The tabloid media stinks. That's the main message in Oliver Stone's seminal 15-year-old acid trip through the blood red art of murderous horror, which is based upon a story by Quentin Tarantino and acted out by Woody Harrelson (then most-recognized for his stint on Cheers) and Juliet Lewis (whose biggest role to date was playing a similar character in Kalifornia). They were Mickey and Mallory, the Bonnie and Clyde of the 90s. Costars included Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, and Tom Sizemore. Ashley Judd and Denis Leary wound up on the cutting room floor.
The new director's cut of NBK is a mere three minutes longer, but it restores over 150 snip-aways which were demanded by the MPAA to lessen the impact of the violence. Playing out like a Looney Tunes cartoon for adults, the movie focuses on the mad love of two natural born baddies on a cross-country killing spree. As they elude (and execute) law enforcement and basically anyone in their crosshairs, they become international rock stars (says one fan, "Mass murder is wrong. But if I were a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory!").
Stone says NBK was his answer to the rise in tabloid-TV journalism which rose to the dizziest of dizzy heights in the early 90s. It's over-the-top grand guignol drama along the lines of something you'd expect to see — visually, anyway, in its psychedelia — from filmmakers like Terry Gilliam or David Lynch. But with Stone's innately stronger command of narrative structure, it's more than just a color-drenched nightmare besotted with black and white inserts.
I haven't seen NBK in many years, but I remembered a lot of it. Still, it was a powerful experience to marvel at the outright mastery of mayhem. This is cultural satire that stings, provokes, dismays and delights. Even though there aren't any cell phones and computers (or, very little) and certainly no PDAs or YouTube mentions, it's admirable that the movie is absolutely relevant and feels as though it could have been made today. As shot by DP Robert Richardson, mixing lurid color and grainy black and white, 35mm, 16mm film and Super 8 video, these technique help make the era hard to pin down… little-to-no Blair Witch shaky cam, Saw green, or Domino editing. It's its own wild thing.
The acting holds up, too. It's fascinating to watch NBK, having just seen, in the past few weeks, the stars' latest stints in Zombieland and Whip It. (By the way, in NBK, when Robert Downey Jr. is talking to Evan Handler, he refers to the TV viewing audience as "zombie land".) They are so perfectly cast — kudos to Stone for recognizing their talent early on and for exploiting their strong suits. As Mickey and Mallory they are caricatures with substance… not an easy balance to maintain.
Extras on the 15th Anniversary edition include a fresh introduction by Stone (which is also transcribed word for word in the thick, color booklet placed with the 2-discs), a previously-released commentary, and a fantastic new exploration entitled: NBK Evolution: How It Would All Go Down Now?
Stone leads the way in Evolution, but there are also some recent interviews with Harrelson and Lewis, speculating on the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, and YouTube yahoos and how they'd react if Mickey and Mallory were just now debuting (in real, and reel, life). The perspective and retrospective, in which every media whore (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) from Joey Buttafucco to Tila Tequila, and from smarmy Steve Dunleavy to today's biggest online muckrakers, is so zingy! Here is the rare DVD featurette which actually serves to educate and entertain. Brilliant idea, rounded out by several points of view, and nicely executed.
There's also an interview with Stone by Charlie Rose, and deleted scenes. While I can understand why it had to go and would have sucked too much air out of the movie, Denis Leary's pop-culture rap is breathtaking. A must-see, for sure, and great look back at the rapid-fire snark-rants he was once known for. These deleted scenes — The Desert; Steven Wright; The Courtroom; The Hun Brothers; The Drive-In; and Denis Leary — are standalone, and not incorporated into the film. (And yes, they've been seen before. Not by me, but they're on other discs. If I am getting this right, the only new things are the intros by Stone, and the Evolution featurette.)
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson