The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Watching Stone’s scatterbrained story of superstar serial killers feels like watching a television when the cat’s got the remote: it’s shot in a variety of formats, tints and styles, including but not limited to rear projection, animation and a particularly vulgar sitcom pastiche; it’s often shot at wildly oblique angles that make it look like an EC comic. (The soundtrack is similarly eclectic, ranging from Puccini to Reznor.) But Stone’s no hollow showman: his attention-deficient movie, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, has a point, positing 1990s America’s TV-saturated, MTV-sanctioned dizziness not as a symptom of its moral degradation but as its cause.
Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis become pop culture celebs for their rape-and-murder spree along the width of America, idiots beloved by fellow idiots, their status begat by the idiot box. (The best sign outside their trial: “Murder Me Mickey!”) Stone especially indicts sleazy media, embodied by Robert Downey, Jr., as an Australian-accented, ratings-whoring host. Its rat-a-tat rhythms themselves a form of violence, such coverage, the filmmakers argue, produces, glamorizes and then immortalizes the monsters it then pretends to pooh-pooh. Then again, one might say the same about Stone and his film; those not hip to the subversive critique might just dig the giddy violence. The Columbine killers’ codename among themselves for their attack was “NBK.” Henry Stewart (March 26, 2pm, at the Museum of the Moving Image; Q&A with critic and Movie Freak author Owen Gleiberman follows)
