assumed his player would be. So five minutes in, not only is it perfectly clear this movie is only going through the motions of actual athletic competition drama, simply rehashing by rote every scene from every football movie ever made, it also hates football and has nothing but disdain for everyone and everything associated with football, up to and including its fans.

The entire film is like this — every negative stereotype you could ever come up with about football players, coaches, owners, fans, or families, is put into play. Somehow, every character is both inept and cocky.

The coach (Al Pacino) is old and out of his league, making bad calls and getting out-coached at every turn, but he’s also an arrogant blowhard who’s disrespectful and misogynistic towards the team’s owner (Cameron Diaz, playing the daughter who inherited her father’s team upon his death), petty and vindictive with both his players and his staff, not to mention sad and pathetic because he pays $5000 a night for a hooker (Elizabeth Berkley, of course) and then wants her to be his girlfriend for real because he’s so lonely and washed up. Honestly, I don’t think it would be possible to throw more distasteful characteristics his way, but just for good measure he also shouts everything in that grating Al Pacino manner until your ears bleed.

In the exact same vein, Diaz’s character is a greedy ballbuster — like Rachel Phelps in Major League, except not funny or cartoonishly villainous or anything remotely interesting. She’s the clichéd daughter of a man who wanted a son, always trying to run with the big boys and prove her worth, but she’s also conducting some nefarious machinations behind the scenes to move the team (literally, she’s the boring and even more awful Rachel Phelps), so she’s mean and unlikable, while also being the target of every piece of sexist condescension they could think of, coming from every man she interacts with. The coach hates her, the players undermine her, the mayor talks down to her, her father’s associates patronize her, and somehow she has to wind up apologizing to her drunk fool mother (Ann-Margret) for … something, I don’t know. Being a hard-nosed bitch, I think. It’s insulting.

The players, too, are caricatures of actual football players. They have a drunken cocaine hooker party at a D.A.R.E charity event, for crying out loud. They have no team unity, and only look out for themselves — a trait that surely exists with some players, but not all the players on a single team. L.L. Cool J plays a running back all about endorsement deals. Bill Bellamy is a coked out wide receiver. Lawrence Taylor is the “heart” of the defense whose health is in serious danger but who keeps playing despite the risks so he gets his million dollar bonus (on the same play that he likely paralyzes himself, but hey — a million dollars!).  And Jamie Foxx is third string quarterback Willie Beaman, thrust into that first game against the Americans (ugh) when Rooney and then Rooney’s backup are injured in back-to-back plays. Despite being a vomiting mess who doesn’t know half the plays in the playbook, he does a few athletic things, wins a game (not that first one, but one, eventually, and then some more) and suddenly is an arrogant jerk talking about how great he is, how he has “invisible juice” so defenses can’t get him (before he’s predictably destroyed by a defense — like I said, somehow both inept and cocky), how he doesn’t need his linemen or his offensive teammates or his defensive teammates, how something something racial is going on, and recording his own music video in which he states his name is Willie Beaman and he “leaves the girls creamin’.” Gross.

The assistant coaches are all raging madmen or scowling their disapproval of how the team’s being managed. The fans are prototypical fat assholes, fighting in the stands. The players’ wives are all either snotty, greedy mean girls or beaten down doormats, and Beaman’s long-standing girlfriend (Lela Rochon) flies off the handle at Beaman when the Mean Girl wives are bitchy to her, at which point he calls her a dyke and screams at her to leave. (All the players scream at all the women, at all times. You know, because women are greedy bitches or whores or bitches and whores and all men treat them as such.) The opposing players (on teams just as ludicrously named as the Americans — the Chicago Rhinos, anyone? And don’t even get me started on the freaking Pantheon Cup nonsense) are all hostile and violent — motherfucker this and that is pretty bland, but early on one of them yells that one of the Sharks is going to be “pulling pieces of dick out of his ass” and at another point near the end of the film a man’s eyeball gets ripped out on the field. I hate it when that happens. There’s even an extended game-time montage set to a song, the primary lyrics of which are “my niggers,” on repeat, ad infinitum.

As for the game itself, it’s so far outside how basic football works I can’t decide if the filmmakers don’t watch and/or understand football at all, or if the NFL was so opposed to this movie they made them change weirdly inconsequential things like uniforms and TV graphics and whatnot. The Sharks have the most basic uniform of all, all black with white lettering and numbers, but all the other teams are in these garish colors with massive designs on them. (The Dallas Knights, for example, are in gold with giant red crosses on their chests.) And no team has a different uniform for away games at all. Home or away, it’s the same every time. I never did catch the initialism for the league that these teams are in, but on the TV broadcasts, the team with the higher score gets listed on top, rather than listing the visiting team on top, so there are times when it switches which team is listed first. The commentators and sports writers are also incredibly trite  — even worse than the real life ones. At one point Oliver Stone, making a cameo as one of the TV announcers, says of Jamie Foxx, “He’s got genius ankles.” I swear, I could not make that up. The sports writer, played by John C. McGinley in an awful haircut, refers to Beaman as a “warrior poet,” of all things. And it’s a nitpicky football complaint, but there’s a point at which the Knights have the ball and the Sharks need a stop. The Knights are up 35-31 on fourth down, and instead of kicking a field goal, they decide to go for a touchdown, at which point the announcers say they’re “going for the win instead of the tie.” This is not what’s happening. They are already winning. Even if they do nothing, the Sharks will need a touchdown, because a field goal will still leave them a point shy. All the Knights are doing at this point is trying to keep the ball and run out the clock. That’s it. If it weren’t such a clichéd trope, it would be an emotionally significant stop either way.

Hilariously, though, at some point someone must’ve told Stone that sports movies have to have uplifting and celebratory endings, because literally out of nowhere, during the final game sequence, there is suddenly soaring music and slo-motion action. Foxx and Pacino share a hackneyed joke on the sidelines, Diaz chooses this time to apologize to her mother for … something, and everyone has learned a very valuable lesson probably, or at the very least their hearts grew three sizes that day.

Of course, the forced agenda of the film isn’t the only thing that makes it self-indulgent. The camera work and editing actually accomplishes that all on its own. Repeatedly, throughout the film, as a scene of game footage plays out, it is intercut with conversations of various other characters — Diaz in the owner’s booth, the coaches on the sidelines, whatever. When two characters are in the middle of a conversation, the camera jumps from them to close-ups of various knickknacks and photos and game paraphernalia, while they’re still talking. When the team loses, and Pacino’s character is feeling downtrodden, there are quick fades to other random people in the bar, players around town, and whoever else, just to show how sad everyone is. And every single scene is shot with at least half a dozen cameras, so one second you’re in tight close-up, the next you’re looking down from an awkward angle filmed by a camera in the ceiling, the next moment everything is off-tilt in a different direction coming from a two-shot. If it’s not the schizophrenic editing, it’s blurred pans to convey a dizzy or concussed player or perhaps the coach having a sepia-toned vision of football games gone by (not sure at all what’s going on there, but the players have leather helmets?). My favorite parts, though, are the random hard cuts to rapid lightning flashes in a cloudy night sky. No rhyme or reason for them to be there, but maybe Stone wants to let his audience know how emotionally stormy everything is. And if you can’t see me rolling my eyes from here, then you’re not paying attention.

The fact of the matter is, I really like sports movies. I own quite a few, and I probably own more football movies than any other sport-related film because I’m such a huge fan of the game. I think that might be what disappoints me most about this one. I remember going to see it in the theater and just instantly, vociferously hating it (this is one of the ones my husband owned when we met) — not because it’s exposing a side of football people are uncomfortable with, but because it’s so wrapped up in its predetermined mission statement and utterly negatively stereotyped substance that it loses all credibility and feeling of authenticity. It wants so badly to be taken seriously that I can’t possibly take it seriously.

Also, it’s just a really terrible film.