Despite (and because of) its pedigree, Natural Born Killers is undoubtedly trashy, reveling in the killing spree of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) and joyfully joining in the public and media fascination with mass murderers. And it’s an invigorating, brilliantly assembled movie celebrating the way that cinema can make the ugliest human behavior thrilling.
This commentary track deals with a handful of themes: the blunt use of color contrasted with the almost tangential way the movie deals with its ostensible theme of liberty; the use of visual and aural cues to indicate the subjective nature of the film; Julie’s progression from isolation to active engagement with the world; and the relationship between the concept of “freedom” and Kieslowski’s obvious interest in responsibility. Plus, I call Juliette Binoche a “two-faced bitch.” How can you resist?
Brevity is the soul of wit, that motherfucker Shakespeare once wrote, and even though he’s wrong, I’ll keep this short. RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson has created the Contrarianism Blog-a-thon. I will enlighten you on how to be a conventional contrarian.
Marnie is narratively and technically artless – literal and obvious and shrill and nearly naked in its themes and concerns, a story clumsily built around Freudian repression. Yet Marnie is not the travesty many people think.
Film Experience Blog is hosting a Vampire Blog-a-Thon just in time for Halloween. I was delighted to see that three bloggers saw fit to write about George A. Romero’s criminally overlooked Martin.
In Calendar, writer/director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of musical minimalism, with its emphasis on long shots, repetition, and minor variation, and with just a handful of camera setups. Nothing is superfluous.
Werner Herzog uses all the trappings of the story of Count Drac-oooo-lah in Nosferatu the Vampyre but doesn’t approach it as a tale of terror. Instead, he turns Bram Stoker’s basic plot (and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic) into a contemplative study of sacrifice and tragedy.
Those who argue that a by-the-storyboard re-make such as Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is a priori a waste of money and time (both the studio’s and the audience’s) fall back on conventional wisdom that seems to apply only to film among the arts.