I followed the NBK thread here for a while, then started deleting -- too much info. on a film I haven't seen yet is something I could live without. But today I finally saw the film (at a multiplex in Maine where I was the *only* person attending the 4:20 show -- almost a sort of private screening). It appears there are camps who think NBK is the coolest thing since serial killer trading cards, and are laughing all the way to the next conference, where they can praise this film for its postmodern sensibilities ---- and also camps who think it is the most gratuitous and senseless spree of filmic violence since -- well, at least since _Caligula_, maybe *ever*. Odd -- the film seemed to me to be neither -- and yet both. It certainly is one of the funniest films I've seen in years -- but at the same time, also one of the most troubling. That's interesting to me, since very few films can make you laugh out loud at the same time that, in the back of your head, you are thinking "ho boy am *I* a sicko for thinking this is funny." NBK seems neither an indictment of our pop-cultural fascination with violence, nor an egregious example of the same -- instead, it is a kind of logical extension of the very media some seem to think it mocks. The "reality" of NBK is its unreality; its most "meta" moments are its most firmly romantic/modernist; if it's a postmodern film, it is only so in order to disclose postmodernism's secret debt to the ostensibly scorned modalities of high modernism. If Luis Bunel, David Lynch, and Sergio Leone had gotten together to make a road movie using previously existing footage shot by a busload of NYU film students on acid, this film might have been the result; it damns and curses, but its tongue is always super-glued into its cheek. Irony? What irony? True romance is love in the name of death; what can be more fun than blowing away random people whose heads become stepping stones in a manic pathway towards nowhere? Georges Bataille would like this film; if you can't have sacred sacrifices, at least you can have *spectacular* ones. I say this as a long time hater of Oliver Stone and his films -- this movie was the most reckless, most innovative, most stimulating experience I've had at a film in many a year. Sure, O.S. has an ego the size of the Trump Tower; sure, the hype is on his side. But having gone expecting to be disappointed in a predictable way, I found myself having the time of my life in a most *unpredictable* way. apologies to any reflections of this sort *already* posted to SCREEN-L . . . --Russell Potter --Colby College