- There’s nothing wrong with old fashioned if done the right way, but The Promise feels like the kind of film that’s out of date. While performances from Bale.
- Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it hadn't been for the O.J. Simpson case. Maybe Stone meant his movie.
- Gardening, mechanical creatures, library books and neighborly friction figure in a magic-tinged fable starring Jessica Brown Findlay and Tom Wilkinson.
Natural Born Killers Movie Review (1. Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it hadn't been for the O. J. Simpson case. Maybe Stone meant his movie as a warning about where we were headed, but because of Simpson it plays as an indictment of the way we are now. We are becoming a society more interested in crime and scandal than in anything else - more than in politics and the arts, certainly, and maybe even more than sports, unless crime is our new national sport. If that's true, then Stone's movie is about the latest all- Americans, Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), two mass murderers who go on a killing spree across America, making sure everybody knows their names, so they get credit for their crimes.
Terrorists always claim "credit" rather than "blame.") The movie is not simply about their killings, however, but also about the way they electrify the media and exhilarate the public. One teenager tells the TV cameras, "Mass murder is wrong. But if I were a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory!") The boom in courtroom TV has given us long hours to study the faces of famous accused murderers; we have a better view than the jury. Looking into their faces, I sense a curious slackness, an inattention, as if the trial is a mirage, and their thoughts far away. If they're guilty, it's like they're rehearsing their excuses for the crime. If they're innocent, maybe those empty expressions mean the courtroom experience is so alien they can't process it. Not once since he was arraigned have I caught a shot of Simpson looking normal in any way I can understand.
His expression always seems to be signifying, "Yes, but . Oliver Stone captures this odd emptiness, this moral inattention, in the faces and behavior of Mickey and Mallory. They're on their own frequency. The casting is crucial: Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are both capable of being frightening, both able to project amorality and disdain as easily as Jack Lemmon projects ingratiation. There is a scene where a lawman is trying to intimidate Lewis, and he throws his cigarette onto the floor of her cell.
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She steps on it and rubs it out with her bare foot. Set and match. Advertisement"Natural Born Killers" is not so much about the killers, however, as about the feeding frenzy they inspire. During the period of their rampage, they are the most famous people in America, and the media goes nuts. There are Mickey and Mallory fan clubs and T- shirts; tabloid TV is represented by a bloodthirsty journalist played by Robert Downey Jr., who is so thrilled by their fame he almost wants to embrace them. The people Mickey and Mallory touch in the law industry are elated to be handling the case; it gives them a brush with celebrity, and a tantalizing whiff of the brimstone that fascinates some cops. Stone has never been a director known for understatement or subtlety.
He'll do anything to get his effect, and that's one of the things I value about him. He understands that celebrity killers have achieved such a bizarre status in America that it's almost impossible to satirize the situation - to get beyond real life.
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But he goes for broke, in scenes of carnage like a prison riot, which is telecast live while the "host" gets caught up in the bloodlust. Yet you do not see as much actual violence as you think you do in this movie; it's more the tone, the attitude, and the breakneck pacing that gives you that impression. Stone is not making a geek show, with closeups of blood and guts. Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy.
There's an over- the- top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing, by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan, and to the hyperactive camera of Robert Richardson. Treasure Buddies Full Movie Part 1. Stylistically, the film is a cinematic bazaar, combining color and black and white, film and video, 3.
Super 8, sitcom style and animated cartoons, fiction and newsreels. They're throwing stuff at the screen by the gleeful handfuls. And look how this film blindsided the good citizens of the MPAA classification board.
The review panel threatened the film with the dreaded NC- 1. R rating. But read their parental warning: "For extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality." They've got the fever! I could point to a dozen more violent recent films that have left the MPAA unstirred, but Stone has touched a nerve here, because his film isn't about violence, it's about how we respond to violence, and that truly is shocking. Advertisement. Stone's basic strategy is to find the current buzzwords and buzzideas of crime and violence, and project them through the looking glass into a wonderland of murderous satire. It is a commonplace, for example, that many violent criminals were abused as children.
All right, then, Stone will give us abuse: We see Mallory's childhood, shot in the style of a lurid TV sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield as her drunken, piggish father. As he shouts and threatens violence, as he ridicules Mallory's thoroughly cowed mother, as he grabs his daughter and makes lewd suggestions, we hear a sitcom laugh track that grinds out mechanical hilarity. Everything is funny to the "live studio audience," because Dangerfield's timing is right for the punchlines.
Never mind how frightening the words are. Who really listens to sitcoms, anyway?
Everything is grist for Stone's mill. Look at Tommy Lee Jones, as Warden Mc. Clusky of Batongaville State Prison. He's seen too many prison movies, and he's intoxicated by the experience of being on TV. He rants, he raves, he curses, he runs his prison like a deranged slave plantation. And then here comes Downey, as Wayne Gale, who hosts a clone of "Hard Copy" or "America's Most Wanted." Using a Robin Leach accent that makes the whole thing into showbiz, he's so thrilled to be in the same frame with these famous killers that he hardly cares what happens to him. Watch his reaction in the final bloody showdown, when he believes he is immune because, after all, he has the camera.
Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning.
As we coast into a long autumn where the news will be dominated by the O. J. Simpson trial, "Natural Born Killers" is like a slap in the face, waking us up to what's happening. Watching the movie, it occurred to me that I haven't met or talked with anyone who seemed genuinely, personally, angry that Simpson (or anyone else) might have committed those sad murders. Instead, people seem more intrigued and fascinated.
The word grateful comes to mind. The case has given us all something to talk about. The barking dog. The blood tests. The ice cream that didn't melt. The matching glove. When the subject comes up at a party, you can almost feel the relief in the room, as everyone joins in: At last, a topic we can all get worked up about!
Once we were shocked that the Romans threw Christians to the lions. Now we figure out a way to recycle the format into a TV show. That's what "Natural Born Killers" is all about.
Fargo Season 3 Finale Explained. The third season of FX’s Fargo just wrapped. Whether you thought the latest installment of Noah Hawley’s quirky Midwestern crime series was the best yet or that the homespun folksiness felt like it was worn too thin, the past 1. Season 3 was a star- studded affair, so much so that it handed two roles to Ewan Mc.
Gregor (and twice the Mc. Gregor is not a deal anyone wants to pass up), as well as roles for TV MVP Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Thewlis (who, like Coon, is also having something of a moment in 2. Ray Wise and Mary Mc. Donnell. But as the season wound down, it became clear that the eccentric story of Emmit and Ray Stussy, Gloria Burgle, Nikki Swango, and the nefarious intrusion of the devilish V. M. Varga was familiar.
It again boiled down to the question of: How do you make sense of a world that no longer seems to have any rules? More so than seasons 1 and 2, however, Fargo season 3 took place in the aftermath of a world gone mad. The story of the Solversons (Lou and Molly, that is) was about stemming the tide of madness whereas season 3, as it gradually revealed itself to be about how two radically different people, Gloria Burgle and Nikki Swango, was largely about trying to set things right after they had already gone horribly wrong. In that sense, the finale was focused on a balancing of the cosmic scales with bloody retribution and a sly nod that the rusty wheels of justice might still turn. With that, let’s take a look at Fargo season 3 and all its various agents of chaos and order. Varga Is Disorder Personified. It wouldn’t be a season of Fargo without a vaguely satanic figure promoting chaos by first whispering into the ears of mild- mannered men of the Midwest.
Season 2 sort of spread this character out amongst the various members of the Gerhardt clan, Bokeem Woodbine’s Mike Milligan, and Zahn Mc. Clarnon’s Hanzee Dent.
Here, Thewlis’ hot- toothed devil V. M. Varga is more like an update to Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo. The only difference is Malvo operated almost entirely in the margins of society, whereas Varga has assumed the persona of a transparent member of middle management. He’s the place where the buck most certainly does not stop.
But whereas Malvo was an animal- like killer driven by a need to seek out prey and the joy of the hunt, Varga is a little more abstract. He’s the gaping maw of capitalism, shoveling in everything he can get his greedy hands on and then purging the excess once he’s experienced the pleasure of consumption.
Varga is also the series’ most evident agent of disorder; he exists in a state as messy as the one he creates, illustrated by both his deliberately unsophisticated attire (a clever act of concealment, as far as he’s concerned) and a set of rotting teeth that may as well be his calling card. Given all that, it’s no surprise that it would take the combined – though not necessarily cooperative – efforts of Gloria and Nikki to challenge him. Nikki Swango’s Vengeance. From the get- go Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Nikki Swango was presented as an agent of chaos, but one who understood and played largely within a certain set of rules.
We know she’d been incarcerated at one point, so she knows accountability – which, for all we know about him, presumably distances her from Varga a great deal. Having been made to answer for her actions, Nikki is in the unique position of making Varga pay for his. Because she straddles the line between lawful and lawless, Nikki can do what Gloria cannot: move against Varga without any red tape or dunderheads like Moe Dammick (Shea Whigham). In the end, Nikki doesn’t get Varga, Gloria does – well, maybe. But she does strike a mighty blow against his criminal enterprise, and reminds him that although he’s thrived by thinking the rules don’t apply to him, there are some rules that even the devil can’t find the loophole in. Nikki might go down as the season’s most surprising character, as what began as a Bridge- playing ex- con morphed into one of this show’s most entertaining and fascinating players. Becoming the person who wiped out Varga was a role that fit her like a glove, but that didn’t happen and instead her story ended in a shootout with a cop who was, like so many cops in Fargo (and Coen brothers movies) simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Given the blood that was on her hands, it would have been a little too blue sky for her to take out Emmit and live out the rest of her life. The show has an undercurrent of tragedy, and unfortunately that meant Nikki’s time was ultimately cut short. Mr. Wrench Is on A Different Path. Mr. Wrench, the hitman from season 1 who was partnered with Adam Goldberg’s Mr. Numbers, and appeared briefly in season 2 as a boy, is an unlikely choice to tie the series’ three seasons together.
But as obsessive as Fargo is in terms of connecting its dots within each season, Mr. Wrench connects the dots of all three seasons; at least as far as a certain sprawling Midwest crime syndicate is concerned. But there’s more to Mr.
Wrench’s appearance here than simply making three seasons of Fargo feel linked, and it has to do with something Paul Marrane says when chatting with Nikki in the mystical bowling alley reminiscent of The Big Lebowski. Like the bowling alley, Paul appears when the two characters need him the most, and although they’re both criminals – violent criminals at that – Paul saves their lives. He even gives them a VW Beetle to escape from a rampaging Yuri so they can plot their revenge on Varga. While Mr. Wrench repeatedly displays a knack for violence – separating Yuri from his left ear with a Hail Mary hatchet toss into some trees – Paul tells Nikki he’s put in a good word for the hearing impaired heavy, and that certain people have been told he’s on a better path. After the self- storage facility shootout that nearly killed Varga, that path remains largely hidden for several years, until Mr. Wrench appears again in the Stussy kitchen.
It’s an ignoble end for Emmit that underlines the show’s belief that the wicked will eventually be punished, but Emmit’s end is made more interesting in that a semi- reformed underworld hitman is the one to help right the cosmic scales. It’s been years since Varga fled and Nikki was killed on a highway, and apparently Emmit getting his family back together wasn’t enough of a course correction to skirt the rules forever. Ray Wise Hints that Old Rules Still Apply. Ray Wise’s Paul Marrane isn’t just the guy you want to be sitting next to on a plane from Minnesota to California; he’s also a really good at running interference with weirdo cops played by Rob Mc.
Elhenney, and, when it comes right down to it, he’s there to help facilitate the distribution of God’s vengeance, or in one instance, directly unleash it upon an unrepentant Cossack killer named Yuri. In the series’ most overtly mystical sequence, Paul Marrane hints that the wildfire- like chaos of the season isn’t burning completely out of control; there are still forces around to help contain it. In a sense, Paul recruits Nikki and Mr.
Wrench to help mete out a little biblical justice, sending them on their way with vengeance on their minds. Though Paul doesn’t appear in the season finale, his interactions with both Gloria and Nikki linger heavily over the events in the final hour. The bowling alley scene is in many ways the turning point of the season; it’s when, after several episodes of watching Varga and his goons demonstrate how far removed from the rules of society they are, Fargo hints that the show’s oft- repeated belief that the wicked will be punished and the good rewarded still holds true.
Cut to Black. Gotcha. That’s pretty much what DHS agent Gloria Burgle’s smile says when Varga predicts the identity of the individual yet to walk through the door of the interrogation room they’re sitting in.
Gloria’s confident that she’s finally caught her man.