The images rattle back and forth between high stylizations, almost recapitulating the history of film in every scene: black and white film noir, overexposed color, slow-motion, odd angles, raw videotape, even animation. It reminds me of Pauline Kael's great line about "One From the Heart": It's one from the lab.īuilding on techniques he pioneered brilliantly in "JFK," Stone shifts radically back and forth between film modes, not sequence by sequence but actually shot by shot within the sequences. Possibly that could have been a great movie, and someday I'd like to see it whatever, Stone and cohorts David Veloz and Richard Rutowski (Tarantino now receives only a story credit) have so front-loaded the meager narrative materials with sheer technique that nothing in it is felt, and the plot line all but disappears. One presumes (one can never know) that Tarantino's original thrust was acidly ironic: sleazy white trash with the IQs of turnips but the feral instincts of rabid weasels, wandering the landscape, blowing people away, covered by media that apotheosized them for their beauty and daring without regard to the moral compass. But the only thing they're any good at is killing people, which they do as reflexively as breathing. Originally based on a screenplay by a real enfant terrible of the movies, the twisted genius punk Quentin Tarantino, who wrote and directed "Reservoir Dogs" and whose "Pulp Fiction" won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is the most anxiously awaited film of the fall, the movie tells the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), two American kids from the heartland, trying to do the best that they can. Under the craziness, there's a worm of a story. He's just brazenly throwing the whole kitchen sink at the audience under a mantra of hip and daring the squares to call him on it. The point being made, under the coarse bombast, would seem to have something to do with that modern bugbear that has replaced "the system" as the generic target of opportunity for blowhards, "the media." Leaving aside the hypocritical irony that no man in this century has benefited more from media adoration than Oliver Stone, it's clear that Stone hasn't thought rigorously about the media, isn't quite sure who or what "the media" are, nor is he offering suggestions as to how to improve them. Oliver Stone thinks he's making a satire, but he has no idea what a satire actually is.
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