#robert downey jr 1994

[nostalgc]

robert downey jr in only you (1994)

please if you save or use like or reblog

[realzayn]

[guiltyonsundays]

say what you want but they matched each other's freak

[stevesxyellowxsweater]

Only you - 1994

Credit to the gif makers! If yours is here and you wish for it to be removed a polite message is all you need to send!

[bloopsstuff]

im sorry is it too much to ask for one night of me wearing a red dress with a young italian-speaking RDJ who’s kissing my neck in rome for the new year? i mean, pleasegod. please?

[famy-x]

Only You Directed by Norman Jewison 1994 USA

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[theethlezprincez]

[coffeeandbatboys]

Dark Academia (without the academia part) movies for a rainy fall day.

Black Beauty (1994)

Happy ending, gorgeous countryside visuals and a beautiful score by Danny Elfman make this one of my favorites when I need to cry.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Leaning a little on the dark comedy side, I love this movie, end of story. Downey is such a great Sherlock.

Batman Begins (2005)

Oh look.

Its a Christopher Nolan film.

With Cillian Murphy in it.

(Hehe What a sh*t storm BarBatHeimer would have been.)

[closetofcuriosities]

Natural Born Killers - 1994 - Dir. Oliver Stone

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Natural Born Killers (1993)

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Rated R for extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality (unrated director's cut reviewed)

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/06/review-natural-born-killers-1994.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

If there were ever a movie where the words "it's not for everyone" needed to be put at the front of every review like a warning label, it would be Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone's exploration of an "if it bleeds, it leads" tabloid media taken to its logical conclusion. Made years before true crime fandom made people like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and the Columbine killers out to be misunderstood loners with hearts of gold, or even before the Columbine massacre itself happened, this is a film that predicted it all, never mentioning the internet but recognizing that, even in 1994, the rise of "trash TV" was elevating some of the worst people in the world into celebrities. It was controversial enough in its day, and it has only gotten moreso in a world where the list of copycats inspired by the film (including the Columbine killers) is so long that it has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a movie where the only two people who are presented as even remotely likable are the two titular mass murderers, a young couple in love causing chaos across the decadent and depraved world that produced them. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the first draft of the script and was credited with coming up with the story, despised what Stone did with it. It is trippy as balls, a film I've seen called "the world's most expensive student film" for its out-there visual style, all the better to reflect the out-of-its-mind, media-addled world in which the film takes place, a snapshot of everything awful about the '90s tossed right in your face.

Even today, this movie still has the capacity to both shock and amuse, like Network for the '90s with a much, much darker and meaner sense of humor. It's the kind of film that many movies that try to be shocking and satirical aspire to be, and if you're not on its wavelength, it can be a very hard movie to vibe with. It's also a movie whose violence and nihilism can ironically make it feel like it's pulling its punches, especially with its two plots seeming to conflict at times, the legacy of Tarantino's dark love story peeking through Stone's satire. It's why I cannot, in good conscience, call this a great movie. Make no mistake, though, this is a movie that deserves to be seen. It is an absolute trip, the product of Tarantino's grindhouse sensibilities filtered through Stone's politics and sense of style that still lands many of the punches it takes, and one you're not likely to soon forget.

Our "protagonists" Mickey and Mallory Knox are a young couple who both came from broken homes (Mallory's shown on screen, Mickey's implied) and are on a road trip across the American West killing people, simply for the thrill of it. Between the shocking nature of their crimes and the fact that they look like a young Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, they have become folk heroes to a generation, the obsession of unscrupulous tabloids and talk show hosts who have made them international celebrities. A shootout at a pharmacy is covered live by a Japanese reporter, and a gas station employee recognizes them from the TV and winds up getting killed. The man most responsible for their stardom, Wayne Gale, is the Australian-born creator of the hit documentary series American Maniacs, and as their crime spree escalates he winds up joining the police in hot pursuit, hoping to score an interview with Mickey to air live after the Super Bowl.

While the film is named for Mickey and Mallory, a good argument could be made that Wayne Gale was the character who the film was most interested in. Even though he's not responsible for the deaths of 52 people in a bloody crime spree, he's arguably the biggest sack of shit in the whole movie, the man enabling the killers by crafting a romantic image of them as two deadly yet cool lovebirds on the run. He is this film's real heart and soul, an inky, pitch-black monstrosity evocative of Geraldo Rivera (kids, ask your parents) whose sins are all too relevant in the modern age of true crime podcasts and fandom. He may be played by Robert Downey, Jr., but the only things he has in common with Tony Stark are that he's a celebrity and a jerk. Downey is shockingly slimy in the part, a loathsome, self-congratulatory jackass who doesn't care how many people he has to step on to get his story and become rich and famous, a portrait of everything rotten about "trash TV", the tabloids, and modern journalism in general. The whole movie, I couldn't wait for this motherfucker to get what he had coming to him.

And then we get to Mickey and Mallory themselves, two characters that are almost perfect but whose presentation within the film ultimately holds it back from greatness. Harrelson and Lewis are amazing, make no mistake. They are perfectly cast as a pair of sexy, white-trash killers, and none of the faults with their characters are on them. In fact, in another movie that didn't have this one's satirical thrust, their characters would've been two of the greatest villain-protagonists in cinema history, and a case could be made that they still are. The problem is that Stone's main interest here was clearly in satirizing the media, and yet he all too frequently seems to buy into the romanticization of Mickey and Mallory that's supposed to paint Wayne as a bad guy and the public at large as idiots. I've often heard it said by Tarantino fans that they'd love to see him or somebody else film his original script, but in my opinion, the best of both worlds would've been a film that paired Stone's media satire with Tarantino's characterization of the two as unrepentant, irredeemable murderers with only the most surface-level charm. Have Mickey and Mallory as absolute monsters. Portray their relationship as a mutually abusive one, which the scene in the hotel room seems to hint at but which is never followed up on. Have more scenes of them on their crime spree, as opposed to situations where them fighting back could be interpreted as justified. Show the scene where they got the suitcase full of a little girl's belongings, as opposed to them just going through it on the bridge after the fact. Keep some of the deleted scenes of the survivors of their rampages giving their testimony. And, through it all, have Wayne Gale continue to ignore all of this so he can craft a TV-friendly legend of these two romantic outlaws roaming the countryside, only caring about the people they hurt so he can exploit them for ratings. It would've been an even sicker and more twisted movie than the one we got, but it would've cut that much deeper.

Instead, the film is ultimately just too sympathetic to Mickey and Mallory. The sitcom sequence was hysterical, a dark satire of shows like Married... with Children that make light of dysfunctional families by juxtaposing the real horrors of a broken home with a laugh track and three-camera framing, one that also makes for a nice villain origin story for Mallory. But in the context of the film as a whole, it's another scene where the two of them kill people (Mallory's parents) who completely deserve it. The opening scene in the desert diner has a horny jackass redneck provoke Mallory's wrath. At the gas station, Mallory killing the attendant who recognized her is a perfectly logical reaction if you're wanted for murder. Tom Sizemore's sleazy cop Jack Scagnetti and Tommy Lee Jones' craven prison warden Dwight McClusky, the representatives of the law in this movie, are both crooks. Mickey and Mallory drive past a random murder in the middle of the street in a small town. The film wants us to root for Mickey and Mallory to burn down the rotting society they live in, but it then condemns Wayne for making them look like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde burning down a rotting society. To put it as bluntly as possible, Oliver Stone, when making this movie, may have had more in common with Wayne Gale than he'd care to admit.

That being said, while Wayne may well be Stone's id peeking through, he is presented as an exceptional showman, and if nothing else, this movie is stylish as hell. In the opening scene alone, we get music video editing, the camera switching between black-and-white and color, and bullet time five years before The Matrix -- specifically, the kind of parody of bullet time that Chuck Jones and Tex Avery might've made for a Looney Tunes cartoon if you'd sent a copy of The Matrix back in time to 1939. Old-fashioned camera tricks and special effects are regularly employed to highlight the artificiality of the world and how unreal everything around Mickey and Mallory is, to the point that a magic mushroom scene at an Indian man's ranch was just par for the course. Stone went for broke with the movie's sense of style, employing every hyperkinetic visual trick he could think of, and it fed straight into the film's twisted "modern Western outlaw" vibe, especially when paired with a soundtrack produced by Trent Reznor that was rich with both classic folk and country and modern '80s/'90s alternative rock. There was never a dull moment watching this, a film that's constantly finding new depths to plumb in both the depravity of its world and its mind-bending visuals. Stone wanted to create a world in which people like Mickey and Mallory were the logical conclusion of every nasty, rotten trend of the early '90s, and while he may have whiffed on the writing, he hit it out of the park on the direction.

The Bottom Line

"NBK" is a movie I liked less as I thought about it more, one that nailed some but not all of its satirical thrust even if a lot of it is still relevant today. As a movie, however, it is an experience, a trip back to the '90s at their trashiest and most nihilistic courtesy of a filmmaker who knows how to make such an experience. If you decide to check this out, buckle up for one hell of a ride.

[cinematitlecards]

"Natural Born Killers" (1994) Directed by Oliver Stone (Action/Crime/Drama)

[queeringclassiclit]

Which adaptation of Sherlock Holmes is the most queer?

*not including House M.D. because it's not really an adaptation, or any overtly queer pastiches like My Dearest Holmes or The Adventure of the Furtive Festivity because that's not really a fair contest

[dalekofchaos]

Doctor Doom gets ruined AND WHITEWASHED AGAIN!

4 attempts to get Doctor Doom right

4

And we STILL can’t get this right

A master of magic and science. A man who rivals Doctor Strange and Reed Richards as the most powerful sorcerer and the smartest man alive. He rules an entire country with an army of Doombots. Considered to be one of the greatest Marvel villains. And they still can't get him right. They have to make him a fucking Tony Stark variant. Tony Stark is not Victor Von Doom and Doom is above Tony Stark.

Victor wearing the mask always is integral to his appeal and aura like Vader's mask. It not only hides his vain scars he caused due to his failures, but it closes him off from humanity and makes him believe he’s beyond it.

As far as I'm concerned Marvel Ultimate Alliance and EMH are the only good adaptations of Doom

Doctor Doom being a romani man with a background CENTERING his family's racial persecution. with his ethnicity at the forefront of his motivations and his tragedy. and they really just brought back Robert Downey Jr.

Being romani is INTEGRAL to doom’s character and without that he’s not doom. he NEEDS to be romani and played by a romani character. full stop, don't believe me? Read Book Of Dooms.

Since 1964 Victor von Doom has been established as a Romani character. His childhood was filled with antiziganism and his parents deaths were caused by it. This later led him to become Doctor Doom and overthrow the Latverian government to protect his people

I am so fucking sick and tired of this whitewashing bullshit and the ethnoerasure of Marvel characters.

The Maximoff Twins, The Ancient One, Moon Knight and now fucking Doom.

God fucking forbid an actual Romani actor PLAYS A ROMANI CHARACTER.

But no they pulled another fucking multiverse shit all so RDJ could return and it all feels like blackface from Tropic Thunder

I DON'T GIVE A FUCKING SHIT ABOUT ANTHONY STARK FROM EARTH-11029 OR INFAMOUS IRON MAN

If you wanted evil Iron Man so fucking bad, why didn't you just do Superior Iron Man?

The LAZIEST, DUMBEST, most CONTRIVED BULLSHIT casting ever, Marvel continues to not beat the whitewashing allegations. Doctor Doom deserved better.

Romani actor Charlie Clapman was right fucking there AND HE ENDORSED IT!

I'd even suggest Romani actor Óscar Jaenada as Doom. Again another Roma actor who's actively interested in playing Doom

And you know what? As bad as the 1994 movie was, Joseph Culp the first actor to play Doom in the Fantastic Four (1994) movie by Oley Sassone & Richard Corman. Culp was also white but he very clearly cared for the comics background of Victor von Doom

and you also know damn well they're going to erase everything about Magneto too that makes him who he is… which is his entire fucking background. how horrible of a person do you have to be to repeatedly disrespect the minorities who created these stories?

Doctor Doom is Roma Romani. He is not white. The MCU loves to whitewash its Roma and Jewish characters and it’s time we called them out for it. Dr Doom is not a white man, he is Roma!

They will never nail down the complexity of Victor Von Doom

Every year Doom goes to hell to fight Mephisto to rescue the soul of his mother. He finally won her soul with the help of Doctor Strange only for her to reject him.

No evil Stark replicant will ever fucking match the complexity of Victor Von Doom.

I don't care if this is a one time thing for RDJ. They specifically chose to do this when the fans were begging for a fucking Romani actor. It also doesn't fucking help that Marvel has erased nearly EVERY fucking ethnic character has been whitewashed.

Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver: Erased Romani heritage and whitewashed. Moon Knight & Wiccan: Casted non-Jewish actors. Sabra: Featured in anything at all, and actress is an IDF soldier to make matters worse.

The MCU is full of ethnic erasure, military propaganda & racism. it’s disgusting this is continuing with Dr Doom’s casting. remember to continue to boycott marvel, because of the genocide they support by casting an iof solider to play a character from the zionist terrorist occupation

Dr Doom is one of those villains that it should be IMPOSSIBLE to fuck up but wasting him on a cheap Iron Man nostalgia casting pop might be the way

[detectivejay]

I'm sure this has been done countless times, but polls are fun and I'm curious, so... For the purposes of this poll, I'm only counting shows/books/games/etc. where Sherlock is a main or very prominent secondary character, there's a decent amount of other Sherlock canon characters represented (at least a version of a John Watson), and there are some references made to the ACD originals. Not counting where he's only a relative of the lead but not a main (like Enola Holmes, RKDD, etc.)

Not counting the ACD original canon as an adaptation here, as none of these would exist without it. Everything else listed is adapting it in some way.

There's also some series I haven't watched/read yet but have been recommended that aren't on here yet for the purposes of space, including Detective L, Miss Sherlock and the Bonnie MacBird Sherlock books.

Feel free to reblog this for a larger sample size :)

[i-am-trans-gwender]

MCU and whitewashing

Despite Dr Doom being Romani in the comics he has been portrayed by white anglo actors in the 1994, 2005, 2007 and 2015 movies.

In upcoming MCU movies he will be played by a white American Robert Downey Jr.

You'd think Marvel would learn their lesson after the backlash of whitewashing The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and the Ancient One in Doctor Strange.

While not as vocal the MCU's depiction of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as white Eastern Europeans, despite being Romani and (sometimes) Jewish in the comics has been criticized. While Aaron Taylor-Johnson is Jewish he's not Romani. Meanwhile Elizabeth Olsen is neither Romani or Jewish.