This Had Oscar Buzz - 103 – Natural Born Killers

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

This week, we’re going back to the mid-90s to visit Oliver Stone’s highly controversial skewering of the muckraking, blood-thirsty media landscape. Natural Born Killers arrived in late summer 1994 and immediately started a firestorm of outraged Republicans and a number of copycat killings. While an audacious and uncompromising satire, the violence of its central Mickey and Mallory … Continue reading "103 – Natural Born Killers"

Uh-oh, wrong house. No, the right house. I didn't get that! We want to talk to Marilyn Hacks. Mickey and Mallory Feared by thousands I love you someone, baby I love you

Watched by millions We're fake Can't stop faith Nobody can It's kind of like the quiet I don't or something Woody Harrelson Juliet Lewis Robert Downey Jr. and Tommy Lee Johns

What do you have to say to your fans? We ain't seen nothing yet. Hello and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast that's traversing a high wire over New York City with Pepe Lepe Pew. Every week on This Had Oscar Buzz we'll be talking about a different movie that once upon a time had Lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another, it all went wrong. The Oscar hopes died, and we are here to perform the autopsy. I'm your host, Joe Reed. I'm here as always with my partner in metaphorical. crime only, Chris Fyle.

I'm here in a series of wigs. You're terrorizing, diner, waitresses. Yep, yep. The way that Juliette Lewis says the word baby, I think should be studied in film studies classes. I almost said it at the very beginning. That, like, baby, like, yeah.

It is cinema. It is oral cinema. I want to do, I want a clip of Juliette Lewis saying baby from this movie, Spoon from Walk the Line saying, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. The clip that won her the Academy Award, and probably enough. Yeah, we're going to be talking about Juliette Lewis quite a bit in this episode, because we're talking about natural-born killers.

A movie that definitely did have Oscar buzz. I know we tend to have the incredulous among you tweeted us and be like, really? And like, bish we got golden globes and Venice receipts. So, I think also that we're dealing with the type of film now, that even though, like, for what the movie is, and of course we'll get into this movie, because it's a lot of movie, guys, I think it's also the type of case where there might even be more now. Like, the Golden Globe director nomination for Oliver Stone, I'm a little bit surprised that there isn't some type of carry. over nomination from like the DGA, right? Because it's very much, especially the controversy that went around this movie, I think now you might see people like rallying around a director for his directorial intention when like, you know, you have actual politicians speaking out

against this movie and misinterpreting its intentions. I have a couple theories as to why that we'll get into as we go along. But yeah, that's a good thing. I think there's a big kind of obvious one there too. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a movie that could not feel more of its time and I don't necessarily mean

that as a negative. Like some, like a lot of this movie does feel like, oh, wow, like this is a very mid-90s kind of movie in terms of visual sensibility, in terms of like what was audacious then, in terms of its ideas. But it also, it's an

incredible, like it's almost I don't want to say an accident of timing, because some of it was definitely intentional. And the fact that, like, it got released at the end of August 94, and you can tell that they were editing it probably up through August. It took them almost a year of post-production for this movie. There was so much, yeah, so much post-production, so many edits. Like, I read somewhere that there were something like, like, four or five times the number of edits that usually go into a movie were in this movie. They had to go back and forth with the NPAA.

I admit, I had for whatever reason misremember the director's cut as being like some true Oliver Stone epic and that it was like a half hour or... It's only like five minutes longer, right? Or something like that. No, and that's because even though it's only five minutes, it's still an extensive amount of cuts that they had to make. Right, right. To the violence of the movie where you're talking about like real minutia that they were not allowed to show to get an R rating. But this movie comes out at the end of the summer 94 and feels. like such a statement about the OJ era and OJ, like the Bronco Chase was in June of 1994, like mid-J

1994 and this movie comes out at the end of August. So like it's it. And you can tell they were editing it up until the last minute because they put footage of the OJ trial. Exactly right. Yeah. Like clearly this movie had ideas about celebrity violence culture already sort of in the hopper. There's stuff they have also showed. Right. They show stuff about the Menendez trial and Tanya Harding and Lorena Bobbett and in a very sort of poor taste thing

like lumps Rodney King into the whole thing which like take a break Oliver but like clearly this movie was commenting on like the moment that the country was in like at that very second which I think does make the movie

kind of a really interesting historical artifact in addition to all the sort of like you know artistic things it's doing. I mean, like, I still would have been a kid at this time, but, like, also, this didn't stop, too. Like, it made me think of just, like, violence as, like, feverishly consumed entertainment, like, cops and stuff.

And, like, that's what he was trying to, this, that's what he's satirizing and that's what he's condemning with this movie. I think there are still, like, limitations to what he's doing. But, like, it felt. Viscerally, like, what this movie does achieve to me is it really gets at the psychosis of what it is like to constantly be taking that type of media and being fed it like its entertainment. And we even see it now in a way that is way more, like, supposedly sanitized and, like, treated like it is much more high art, but, or it is much more, I don't know, acceptable than, like, shit like, cops that's, like, violent and horrible and, like, sets bad cultural precedence. Right.

But, like, in just the obsession of true crime media now, where it's, like, just because you have a nice, pleasant voice giving it to you in a podcast form or in, like, documentary form, like, doesn't mean that we are any less removed from, like, this kind of true crime gross obsession. But I do think it's, it's interesting. probably important to sort of like to kind of place yourself into what that culture was at the time. Because now we have like, we're, you know, we're constantly swimming in it. We've got, you know, there's Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle and social media. And as you said,

podcasts and true crime and Netflix and all this kind of stuff. But like back then, I think maybe because the outlets were fewer and the, you know, I think the, the cultural sort of. egregious of these like because we'll get into the whole robert downy junior thing of it but like the show that robert downy junior has in this movie and the type of journalism he's doing like it's an extreme portrait but like it's so close to what it really was like in the 90s and those type of shows that's the thing is you had um fewer sort of points of contact with this stuff but like if you remember at the time not only was this you know the mid 90s sort of like true crime boom it was also the era of daytime talk show supremacy, where there's a lot of Geraldo in Robert Donnie Jr's character. But this is like the Geraldo, Phil Donahue, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, sort of like, and they were all of them at various different stages obsessed with this kind of thing. But it was also the era of hard copy and Inside Edition and 48 hours and all these other like primetime news magazine shows, which were also equally obsessed with this. kind of stuff. And then the OJ thing ushered in the era of like court TV, which begets at some point along the line, Nancy Grace, and sort of like, it's a timeline and continuum, but like,

I, it's so important to remember that just like, not only was this stuff sort of pervasive at the time, but the outlets that we're covering it were covering it from like such a hard angle and such a sort of like aggressive angle. And I think this movie, I'm of two minds. on this movie. I'm sort of at least of two minds on this movie. I have a lot of sort of, you know, opinions about it. But I think especially in the first hour, it, I think, does a pretty effective job of putting yourself in the middle of this sort of cultural fascination with what was going on and the madness of it. And the sort of, I think the first half in the movie does a much better job of making the case that it is commenting on

a national obsession with these kind of characters while making it incredibly nightmarish and incredibly like, how do you depict a modern-day celebrity crime spree? Well, you depict it in the most sort of like surreal fashion possible because you don't... Changing, like, lensing for... maths and like film stock constantly. So it's like you can interpret each as like an empirical truth, the data truth, a fabrication of like outright lies or like spin within an like a single

sequence. Right. And I think the second half of the movie once they're in prison and once it becomes a little plottier, it does a less effective job of depicting them from. that remove, I think the second half of the movie, it's harder for me to buy the case in the second half of the movie that Stone doesn't fall in love with these characters too much, right? And I think watching the first half of the movie, I remember thinking, because my opinion when I first saw the movie, this is only the second time I've seen this movie, I can't imagine willingly seeing it a third time. It's so unpleasant to watch. And I, and I mean that as like a value neutral statement. It is just unpleasant to watch. But I was watching this again. And for the

first half, I was just like, oh, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was a little too wrapped up in my revulsion to sort of like see it objectively. And I was thinking that like, oh, maybe, you know, this movie deserves more respect than I gave it. And then in the second half, I'm just like, okay, all right, this is, this is why. Maybe this is why I reacted this way. The only thing about that that works in the second half of the movie is there is much more focus on Robert Downey Jr.'s character in the second half. And like, if there's any valuable satire to kind maybe not any but

the most valuable satire is like the obsession with that like that character I thought a lot of Geraldo in the era um yeah where it's like it becomes kind of more a direct condemnation of a certain facet

of this larger global thing that he's talking about this bigger idea with the whole movie right so but you're right that he does kind of fall into the trap of falling in love with these characters and what they represent. And I don't think, I don't think he's aware of that, or I don't know if it was intentional. Yeah. Yeah.

But before we get too far into it, let's sort of set the table. This movie is, of course, Natural Born Killers from 1994, directed by Oliver Stone, written by Richard Rutkowski, Oliver Stone, and David Velaz, based on an original story by Quentin Tarantino. starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Seismore, Edie McClurg, Queen, Edie McClurg, and Rodney Dangerfield. This premiered on August 26, 1994, and then three days later, curiously, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. We'll talk about its reception of Venice soon enough, but before that, Chris, would you like to have the unenviable task of summing up this movie in 60 seconds? The thing is, it's not necessarily unenviable because, like, there is a plot, there's things that happen, but, like, what this movie is about is about, like, the textures and the ideas of it. So, if I don't get all the plot in there, that's not what the movie is.

So it's fine. Yeah, all right. Ready when you are. All right, I'm good to go. All right, 60 seconds, starting right now. Now, troll-born killers, we're following a crime spree of Mickey and Mallory. They are going around killing people. It starts when they fall in love, and she kill her parents, including her sexually abusive father.

They go on a spree of killing more than 50 people across the United States. Meanwhile, we're seeing side portraits of this detective Skagnetty, played by Tom Seismore, who is himself very sociopathic and a psychopath. And the, oh, we're seeing Wayne Gale, who runs, like, this crime-wracking, like, Haraldo, copy type of show, obsessed with violence. Meanwhile, they eventually get bit by a snake while tripping in the desert, and they get caught because they try to get antidote. And then a year later, they are in jail. Wayne Gale interviews Mickey after the Super Bowl, and then there's a police riot, and they go free. They do.

They do go free. They kill Robert Donny Jr. in this film's final scene. That's time. Yes. and like that's just kind of the minor deep like the movie you know we complain about the back half of it being so plotty and that's like it's kind of when the movie just like slows down and the first hour is very very rapid non-linear

um like it opens with this like truck stop diner massacre between Mickey and Mallory that is not like the beginning of their violence, it's like in the middle of their spree. You are sort of plunged into this nightmare world almost immediately where they're at the diner. Every angle is a Dutch angle. And every... This is Dutch Angle, the movie. This is truly Dutch Angle the movie. There's a movie back in the 90s called Dutch with Ed O'Neill. This is the sequel to Dutch. This is Dutch to Murder Street, Boogaloo.

And then, of course, we have Dutch three Battle Star Earth dreadlocked John Travolta movie. Like, the three Dutch angle movies of all time. Let's also not forget, doubt. I was going to mention the King's speech, but yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot of thing.

Doubt. God, remember all the Dutch angles in doubt? Crazy. But not only that, not only the angles of it, it's like every single line of dialogue is punctuated by the same line of dialogue repeated, but in black and white frame where like everybody's acting differently. And it's, it's all jarring. And I think intentionally so. And I think there's no, there is no baseline in the first hour of the movie, which I find terribly unsettling. It's a really, this movie will fuck with you. Like, it is,

um, you sort of, you, you, you almost want to instinctively, um, push back against it and just be like, you know, Oliver Stone, like, who do you think you are? Like, why, why are you doing this? To what purpose are you doing this? To what end? To what end? But it's an effect that he's already used and maybe to better effect with all of these like film stock changes, these weird angles, like repeating things from different perspectives, like especially in JFK. Listen, it's done so well.

JFK is one of my top two or three movies of all time. Like, I love JFK. I watch it all the time. That is also a movie that unsettles me. That is a movie that will make you feel paranoid in the middle of the day. Like, that is absolutely unaffected movie. And then I think you see the continuum from JFK to this. In between JFK and this, he made a movie called Heaven and Earth, which was the third in his sort of Vietnam trilogy.

very different movie than either JFK or especially this one. He had mentioned at the time that he had made Natural Born Killers because he wanted to make something completely, completely different than Heaven and Earth. And I think one of the things that is so different from Heaven and Earth in Natural Born Killers is that he could basically create this environment. I think a lot of Heaven and Earth was him sort of like dealing with location shooting and that kind of stuff.

And he could basically create this nightmare world of Mickey and Mallory's from scratch. There's a lot of things out there and content that you can read about the making of this movie. And it sounds as chaotic as you could imagine when you watch this movie. Robert Richardson was the cinematographer on this. He's won an Oscar for JFK. He won an Oscar for what was the Tarantino movie? I think, Hateful Eight he won four. Yeah, he's won, I think.

Maybe multiple Tarantino movies. I think he's won three Academy Awards. I'll look it up in a second. But he, at the time, had talked about just how he apparently, like, hated the experience of making this movie so much. I think the subject matter fucked with him. I think he was going through sort of like these multiple terrible things going on in his life. And also, the shooting of it itself was so arduous. He had, like, sustained an injury as he was doing this.

And then his replacement cameraman got, like, cut on his eye. filming this movie like it was just seemed like an absolute absolute misery but also it's just like again so many things went into the making of this stones doing um like rear screen projection and he's doing like scenes where like scenes are projected onto walls and then like they're shooting it all like live and happening like in the same shot and everything it seems like half of the actors didn't know what they were doing. Roddy Dangerfield talked about how he totally didn't understand what the script was going for and, you know, and yet he gives this perhaps, like, intentionally off-kilter performance

that is incredibly effective and scary and off-putting and unsettling. And there's just, there's a lot. There's, you know, Stone talks about how he cast Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis because essentially they seemed white trash enough to play these characters. characters, which is like a whole thing. You know, you wonder, you know, how much sort of respect Stone afforded his cast members, and it's a whole thing. It's just, it's a lot going on at once. I imagine any set that featured Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr. and Juliette Lewis at the same time, not to mention Tom Lee Jones, but like just...

1994, Robert Downey Jr. especially. That's the other thing. Like, Jesus Christ. Like, I, the chaos. inherent in that shoot, in that shoot, I can't, I can't imagine. It's so much. It's, it's, it's, it's so much. God. But I think when we talk about, when we sort of like try to get like two basics of like, why did natural born killers have Oscar buzz to begin with. We really do have to talk about Oliver Stone. This is the second Oliver Stone movie we've covered after Alexander, but I think Alexander comes a decade, a full decade after this movie. And I think by the time we got to Alexander,

we had, it's a slightly different Oliver Stone where he's become sort of more, I don't know about, like, if more obsessive is the term, but like his interest had sort of like spiraled away from making the kinds of, he was like, he was well removed from his Oscar successes. Let's, let's, you know, probably put it that way. I mean, he still makes movies that will generate some type of buzz because he has, he is Oliver Stone and he has those two Oscars, even today.

Plus a writing Oscar. Like, he's got, he has like three Academy Awards and he's, but yeah, but after Nixon, which is the movie that comes out right after Natural Born Killers, uh, Stone's not really an awards guy anymore. To the point that maybe the only one that like doesn't generate any type of Oscar buzz, much to your. George Graham Joseph is savages. Yes, absolutely true. And that's partly because it's a summer release, you know, so it's like that conversation may not have it really started at that point,

whereas if we knew it was coming in the fall, it might have been considered differently. But most of the movie's crater at this point in, like, the modern day. But like in the 90s, he could have probably done anything he wanted and generated some type of Oscar buzz. And this is the movie. That proves that to be true. Yeah.

Like, let's do the quick cursory glance through the filmography, right? Because he starts in the late 70s, but really he doesn't really break through until 1986, which is his big platoon year. Platoon wins best picture. But, like, the other thing about 1986 is he also directs a movie called Salvador, which, like, gets James Woods a best actor nomination at the Oscars. So, like, 80s. And at this point, he'd already had his screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express, too.

Right, that's, yes. But as a director. Yes, he wins the screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express in 78. And then by 86, he wins Picture and Director for Platoon, which is a movie about the Vietnam War, starring Charlie Sheen and Willem Defoe and Tom Berringer. It's a huge success. It is, well, the Deer Hunter had already won for Best Picture, but, like, it is the sort of the 1980s signature Vietnam movie, right? sort of. And then, three years later, in the interim, he directs Wall Street, which is also a best actor winner for Michael Douglas. So, like, the Oscars sure do still love Oliver Stone. And

then 89, he directs Born on the Fourth of July, which not only is another Best Picture nominee, he wins Best Director because that was the year that Driving Miss Daisy won best picture, but wasn't nominated for Best Director. So Stone wins that. But this is also the movie that kind of turns Tom Cruise's career around and really, like, is a real milestone in terms of, you know, what the kinds of things that Tom Cruise was able to do on screen. It was a huge breakthrough for that. It was, again, another Vietnam film. And he becomes, Stone sort of becomes like the American author of the moment about sort of critical looks at the war in Vietnam.

And eventually American life, too, an American... Right. And that continues even in JFK. JFK is hugely obsessed with the idea that Kennedy may have been killed because he was intending to de-escalate the situation in Vietnam, and among, like, the other, you know, dozen ideas that JFK has about reasons that Kennedy may have been killed. A dozen being a very modest number of them. Well, yeah, that depends on if you're watching the director's cut or not.

Yeah, right. I love that the Doors also comes out in the same year as JFK and kind of scrubs the whole, like, fact that that movie was pretty much a failure. And completely, completely different in terms of focus or subject matter than anything else. I guess it's still sort of like is in that countercultural, you know, 60s, 70s, milieu, whatever that the other movies are talking about. But like, yeah, it is just a, you know, It's a wild ride. It is, again, though, like, a movie that really helps to define careers for Val Kilmer. Even, like, Meg Ryan, who was in that movie. But, like, that was another one where it's just, like, this woman, this actress who was sort of like she was the girlfriend in Top Gunn. She was, you know, and then all of a sudden she's in the doors and playing this, like, incredibly different kind of a character. And he was, in very many ways, like, you talk about natural-born killers as this sort of crux point between Stone

Stone's career and Quentin Tarantino's career. And, like, in very many ways, this is the point where, like, they cross paths, Tarantino's arc goes up, and Stone's arc, you know, with Nixon, you know, notwithstanding coming next, but, like, Stone's arc essentially goes down. And Tarantino really kind of, like, takes the hand off from Stone and is then becomes much more famous for doing the kinds of, like, he's making the kinds of audacious films that Stone had been and obviously doing his own thing with it. But, like, there's a lot of similarities in terms of, I think the Rodney Dangerfield casting in this movie is a pure Tarantino move, right? Which is taking an actor who we have a very definite picture of in the American cultural consciousness,

and placing him in a role that is, in this movie, essentially, it plays on that sense of what we had of him and then twists it and really kind of like twists the knife into the audience because of it. I think Tarantino sometimes sort of casts either very much too type or against type in a way that feels a little less pointed than this, but like it's the same kind of stuff he does in terms of like career rehab and like resurfacing these old sort of kitchy figures. Yes. The thing is, I wonder where that came from. I mean, you have to imagine that the idea came from Oliver Stone because Tarantino was so distanced from this movie. His original script was something that was way more Bonnie and Clyde focused and, like,

focused on these characters versus like the wholehearted perspective of this movie that is just media circus, right? Yes. But it does very much feel like there's not a whole. On the surface, because of the violence of the movie, there's not a whole lot that you could really ascribe to a Tarantino thing. But that is a smart observation that that's what does feel like it. Yeah, it's interesting that at the time, critics really sort of like latched onto the Dangerfield thing. I remember when I watched this the first time when I was a teenager, that shit, like, so through me and so, like, disturbed me.

And I didn't even barely know who Rodney Dangerfield was. I think I had only seen him in, like, ladybugs was the only, you know what I mean? That would have been my only cultural, you know, sort of standpoint for that. I mean, like, back to school was on heavy rotation in Early Comedy Central. Right. Oh, the Tarantino thing. That's what I was thinking of was, um, Tarantino's relationship to this movie is very particular and very, uh, at the very, very beginning because the, uh,

Stone essentially options this story, this original story that Tarantino had, that I believe he wrote before he wrote even his major movies. I think so. Oh, okay. Maybe it was after Reservoir Dogs. Clearly, by this point, Tarantino is known for Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction has premieres in Cannes in May of this year, but by the time Stone options this movie, I think Tarantino may have already had Reservoir. dogs out, but definitely was not like Quentin Tarantino in stature as we know it. Quentin Tarantino was definitely still like attached to people because the reputation goes. I'd be so much more

interested to hear Tarantino talk about it now than all of the, you know, comments we have from him at the time. Right. Things like he was threatening actors that he would never hire them if they worked on this movie. Well, it's really interesting because at the very, very early stage there's a quote from Tarantino that he's just like, I'm happy that Oliver Stone's doing my movie. I have no, you know, this is great. Everything that

Oliver's doing is fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And I think that was from like 93 when the film was even in production. But then, after the fact, we hear about, yes, him talking to, I think it's Tim Roth and it's somebody else from, Bouchemi, at least. Right, Bushemi. That they both, they wanted both of those

actors for either the downy role or the Tommy Lee Jones role. And I'd read that he had said something to Juliette Lewis, but obviously she still took the role. Right. But definitely Bushemi and Tim Roth, where he's just like, I'll never work with you again if you do this movie. He eventually threatens legal action because he wants to publish his script, his story on its

own, and the studio wasn't going to let him do that, and there was a whole legal pushback. And Tarantino ultimately comes out and says, like, I hated that movie. I would have never, you know, made that movie that way, yada, yada. And by reports, his is a much more closer to a Bonnie and Clyde type of narrative. And this is, I mean, this has elements of that, but it's more about, like, the American consuming obsession with narratives like that. and the toxicity of some of that. It's interesting. I want to know if this stems from some of...

Because Tarantino is not a member of the Writers Guild of America. He doesn't want to become a member. I wonder if he maybe tried to... If this is somehow linked to that and maybe he tried to get his name taken off of the movie because he only gets a story credit. Or, well, maybe he initially wanted to push for a screenplay credit. and didn't get it, and then... Because it was so completely overhauled from what he did.

And, like, you can also understand him being pissed about that, because, like, that's... You can and you can't, because, like, that happens all the time with movies. I would, frankly, much rather watch this than what it sounds like, Tarantino's version, would have been... I would be fascinated to see Tarantino's version. I think you mentioning that it sounds much closer to a Bonnie and Clyde thing is, I think, maybe not the approach to take to a story like this in 1994 where, because Bonnie and Clyde ultimately is, yeah, I mean, you talk about, you know, depiction is not endorsement and all this stuff, but like Bonnie and Clyde absolutely glorifies Bonny and Clyde and humanizes them and, you know,

not saying it shouldn't, but like that's what that movie does. And I think a Tarantino movie that is maybe more straightforward and is maybe less horrifying and disturbing and unsettling. I think that's, I think that's the great virtue of Stone's take on this story is he makes it, again, especially in that first half, the second half undoes some of this work. He makes it impossible, I think, to become infatuated with these characters or like these characters, essentially, because it's so nightmarish, and you would never want to experience what's happening in their heads or what, you know, or the environments they create for themselves. It's like this is a movie with, you know, a field of poisonous snakes.

And even the stuff where, like, they get married on that Rio Grande bridge overpass, whatever, where it's like the whole angle is this extreme high angle where you're essentially just like staring into this deathly abyss of a canyon. And it's just like, oh, right. Like, even at their most romantic moment, this is fucking terrifying. It's psychotic. Well, and it's also, I think, Oliver Stone at kind of every turn underlining that his thesis of the movie is our culture of obsessing over violence and true crime and consuming it as a product and it being sold to us as a product, too. because I think one of the other incredibly disturbing things about this movie

is like, I mean, watching this movie is truly like channel surfing, right? The way that it's cutting and everything, but then you also have... To the point where, like, there are Coca-Cola ads within the commercials. Yes. The Coca-Cola polar bear, like...

Twice. Basically, the whole commercial shows up at one point, and it is so upsetting because it's also... It's taking aim at a larger problem with, like, what we're consuming. right, where it's in between all of this violence, we're sold all of these comforting images so that it can go down easier.

Right. Or we're sold a narrative so that we can still manage to be able to be obsessed with this very spun, like, images of violence. It's interesting to me that in this year, this movie was nominated for a couple of MTV movie awards. But it, even with it, it being so explicitly sold to an MTV sensibility in terms of the filmmaking style, in

terms of the cuts. Like, this thing looks like a 9-inch Nails music video for a lot of its run. Trent Reznor famously did, was in charge of the soundtrack of this movie, and apparently watched the movie, like, hundreds of times to get himself sort of, like, immersed in the movie which is just like, I love Trent Rezner, but, like, it makes me never, ever want to be in a room alone with Trent Resner, to have, like, had the wherewithal to watch this movie hundreds of times, I can't imagine. You're saying you don't want his streaming recommendations during quarantine. Yeah, and that says a lot, because I'm very attracted to Trent Resner.

But so this movie is so attuned to the MTV sensibility and is so sort of ripe for idolatry from, you know, and I think maybe at the time for like that. very, very specific moment in time, I think there was a kind of fascination with, like, Mickey and Mallory, like, you know, Outlaw Rebel, like, murderers, whatever. In the imagery, especially in, like, the MTV set, right? Yes. Yeah. I couldn't really tell if I felt like it was adopting the, like, MTV music video aesthetic

or condemning it. It never really feels like it's calling it out by name. No. But I don't necessarily get the impression that it. thinks that that is all a good thing or that it's separate from the conversation that it's having. I think it's one of those things where the father forces the son to smoke

an entire pack of cigarettes to get and stop smoking. It's almost like that kind of thing. It's just like, you want this aesthetic. Well, like, here, how do you like it all the time and turned up, the volume turned up this eye? But I think it's interesting that even after that

sort of like initial cultural moment of fascination, natural born killers does not really have that long of a cultural tale. Nobody really ever talks about it. Now, certainly Mickey and Mallory are not cultural figures the way Bonnie and Clyde are. I think there's two reasons for that. One being the obvious thing that this comes in the same year as Pulp Fiction and it's dealing with this very stylized violence in a way that gets across the board respect, especially still now in the narrative. And it's not it's not apples to apples. There's a whole different conversation to talk about.

like the ingraining wit to violence that pulp fiction does and like you can go into a whole thing about that. So it's like it's not apples to apples, but for like certainly awards purposes and film history purposes. Like that is a huge thing for why it feels like we don't talk about this movie anymore. But I think the other thing is almost the immediate narrative for this movie is or what it's cemented as is a series of copycat. killings or Republican figures coming out against this movie and condemning it. Right. Bob Dole used this movie and sort of outrage over this movie to help springboard his eventual campaign for president in 1996.

There was a big sort of cultural movement of Republican politicians demonizing Hollywood as a way to sort of fire up their base in a way that still goes on today, but But we've become so sort of numb to it that I don't think it's as effective as an acute tool of campaigning, although maybe that's because it sort of seeped into the population so much that you don't even need to really say it anymore. It's sort of like stoked these cultural resentments that have kind of calcified in the right and the left. But at the time, like, you couldn't throw a stone without seeing a Republican politician call out some, whether it's, you know, Murphy Brown or The Simpsons or Natural Born Killers or the real world or like MTV as a catch-all term for like, you know, youthful vice. DeGeneracy. Yeah, yeah, exactly, essentially. So, yeah, it's interesting.

It is a little heartening to me that Mickey and Mallory didn't really. become, like, you don't see, like, they're not, they don't have their own scarface posters. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they don't have T-shirts. Right. And, and that's, that probably would have been a concern back then. If you like, I mean, you talk about, you know, this

rash of, like, this idea that natural born killers spurred copycat killings is, like, a thing. Like, there are multiple um, murder stories that trace back to, oh, such and such, you know, watched

natural born killers one night and then the next week he and his like underage girlfriend went and killed her parents and killed some people there are you know some of these high school shooters from the from the 1990s from the late 90s um natural born killers was one of those you know movies they watched and of course we've given through an exhaustive conversation in the culture about does you know violent media hold a responsibility for violent actions from people who had consumed that media, and, like, this is not the form for that. Or just people, you know, misinterpreting the very obvious intent of a movie. And I feel like the movie that gets that pegged to it is fight club. Yes. And this maybe feels like an even more pronounced example of that to me. Yeah.

Fight Club even does. I don't think Stone's being irresponsible in this, even if I do feel like the second half of the movie, um, his message gets away from him both because he, just keeps on hammering at home to the point where, you know, you stop feeling anything about it. It just sort of just like numbs you. But also, it's the thing I mentioned where it's like, I thought that the, an original cut of this movie or one that was out in the populace is like three hours long, A, because like he makes three hour long movies. Right. But also like, I can't fathom watching much more of this movie. The two hour cut feels like a three hour movie. Like, it just, it feels like you're watching it forever. Um, and I also feel like this,

you know, again, the latter half of the movie so aggressively makes the media and Robert Tony Jr. the villains of the movie that you can't, like, by default almost, you're like, well, if Robert Downey Jr. and the media are the ultimate villains of this movie, then what are Mickey and Mallory? Like, they're the ones. It's that thing where, you know, oh, these people are terrible people and they've killed and whatever, but they've never lied. Like, they're, They're, you know, honest about who they are. And, like, we've placed such a... They're the protagonist of the movie, but they never become more than an idea.

So it's like they can't really be the antagonist of the movie. Well, even in the fact that, like, you show their, you know, their origins, where, like, Mickey's entire origin is this, like, these flashes of rear screen projected, you know, violence and depravity in his home growing up. We see a little bit more specifically about Mallory's growing up. up because Stone presents it as this sort of fractured sitcom starring Rodney Dangerfield and Edie McClurg as her parents and Rodney Dangerfield to this like, you know, laugh track sort of terrorizes her and threatens her and gropes her and makes mention of

him having raped her and all this stuff. And you see, you know, it's very obvious like, oh, okay, like this is what, you know, made Mallory into Mallory. And that's what's starts the killing spree because Mickey sort of hooks up with her and they murder her parents and burn down the house and this whole kind of thing. And, but it's, it's,

it's interesting to me, the sitcom conceit because I think there's a, there's a temptation to view it from a 2020 lens about it being so obvious and so, but I think at the time, I think it does deserve credit for, doing the whole, like, we're going to explain how a killer became a killer, and we're going to do it in a way that is so non-straithforward, that you're not going to be able to have sort of solid ground beneath your feet and to be like, ah, see, this is what happens. I'm going to play a sort of armchair psychologist and whatever. It's just like, no, this is a nightmare. This is, you know, everything you ever felt comforted by as a young person watching television.

is completely now turned against you. And that's sort of a window into what, you know, that kind of a childhood might be like. And I think also revealing and kind of embodying and exposing the way that we mythologize the origins of violence, or at least the media did in that way. Yes. Yeah.

To be back to the, I don't think he's being irresponsible note, it's that very thing right of like I don't think he believes and watching the movie I think he makes a very convincing case for all of the things that he is showing us even though it is like in like rapid succession and it is very extreme he's not showing us anything we haven't already consumed before

and that people weren't consuming at a regular time. And that's where the indictment is. And it's like, that's a lot for people to take. I think a lot for people who don't maybe sit and think about what they're watching, too, or don't want to, you know, feel bad, I guess. This movie does demand a very actively engaged audience for better or for worse. You know what I mean? Like, it does demand, it demands a lot of viewing. No, no, it doesn't. Can we pivot to Juliette Lewis for a second? Absolutely. At any given moment that you want to say that to me in our lifetime together as friends, you can pull out that card. One of the things I find fascinating is just how young she is.

I always reminded that she's younger than I think she is. She was 20 years old when she filmed this. It came out just after she turned 21, which means she was 17 when she was Oscar nominated for Cape Fear in 91, but which also means that she was 15 years old when she made National Lampoons Christmas vacation, which is wild to me. Like, that is, like, because normally you're so used to teenagers being played by older people. And also, like, it's such a cliche, but, like, she really does have a presence to her in a way that make that, you know, you would have to imagine, she would have to be older than what she's playing to be able to play this so well and so intelligently. It also means that she was still a teenager when she was in husbands and wives in 92, which, like, is, like, is good.

gross. Classic Woody Allen love interest, 18-year-old Juliette Lewis. So she's 20 years old when she films this. It is a remarkable performance. It is like, it's so charismatic. It's so unsettling. She's so good at what she needs to be doing. It's incredible.

Yeah, like she's tasked to do quite a bit. because she has to play the idea. It feels like Mallory has to shoulder a lot more tonal swings that Oliver Stone is going for versus Mickey feels like he stays more of the same character the whole time. She's kind of very darkly funny sometimes. It's not just like a girl gone mad. You know what I mean? Like it could have been very easy to play her as just this like psychotic. baby doll and she goes so far beyond it yeah and like if there's something that's actually

like certainly not soothing but like compelling to watch through all this madness it's just how fascinated I was by her performance um did you read the story that uh Oliver Stone wanted to cast Tori Amos in this role yes and like she has lyrics about how she almost slapped him in In a sort of fairy tale Yeah, that's the song So we go along And we said we fake it Feel bitter with all of a stone

Did I almost smack them soon Right that night I don't know But so the story goes And again, the story comes from Tori Amos Who like, I adore more than maybe anybody on this earth But like she's definitely a spinner of tales And I'm always, there's always like, you know

There's the, you know she's fantastic and she lives in a world of fairies and I love her very much but she tells the story of how A, Oliver Stone pursued her to play Mallory in this movie which like I don't know what

that would have done to me you know what I mean to play this role like I genuinely like what is that sliding doors universe how do I feel about her music what kind of person does that turn me into I don't know but that he also wanted to use

her song me in a gun, which was from her 1992 album, Little Earthquakes, in natural born killers. Now, me and a gun is an a cappella song, which is about her, which is Tori singing about her own

rape in a incredibly raw and confessional manner. It is a very Loki song. You can see how that could be used to incredibly disturbing effect in a movie. like natural born killers, but that Tori really objected to the idea of that song with that

sentiment being used as a vector from which, you know, this serial killer would... For a man to tell the story he wants to tell. That's, yes. So, yes, so the story goes that she, you know, she refused him permission and she slapped him. And then she also sort of like, she continues... I mean, that's a disgusting ask of him. Oh, absolutely. And completely misses the point of the song and completely misses the point of, I would argue, her entire musical career up to that point. And it's interesting that in the same year that Natural Born Killers comes out, she releases her second album, which is Under the Pink, which is my favorite album. And she, you know, she succeeds and thrives and good for her. But yeah, just a wild story among many of them when it comes to

the production of this movie. But back to Juliette Lewis for a second. So this movie goes to Venice, again, three days after it opens in the United States. And it's a success, but sort of an outsider success. We can say that. I mean, I'm shocked that even then this movie made as much money as it did and was released by a major studio would fully never happen. Neither of those things would happen today. And like, I realize that's a very basic kind of trite thing to say. But like when you watch the movie, it's astounding. And maybe partly because it was such a controversial movie that, like, there was a curiosity factor. But I do also think that it speaks to the power of Oliver Stone just as a name at the time that even this movie could make that kind of

money, especially with what it's, you know, inciting in the discussion. Yeah. So it wins a special jury prize from Venice, which is essentially, as you said to me before we started, second place at Venice. And then she wins a critics prize for best actress and then also a special mention prize for her performance in the movie. And it's interesting and I think correct that she was the one sort of singled out from this movie. I think Woody Harrelson is also very good. Woody Harrelson is an interesting thing in this movie because you forget the fact, because we've known him for so long in his career has, you know, played a lot of different kinds of characters, many of them sort of amoral and villainous and whatnot.

But he's a year removed from the Cheers finale when he makes this movie. Like, he's still in the culture. I know he had already made White Men Can't Jump, and he had made a couple other things that sort of like pull him away from that persona, a decent proposal was the year before. this but like he still is very much in the cultural consciousness he's woody boyd you know simpleton bartender uh on cheers and like you talk about a movie that is you know a career move that is designed to you know completely explode this character who you've become defined by like this is one of those all-time examples of that he's terrifying in this movie

by the way. Yeah, I mean, I think he's great in the movie. But you're right that it took a long time for Woody Harrelson. And maybe this movie has something to do with it that he probably freaked people out a little bit. Yeah. I mean, he gets the Oscar nomination for People v. L.A. Flint shortly after. Which is, again, another sort of, if Natural Born Killers somehow didn't do it for you, like playing Larry Flint was basically going to salt the earth behind any of.

ideas that Woody Harrelson plays these sweet characters. But also he plays Larry Flint in a Milosh Foreman movie. I still need to see that movie. Oh, have you never seen it? It's a good movie. I don't know if it's something that I think about too much very often, but he's very good in it. Courtney Love is obviously very good in it.

Courtney Love is somebody I thought of a lot during this movie, even though I don't think there's any of her songs on the soundtrack, but every once in a while there's a music Q. And I'm like, is this Courtney? Because there's a lot of her sensibility, I guess. And like, and she had, she was, I think, close with Trent Rezner around that time. And like, obviously, 94 is the big year for Whole. Hull's debut album comes out this year. And, um, Kurt Cobain died this year. Like, this is, obviously, she's very central in the culture by the time this movie comes out. So she's another person.

You talk about, like, who else, you know, might have played Mallory. And I don't think anybody should have. Juliet was perfect. But, like... I can't imagine anybody else playing that. But, like, that's a Courtney Love persona, right? Like, Mallory in this movie is, like, you could see that. I could see that.

Mm-hmm. I don't know. Interesting. What did you think of the music in this movie? All those Leonard Cohen song cues that, like, really, like, chilled me to my bone. I know. All of the Leonard Cohen stuff is just, like, perfectly chosen. It's interesting that Trent Rezner...

had some type of role in all of the music in this movie because it's also very precisely chosen they keep using Sweet Jane throughout that just feels very much like back to the thing I was saying of building the mythos and how we kind of romanticize these certain things and the tools that we use to romanticize them Yeah.

How old were you when this movie came out? I feel like... It would have been seven. Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like this is one of those movies that sort of defines the age difference between us. So I can't imagine you were... Oh, but still, I had complete consciousness at seven years old of what this movie was and how people felt about it. That's how... It was a huge cultural flashpoint.

Like, everybody was talking about this movie. You talk about those things where, like, everybody was discussing it. Like, that's absolutely the case for this movie. It's also probably exactly the age that I started becoming aware of MTV and, like, cable television and being exposed to those things. Yeah. So I think if we want to pivot to what, you know, why this movie didn't ultimately succeed beyond, and we'll get into the Golden Globe, the Golden Globes in a second. But, like, I think the Pulp Fiction angle. is a huge, huge, huge reason why ultimately this movie didn't end up going anywhere in award season. I think it's weird because, like, separately, it's weird to say that Pulp Fiction is a more, you know, respectable, scare quotes.

Yeah, but it's, but it is. But it's a much more palatable movie. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And it's also, I mean, in some ways, and this is maybe not. necessarily to condemn pulp fiction because Pulp Fiction is what it is and like has been interpreted as such and like of course it's a masterpiece but like

natural born killers is you know exposing something that I think to at least a small degree Pulp Fiction kind of marinates in right and like that's kind of the vibe that's what partly one of the things that was revolutionary

about Pulp Fiction was you know having a wit about violence um aside from all of its interesting things with like narrative structure and like and pulp fiction also kind of it doesn't make as direct a commentary on the media but like it absolutely comments on our kind of cultural history with these stories these i mean the whole the title pulp fiction is itself sort of a meta commentary on the kinds of of stories we immerse ourselves in. And obviously, this is a story about hitmen and, you know, mobsters, girlfriends, and, you know, all this kind of, it's such a, you know, it's a malange

by nature. And it's ultimately, for a movie featuring any number of dark corners, is a much easier watch, is a much more pleasant thing. And of course, none of this is to say that Pulp Fiction received no controversy or no upset people at it which is of course not true but you're right that there's something comparatively to this movie which by the time Pulp Fiction had premiered

in Cannes so people had seen it and people had praised it beforehand but before the public really sees it Pulp Fiction's entering a cultural conversation that is already outraged by natural born killers too Yeah it's a really interesting timeline that way where like Pulp Fiction happens both before

and after natural born killers is. Yeah. Yeah. And like Pulp Fiction arrives to the public with already a sheen of critical acceptance, at the very least, from the film community. It had been from Cannes. It then becomes the heralding of this as the next big sort of indie sensation. It sort of defines the, you know, or at least takes the idea of an indie sensation to the next level. The 90s are sort of a history of indie cinema. sort of like leveling up and leveling up and leveling up again. One thing that both of the movies had in common was that Siskel and Ebert loved them both. And it's always an interesting thing with Ebert, how he's going to react to something this violent. Sometimes the violence of something really does just like turn him off and he, you know, closes himself off to it.

And Siskel is the ultimate wild card because like who, you know, who the hell knew? where he was going to come down on anything. But they, two thumbs up for natural born killers and then obviously they were both big proponents of Pulp Fiction and yeah, I think that was another sort of like

feather that natural born killers had in its cap. I think, you know, there was a lot going for natural born killers and then ultimately you just had to remember that just like oh right, it's like it's a revolting movie. Like it's a revolting experience.

to watch it. Yeah, I mean, like, that's the thing, that's the point of your palatibility thing. It's like, you leave natural-born killers and you feel gross about not only the world, but yourself and how you have participated in what it is chastising you for. And Pulp Fiction, you leave, like, energized and invigorated by... You want to watch all these other movies, the key references. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not just the feeling of it, but, like, it truly was a revolutionary film.

And, like, it makes you think about the ideas of, like, what cinema could be. Yeah. Whereas natural born killers is just like, we are compromised. Right, right, right. Go home and what are you going to do? Turn on your television?

Like, yeah. Oh, boy. I mean, even with all of that and even with the degree, I do wonder what happens to a natural born killers at this time for Oliver Stone. If it doesn't have a direct, like, competition, for lack of a better word, in pulp fiction, where it can amass some type of critical support

and get a discussion beyond that. I do still think that in a time like this where narratives around directorial intent are maybe a little bit more galvanized that especially if there's Republican, you know, senators and such speaking out against a movie if like there's a rallying cry to support a director.

Yeah. I don't necessarily think that's what the Globe nomination is. So yeah. Because if I think especially, especially in, you know, this era, the globes are going to be more susceptible to all of that pre-buzz or all of that early buzz than, like, how a fallout. Here's what's fascinating about the 1994 Golden Globe nominations is Oliver Stone gets nominated for Best Director. It's the only nomination that that film gets. And so that director field, it's Robert Semeckis for Forrest Gump who ends up winning. Forrest Gump ends up winning basically everything that year. Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. Robert Redford for quiz show. All three of those were both Oscar nominees for picture and director. And then the sort of outliers are Stone for Natural Born killers, and also Edward Zwick, our friend Edward Zwick, for Legends of the Fall, which, like, could you have picked two more different outliers in that field?

Like, it's, you know, there's Oliver Stone with just like blood dripping from the camera and just, you know, everything's a nightmare. And then Edwardswick is just like, but what if Brad Pitt were a goddamn dream? Like, what if he were just standing in a field of wheat, wearing a hat? His long golden locks blend into the wheat and he becomes the wheat and also Julia Armand. What if Brad Pitt was your husband's brother? Like, how quickly would you flip-flop and have sex with him? Yeah, that is, it's very funny. And Legends of the Fall actually got a few nominations, I want to say.

Yeah, we can't talk about it on here. It's a bummer. Yeah, got a, we both ride hard for shit like Legends of the Fall. Yeah, it definitely, it's Oscar nomination is for James Horner's score, right? Cinematography, at least, I believe. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you're right. So at the Globes, it gets nominated for Best Motion Picture Drama.

Brad Pitt gets an best actor nomination up against four eventual Oscar nominees in Hanks for Forrest Gump, Freeman for Shawshank, Paul Newman for Nobody's Fool, John Travolta for Pulp Fiction, and then eventually who gets added to that? Oh, Nigel Hawthorne for The Madness of King George ends up replacing Brad Pitt in that lineup for the Oscars. Also gets a score nomination. Does not get the screenplay nomination, interestingly enough. But, yeah, it's, that's a really, that's, 94 is an interesting year. And I want to pivot to best actress, too, because we were talking about Juliet Lewis, giving such a great performance. That's one of the weirdest best actress years, I can recall, just in terms of, like, what eventually made it to the Oscars, not necessarily that, like, what made it was bad.

It still baffles me that Jessica Lang in a movie that had sat on the shelf for years from a studio that had died, ends up winning, not only winning best actress, but, like, winning everything. Steam rolling the season. Like, nothing ever comes of it. I think, I've said in the past, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Jody Foster was only a few years removed from winning her second Oscar. And so she was essentially a not, like, never going to win. Never going to win for now.

Even though in, you know, in a world where she didn't have two Oscars on a shelf, I could definitely see her winning for now. Streep's in a genre movie So there's resistance to that Even though she's so, so, so good in the River Wild And I will never shut up about it I think she's fantastic I need to watch that

Winona Ryder gets nominated for little women But like she at this point Which is her second year nominated in a row After the Age of Innocence the year before But I still feel like there was resistance to her As being this sort of like Gen X girl Like they still weren't going

prepared to, like, go all the way for her, even though she's great in little women. I think she's an interesting analog somewhat to, especially for like this performance to Kira Knightley. Yeah, in Pride and Prejudice. Yeah. Of like, like, people don't take that performance as seriously as it should. I agree. As they should. It's a girl movie. So like, there's like... It's a girl movie from something that's been adapted a million times before, but like that still doesn't diminish the fact that it's great work. So the Oscar nominees that you, It's Lang and Blue Sky, Winona Ryder in Little Women, Miranda Richardson, and Tom and Viv, who, like, I've never seen that movie. I'm sure she's great. She's Miranda Richardson. I think she's almost always great. But, like, that was never going to really happen either. That's also, like, a nomination that is always, like, anytime you bring it up, people are like, I've never seen that. And that feels, even without seeing the movie, very similar to, like, why it seems obvious that she wouldn't win because. it's probably the type of thing

that's great work in a movie that nobody saw. Right. So yeah, Lange, Jody Foster, Miranda Richardson, Winona Ryder, and then the fifth nominee we've discussed before is Susan Sarandon for the client, which was a nomination that was like a pure reputation nomination.

And ultimately, I think it's a great performance and I think it's one of those that was like unfairly slighted at the time because it was from a Grisham movie that was not supposed to sort of, you know, high-end awards-efare or whatever, but she's so good in it. But it's definitely...

It's a real, like, movie star performance, too. Right. And we've talked before how, like, that thing is incredibly, that quality is incredibly valuable, but doesn't get respect. But it's very much the kind of thing we're like, oh, Amy Adams, we're going to nominate you for vice. We're going to nominate you for, like, whatever. You're not going to win this year, but you're going to win eventually.

But we're just going to keep, like, nominating you to, like, you know, string you along, essentially, until we do end up giving you this award. Of course, Sarandon ends up winning the very next year for Dead Man Walking, which is a much more Oscar-y kind of a thing. But, like, other contenders in 94 are really interesting. This was the year that Jamie Lee Curtis won the Golden Globe Musical or Comedy Award for True Lies, which is like kind of... If that nomination would have happened, that would have ruled. That would have been awesome. Absolutely would have ruled. Jamie Lee Curtis is really, really good and funny in True Lies. That's one of those movies were like, it's James Cameron. It is, it's more of an action movie than a

comedy, to be sure, but like Jamie Lee Curtis's performance especially is pretty comedic. So there's that, but there's also one of the globe nominees that I think is really interesting, besides Merrill, Merrill gets a globe nomination for the River Wild and rightly so. They also nominated Kevin Bacon in supporting. So like the Golden Globes were much better on the subject of the River Wild than the Oscars were. And I think that's a feather in their cap. But they also nominated Jennifer Jason Lee for Mrs. Parker in the Vicious Circle, which is a movie I've seen at least once I remember nothing about it because I think it's pretty boring. But like she won a bunch of critics prizes for that. And like she showed up throughout the season. I mean, even with people like Jamie Lee Curtis and larger performances that have stuck in the cultural consciousness, if you look at the award season, it's probably more likely that Jennifer Jason Lee was sixth place. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But this is the middle of a sort of inexplicable era where Jennifer Jason Lee is in movies that are definitely on Oscars radar that she's definitely getting precursor awards for, and she just cannot buy her way into an Oscar nomination. This is coming in the midst of shortcuts in 93, Miami Blues.

What was that other movie? Georgia. Well, Georgia comes right after this. Yeah, absolutely. But wasn't she in Last Exit to Brooklyn and getting stuff for that? So, like, she's constantly getting precursor attention, like, rave reviews. She's like, you know, actress of her generation, whatever. Yeah, Mrs. Parker is 94.

And then Georgia in 95, we're like, it's the ultimate, and this is no slight against Mayor Winningham, who was great in that movie. But, like, the ultimate, fuck you is Jennifer Jason Lee not getting nominated in Georgia, but we're going to nominate Mayor Winningham, the much more palatable character from that movie. it's wild. It's wild to me. And the fact that she ultimately ends up getting her nomination, you know, a decade or more later for Hateful Eighth is, again, almost salt. I hate that. Because it's just like, I hate that. But like, yes, like on a global justice level, Jennifer Jason Lee should be an Oscar nominee. But like, you couldn't have given it to her for any of these roles in the early 90s. No. I don't know. 94 Best Actress is continuously. fascinating to me. It's what a weird one. And of course, Juliette Lewis probably

was not near cracking any of this. I mean, it doesn't show up in... But probably should have, right? Precursor nominations, but I also... You know, in terms of performance quality. She probably should have cracked that lineup in, you know, a perfect word. Oh, 1,000%. I mean, she'd probably

be, of the performances I've seen, she'd probably be an easy winner for me. And also, it's like, it's also the type of performance that I think today would be dumped into supporting, because that's dumb. Yeah. But yeah, it would be dumb because she's, she's the show on this. Do you want to talk about Robert Donnie Jr. for a second? Sure. Let's talk about 90s Robert Johnny Jr.

I have to say, I didn't, I mean, he's third build in the movie, but for somehow I still. didn't capture that he was in the movie for some weird reason in my consciousness of what it was. So when I watch it, you hear him in voiceover first. Yes, you do. But he's got his like Robert Johnny Jr. Aussie accent, which is like...

Yeah, which is so arch and gross and intentionally so. Yes. But the second that you see him on screen talking, I laughed out of my skin because I didn't know that it was him.

I think that his performance totally kind of goes off the rails a little bit for me. But at least just the concept of what he's doing. Yeah. I think it's what the movie requires of him. I think he's giving exactly the performance that Stone wants and needs out of him. It's tough to call this like a favorite performance because like I don't know if anything in this movie is like a favorite. But I think he's fantastic in this. Like, I genuinely do.

And... I mean, obviously, it's a performance we don't talk about because, like, even I didn't know that he's in the movie. But, yeah, there is a lot to appreciate and kind of gush over in what he's doing. And that he can kind of just, like, fall into what is probably the archest satire that the movie goes into and do it pretty smoothly. Yeah. in a way that feels like a performance and not, you know, just a caricature. This comes in the midst of a really wild era for him. He's only a couple of years removed from his first Oscar nomination and best for best actor in Chaplin, which was in 92.

95 he makes home for the holidays, the Jody Foster directed movie, which he admitted he was, doing heroin for that entire film, and he's like very, very, very deep into his drug addiction at this point. He gets, his big arrest, I think, comes in 96, this first big arrest for that. The one thing I did not realize before reading up on this was that his, one of his trials where he was, you know, he eventually ends up like serving time and like, a state-mandated rehab facility for, like, a year. He was, his legal team was the OJ legal team. Like, the full OJ legal team. Maybe not Johnny Cochran at this point, but like Robert Shapiro, you know, all the way down. I also didn't realize that he, like, gets out of his year-long rehab sentence, joins the cast of Allie McBeal. I knew he joined the cast of Allie McBeal.

I didn't know it was like right out of. state-mandated rehab, wins a golden globe, like, is, like, hugely, like, revives Ellie McBeal's ratings or whatever, then falls off the wagon immediately, and, like,

David E. Kelly has to fire him from Allie McBeal. This, you know, this actor who had, like, helped, you know, turn the ratings around and whatever, and, like, brought it, like, this huge bit of success. And fires him because he, like, has, you know, completely fallen off the wagon and is, like, breaking into people's houses,

and Palm Springs and whatnot, and it's a whole, like, it's a night, you know, a real nightmare in terms of the 1990s in Robert Downey Jr. Well, we've talked about, like, his many comebacks before, but we haven't really, like, gone into, like, especially this era of what it was like for him. And it's like, I truly do think that he's, like, one of the more substantial comebacks. I don't think a lot of people come back from that type. Him and Drew Barrymore, I always feel like, are two of the more sort of, like, improbable comeback stories. Did you also know that Woody Allen originally wanted to cast him and Winona Ryder in Melinda and Melinda, but couldn't get bonded for either?

Wow. Yeah. Because that would have been during the Free Winona era. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, like, can you imagine, like, Melinda and Melinda is not a bad movie, actually. I don't ever think about it. But imagine.

And the, who he ends up going with is Roda Mitchell and Will Ferrell. Yeah, yes. Yikes. But like, imagine what that movie is with Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr. It's, uh, oh, the other thing reading up, I think the whole reading up on Robert Downey Jr.'s was like one more cursed, like, statement after another. But one of the things that had to get canceled when he ends up getting, going to jail for, um, parole violation is he was going to do a live stage version of Hamlet in

L.A., directed by Mel Gibson. That's... That's cursed. That is... The most cursed. He also had to drop out of America's sweethearts. So, like, one thing on top of another, truly.

All right. Yeah. What else? What else on our docket about natural born killers? What other... We didn't even, I think, mention Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones fully playing two-faced. I wrote that down.

I wrote that down. I'm so glad you said that, too. It is, by the end of this movie, he is absolutely full-on Harvey Two-Face from Batman Trevor. Harvey is kind of, or not Harvey. Tommy Lee Jones is kind of a really, I mean, the whole, like, grossness of JFK aside. Yeah, this is his third straight Oliver Stone movie in four years.

Tommy Lee Jones is kind of a good performer at camp. yeah this he is so off the rails by the end of this movie he's just like he's fully drooling in every shot he's a loony tunes character he's like yosemite sam promising vengeance on on bugs money by the end by the time mickey and mallory are getting out of prison there's a riot but oh god this whole and it's so i mean it's like it's obviously intentional we're not digging the performance i think by highlighting those things we're saying that he's great in this but it's so to what we think of Tommy Lee Jones doing. Because I think at this point, we just think of him as like this craggy old man or whatever.

But like he can kind of let loose in a way that I don't think has necessarily been discussed or like cemented as a part of his legacy. Well, because a lot because the other part of his legacy is the no country for old men in the valley of Ella. Like, I really do feel like the 2000s kind of cemented him as this very stoic, grumpy sort of persona to the point where, remember when in Lincoln, the fact that he was sort of like a little bit over the top, people were like, people really didn't, a lot of people really didn't care for it because they thought he was sort of like being a little extra. And part of me was just sort of just like, this isn't Tommy Lee Jones being all that extra. Like, we've seen Tommy Lee Jones be extra. Like, I just think it's, yeah, I think that performance is, you know, has a lot of life and fun to it, and I really enjoyed it. I think it's a good performance. I really like it.

But, yeah, I think this is, this is Tommy Lee Jones going off the reservation. And speaking of which, one of my least favorite parts of this movie, but least surprising, is the indulgence in Navajo mysticism in a very, very mid-90s way. It reminded me of those X-Files movies where, like, Mulder would go and visit his contact among the, like, Navajo Code Talkers or whatever. And I'm just like, it's very, very basic mid-90s sort of outsider mysticism. But it did lead to the snake scene, which freaked me out so fucking bad. when they sort of light up that torch and you see just how many coiled rattlesnakes are in that field.

To take listeners behind the curtain in like discussing the episodes we were going to do, Joe posited this episode, me not fully knowing the amount of footage of snakes that run through this movie and him fully knowing

my, you know, bone deep fear of snakes. So the only thing I think text him about this movie, was something to the extent of how dare you for all the snakes? I had fully, I had maybe, like, suppressed the snakes, so that's my defense of that. A lot of this movie made me think of other movies that sort of come either contemporary to it or after. Did you get flashes of the Doom Generation at all during this movie? No. It really made me feel like I wanted to watch the Doom Generation again, Gregorak's movie,

which came out the year after this with Rose McGowan and Jonathan Sheck and made me want to watch that movie again. We're more versed in Gregoraki than I am, so I haven't seen it, so that might be why. I would recommend you seeing it. It's real interesting. You know, good is maybe a consideration that shouldn't be applied to a movie like that. Yeah. But there's a lot of that movie that I feel like, if not pulling consciously from this movie, you know, definitely similarities. This also, this at... All on the ether. Briefly, in Natural Born Killers,

you get a animated sequence that immediately reminded me of Pink Floyd's The Wall, which reminded me that a lot of the boys in my school at that time were very into Pink Floyd's The Wall for various reasons that you might extrapolate from drugs and such, but yeah. also did you catch Jared Harris yes Jared Harris is there's a whole sequence of around the globe

of the like for lack of a better word standum for Mickey and Mallory and Jared Harris is one of them and I... He's such a fan. He's such a fan of Mickey and Mallory, yeah. Took me a second I was like, wait a second, who is that?

Like, oh shit, it's Jared Harris. Did this movie make you think of the house that Jack built at all? Lars van truer is the house that Jack built That's an interesting comparison I never actually watched that movie It's on Showtime a lot So I've actually seen bits and pieces of it a lot

It is not a pleasant movie It's one it's that sort of was the point of comparison Was just like it's this movie that centers this This killer And like the house the Jack built Has a lot of like weird style It just looks gross and grungy And it's sort of like almost like a

not quite a gummo level of gross and grungy, but, like, it is just an unpleasant experience for a lot of reasons. I can imagine. But there was, I did feel like, I'm sure, I would have loved to have heard what Von Trier's take on natural born killers would have been. I'm sort of just going through my notes that I made. Definitely wrote down Harvey Two-Face from,

Batman Forever. Oh, did you read, I read a little bit about the series of murders that were chocked up to copycat killings for National Born killers. The fact that one of them, one of these copycat killings was eventually featured on that oxygen show snapped, and then also a real show, both of them about killer couples. I'm like, that makes the movie's point fucking. right for you. Like, it's an auriboros of horror, just like, Jesus Christ. Wow, I did not see that in my research. That is insane. Yeah, yeah, truly. Oh, one last thing as I browse through my notes. The diner scene at the beginning, the key lime pie. Have you ever seen a less appetizing slice of key lime pie in your life? I don't like key lime pie. It looked like toxic. Jello pie. It did look like toxic. The green is not the color, not the hue of green that you want for a key lime pie. It looked so just neon green and awful. And like, oh, God. I love that anybody who had perhaps seen like JFK or born on the Fourth of July and like, you know, took some type of like Americana or whatever and like attributed that to or like mindful Americana or something

and attributed that to Oliver Stone and showed up for this the diner scene is like well if you're not here for this get out now I just can't again this is just like kind of a basic thought

of like I can't imagine to showing up for a theater like this and just being walloped with it yeah I also it's interesting to me the JFK comparison, where you look at JFK, and one of the things that's remarkable about that movie is

the cast that it attracted, which is like 20 name actors, like Jack Lemon and Walter Mathauer in this movie, Sissy Spaceic, Edward Asner, you know, John Candy, Tommy Lee Jones is, of course, in both movies, Joe Pesci, the year after he won an Oscar, Kevin Costner, the year after he won an Oscar, like, one of the most sort of like starry, snazzy cast ever. then you go to Natural Born Killers, and it's like every grubby character actor you ever wanted to meet where it's like Tom Seismore and, you know, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Olin Jones, and just anybody who's ever played, like Balthazar Getty and Robert Downey Jr. In the same movie.

Like, are you kidding me? JFK is already like a cocaine movie, but Natural Born Killers takes that cocaine movie and gives it hallucinogens. Like this, this felt very, um, intrinsic to JFK to me. Wait, did you know that Ashley Judd was in deleted scenes of this movie? Yeah, he like stabs her with a pen or something, right? In a courtroom. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Horrifying. Also Mark Harmon, apparently. And Arles Howard and Boris Karloff. God, I'm just like reading through the cast on IMDB. And I'm just like, what? Rutherford B. Hayes. Sidekick.

Fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. What else? Do you have any sort of odds and ads? I had to stop taking notes for this movie at some point because it felt like taking notes was actively, like, making me miss things in the movie because it just comes at you so rapidly and insanely. I want to sort of button this on the Tarantino thing, because again, I really, I couldn't quite get past the idea that this. was the crossroads for the two of them. And what does... It's funny to me that Tarantino publicly hated this movie so, you know, overtly. Because there is a lot of this movie that you do...

Like, I see echoes of in later Tarantino stuff. Mm-hmm. Like, there's stuff that in this movie that I feel like is in Kill Bill. There's stuff in this movie that I think is in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to a much, you tamer effect. Yeah. And just like that is a movie about violence, but violence doesn't happen until basically the end of the movie.

So was Tarantino a filmmaker who owes a debt to Oliver Stone? Is Tarantino the filmmaker that Oliver Stone should have evolved into instead of evolving into any given Sunday and W and World Trade Center? Like, what's, I'm, I'm not sure where to go with that. I mean, To a certain extent, I mean, Nixon is not exactly, you know, lobbing a softball or anything. No, absolutely not.

To a certain extent, I wonder how much of the controversy around this movie kind of... It's not that he strayed away from controversial subjects. Like, people were pissed off that he made World Trade Center. But then when you see the movie, it's much more... It's not the Oliver Stone who's... making this movie, even though he's, like, dealing with these subjects. I think W is the same way. W. W. is exactly the same way. Like, he, you know, came out and said that he wanted to do this movie while George W. Bush was in office. And, like, you

watch that movie, and it's like, this movie's not, you know, hitting hard at all. Why did this movie have to be made while George W. Bush was in office? Like, like, yeah. Especially the movie that it is, where it's like, this isn't interrogating anything. This is. It's a burlesque performance. Yeah, absolutely yeah yeah it is it is a standard boring biopic um yeah so i guess my thing is did quentin tarentino make oliver stone unnecessary i mean i guess what i'm arguing is it's not that he is unnecessary it's that he is not provoking yeah anymore because the interesting difference between them is tarentino for all his provocations never feels all that political.

Like, even when he's burning down Nazis and, like, you know, finding justice for, you know, slave populations or whatever, he never feels like he's making, like, he has anything political to say. That's one thing I think is true about the hateful eight and that it's capturing a moment and it's kind of embodying, you know, the, Trumpy culture and kind of trying to rub our noses in it in a way that I feel like is incredibly fruitless. Yeah. That's maybe the only one that I would pin that to, even though that's a movie I despot. Whereas Stone, throughout his especially early career, is so overtly political, has so many

things to say about Vietnam, about sort of American, the American culture of the 60s, obviously why he thought JFK was murdered. And then as he moves along, his point. political statements become, A, flatter, and be more muddled by what he's getting up to in his, you know, in his public life in terms of cozying up to Castro, cozying up to Vladimir Putin, you know, his, I don't know, like, did you, did you ever watch, he had made a television series for Showtime based on the Howard's in People's History of the United States, and it's so turned into this, like, episodes-long screed against Harry Truman,

which, like, fine. Like, if that's the American figure, you want to, like, you know, take down, like, go for it, do it. Like, there are, you know, valid angles at that. But it comes across just so immature and basic and just sort of just, like, not rigorously I don't know. Like, it just comes across as just like, if this is the level to which you're going to be politically agitating,

like let someone else do it. Mm-hmm. I don't know. I mean, yeah, to a certain sense that he did, and he's, a lot of that fuels into his documentary filmmaking that nobody notices right now. Yeah.

I definitely, it feels like, Oliver Stones is much of an artifact from the early 90s as all of this you know celebrity criminal culture is yeah this I mean like yeah probably more so than anything I've you know engaged with

in recent memory this is a absolutely fascinating time capsule yeah I think so too all right do you want to play the IMTV game Absolutely. Every week we end our episodes with the IMDB game where we challenge each other with an actor or actress to try to guess the top four titles that IMDB says they are most known for. If any of those titles are television or voiceover work, we'll mention that up front. After two wrong guesses, we get the remaining titles release years as a clue. If that's not enough, it just becomes a free-for-all of hints and film stock styles and aggressive violence. I love when the IMDB game devolves into aggressive. of violence. It's truly a time. Listen, I gave you both Derek, and you

wanted to be... Yeah, if that's not violence, I don't know what it is. So, do you want to give to me first, or do you want to guess first? I'll give to you first. All right, let's hear it. Kind of stumbled around to try to find people to do for this. I stuck with the Oscar year, a winning performance that we talked about that baffles us to.

To this day, is Ms. Jessica Lang, winning her second Oscar this year in Best Actress. Jessica Lang. Her first in that category, but her second overall. Any television? No television. Okay. Sorry, American Horror Story. Sorry for your efforts.

Ryan Murphy. Sorry, Feud. Sorry, Great Gardens. Okay. Tootsie. Wonderful in Great Gardens. Tootsy, yes. First Oscar, sporting actress.

Yes. Terry Garge should have won. Terry Gar will tell you that to this day. All right. Lang's interesting because obviously her career stretches back into the 80s, and you wonder how far you want to trust IMDB with that. And then in the 90s and 2000s, the roles sort of become fewer and far between. Is Cape Fear one of them?

Cape Fear is not one of them, Juliette. Lewis's nominated performance. Yeah, okay. All right, Jessica Lang. So her other Oscar nominations in the 80s are like Music Box and Sweet Dreams and Francis. And I want to... Francis is the only one of those I would try to maybe guess. Isn't she also...

Isn't she one of the farm wives in that year that Sally Field wins for Paisal and the Heart? I don't think she's nominated for that either. I'll guess Francis. Francis, correct. You have no one wrong guesses. Okay. Well, I do have one wrong guess because I guessed Cape Fear. Oh, yeah, Cape Fear.

Um, all right. Not dumb of you to guess the Scorsese, but in this case, it was wrong. Yeah. I can't imagine, like, um, it's not going to be like Cousin Bet or, uh, what's that other movie with her and Gwyneth Paltrow, where she's like the mean mother-in-law, remember that? She's like the mean mother-in-law, and isn't like Gwyneth, the, like, is it the climax of that movie

that Gwyneth Paltrow is trying to give birth and she's, like, either torturing her or, like, not helping her? I've maybe never seen it. Maybe I misread, like, the trailer, because I never saw it because I was like, well, I don't know, man. But, yeah, she's, like, evil, untrust. Musting mother-in-law. Yeah.

Okay. I feel like there's got to be something more recent. And if it's not television, like Big Fish? No. All right. That's your two wrong guesses. Yeah. Your years are 1976 and 1994.

All right. Is Blue Sky one of them? Blue Sky is one of them. Jesus Christ. The inexplicable popularity of that movie, Continues. A blue sky. Ninety-six, is that when she was in King Kong?

That is King Kong, correct. A movie, she played basically the Faye Ray role. Right. Also, shout back to our Naomi Watts miniseries where Naomi Watts played that role. But Meryl auditioned for this role for Dino D. Laurenti's. And in Italian, in her audition, he says, why did you bring me this thing and, like, called her ugly? Not knowing that she spoke fluent Italian and responded to,

to him in Italian, I'm sorry, I'm not to your liking or something like that. Fuck yeah, Merrill. Fuck, yeah. I love it. Amazing. That's an interesting, that's a really interesting IMDB. So her most recent is Blue Sky. Yes.

That's wild. One of the TV shows up in there. It's probably an Oscar thing, right? Because you have her two Oscars in there. You have her Oscar nomination from the first year that she won where people are like, she won for Tootsie because of Francis and she's, She wasn't going to lose to Merrill in Sophie's Choice. But then King Kong, like, nobody talks about that King Kong movie.

Nobody watches that King Kong movie. Yeah. That's crazy. All right. Well, well chosen, Chris. For you, I went into the Oliver Stone. Well, of course, trying to, there's a wealth of possibilities in terms of actors from Oliver Stone movies that I could pick. I went to a, we mentioned.

it briefly, W. One of the more unhinged performances in W, and thus the best one, playing Condoleez of Rice, playing Condoleez of Rice in W, a performance that must be seen to be believed,

I'm giving you Tandy Newton. One of them is television. Westworld. Yes, Westworld. Crash. The end winning role in Westworld. Crash, yes. Cool. Mission Impossible 2. Yes. Three for three. I hate you.

Okay. This is where it does get difficult. It does. For Tandy. Yes. Beloved. No, I probably would have guessed beloved, but it is not beloved. Okay.

She's like the, she's the lady in other action movies. She's in one of the Riddicks. I don't think Condoleezza Rice is going to be on there, because she's got to be, like, 12th build for that movie. Yeah, I would say. She's on some Tyler Perry movies. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to say for colored girls.

No, not for colored girls. So that's too wrong. Missing year is 2006. So right after Crash... Yes. Oh. Before Condoleza Rice. Mm-hmm.

This was the thing about Tandy Newton post-crash is, like, if anybody, I mean, Terrence Howard obviously did, and he's good in Crash. But, like, Tandy Newton didn't really launch in the way that you would expect, especially, like, she won the BAFTA. Wait for what, for Crash? Yeah. Wow. She was never in the Oscar conversation, really.

Yeah, it's very strange to me that there wasn't a supporting actress nomination for that movie. Also, I'd like to make note of the fact, and this will probably knock a couple possibilities off your list. But her 2007, her two movies in 2007 are Norbit and Run Fat Boy Run. Maybe not the friendliest. Yeah, I guess so. Run, fan boy run is so bad. That was what David Schwimmer directed that. Oh, boy.

Simon Pegg running a marathon. It's a terrible unfundered. Because he's so fat. Yeah, Simon Pegg. Big roly-poly Simon Pegg. Jesus. God, she was in Norbit. Wow, so she crashed in on Crash.

Cashed in on Crash. Cash in on Crash with Norbit, yeah. So the movie you are missing is directed by somebody who directed a movie that we've talked about on The Set Oscar Buzz before, like has been a subject of the set Oscar Buzz episode

starring that same actor. As the movie we talked about? Actor male. Yes, she is, I'm pretty sure, the love interest in this movie. Okay. Such as it is.

And you said Norbert was 2007, so it's pre-norbid. Yes. This movie is... It would have had to have been some type of prestige director if we were talking about it, and you mentioned it by the director. Eh? The movie in question

is a real fucking trip. I'll say that. Really? It was a notoriously off-the-rails movie. This is one of those things where it's the year is not helping me.

It's kind of actively not helping me. Well, what are things that a year can be helpful for? Oscars. Uh-huh. This is an Oscar movie? Mm-hmm. Okay.

I believe it had one Oscar nomination. One Oscar nomination for like a performance or a screenplay? Okay, performance. You mentioned an actor is the same in both movies. Was it that actor? Yes. 06. You were giving me the hint of seven pounds.

It's got to be the pursuit of happiness. It is, the pursuit of happiness. I've never seen the pursuit of happiness. You're not missing a whole hell of a lot, I'm going to say. It's a well-intentioned movie. but it is not terribly good. Seven pounds is the one I would watch of the two of them, just because seven pounds goes so bug nuts by the end.

Seven pounds is bananas. Listen to that episode. Wow, Tandy Newton. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not exactly surprised that those are hers, but like, there's, I mean, she's in solo. You know what I mean? Like, she's in bigger.

She's like the best thing about solo. Yeah, she's in I don't know Rock and Rolla She's in Chronicles of Riddick You were right about that She's in Chronicles of Riddick She's in The Truth About Charlie

Again, love interest In a action movie One thing I always forget That I know is She's in interview with the vampire She is the Yes The New Orleans

House maid That they feed off of in that one, sort of as the plantation is burning down around them and whatnot. What a movie. Interview with the Vampire. Cucka Pants. Yeah, so that's our

episode on Natural Born Killers, a thoroughly unpleasant movie that was nonetheless really fascinating to talk about, Chris. I'm glad we got our chance to do that. That is that. If you want more of This Had Oscar Buzz, you can check out the Tumblr at this had oscarbuzz.com.

com. You should also follow our Twitter account at Had underscore Oscar underscore buzz. Chris, where can the listeners find you and your stuff?

I am on Twitter, Chris V-File, that's F-E-I-L. Very good. Yes, indeed. I am on Twitter at Joe Reed. Read is spelled

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