Only God Forgives (2013) Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas

It's beautiful, reasonably effective hogwash.

you've seen it gukbe? read some cannes reports (prob in S&S) that wrote this one off as a misogynistic disaster

This is now available through video on demand services. Don't think I'll bother until it's free.

A lot of harsh words, and I can see why. I don't totally disagree with them either. Kind of misogynist, yeah. Doesn't go in for the type of revenge film it looks to be though, which is a plus. The score is incredible.

How's the soundtrack this time out?

Interivew with both Zimmer and Refn by John Hughes' son:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/only_god_forgives_director_nicolas_winding_refn_discusses_his_favorite_music.html

looking forward to a night of pretentious macho nonsense

one of the things i dug about drive is that gosling's driver only initially seems like a stereotypical action movie tough guy. as the film progresses, he comes to seem increasingly creepy, even inhuman. he's clearly the hero, but in that, he's as much travis bickle as james bond.

i watched this, its like nearly oppressively dour/humorless. right, transcending revenge or w/e ~ehhh. lotta cool hallways & wallpaper tho

edelstein's review: I thought it was just about the worst fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

lol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/only-god-forgives-reviews_n_3624095.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment

1. "Movies really don’t get much worse than Nicholas Winding Refn's 'Only God Forgives.' It's a shit macho fantasy -- hyperviolent, ethically repulsive, sad, nonsensical, deathly dull, snail-paced, idiotic, possibly woman-hating, visually suffocating, pretentious. I realize I sound like Rex Reed on one of his rants, but trust me, please -- this is a defecation by an over-praised, over-indulged director who thinks anything he craps out is worthy of your time. I felt violated, shat upon, sedated, narcotized, appalled and bored stiff. [...] I was repelled by this film in ways I didn't know I could be repelled before I saw it." -- Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

2. "The truth is this unwatchable atrocity can't be saved from itself." -- Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

3. "The new Ryan Gosling movie has to be a comedy, I think. The only alternative to laughing at it is napping through it." -- Kurt Loder, Reason.com

4. "The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in 'Only God Forgives.'" -- Peter Debruge, Variety

5. "The innovation of Refn's latest is mostly just in the way it manages to merge gory and boring. At least it's created a new movie adjective for me: goring." -- Sara Stewart, New York Post

6. "'Only God Forgives' is the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe

7. "This is the worst, least, dumbest picture made by people of talent this year." -- Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

8. "I thought it was just about the worst f--king thing I’ve ever seen. In fact, I was depressed it wasn’t laughed off the screen." -- David Edelstein, New York

9. "Gruesomely grotesque and pathologically pretentious, a diabolical horror called 'Only God Forgives' may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is unquestionably in the top five." -- Rex Reed, New York Observer

lotta cool hallways & wallpaper tho

Sold!

I thought Drive was strict by the numbers crap, some of the worst kind of Tony Scott/De Palma excesses allied to a schmaltzy, cute kid storyline & a bit of fashionable ultra-violence thrown in to give it a "modern feel".

"He barely talks. He doesn't have a name"

Refn should have hooked up with Mads Mikkelsen again, he can work that old trope to perfection without even saying a word.

Get the feeling I will dig Only God Forgives, despite it being shit. Also get the feeling that Refn is in thrall to Gaspar Noe, who is a malign influence on other directors, especially when they attempt to imitate black holes like I Stand Alone or Irreversible. At his best, I think Refn has more in common with John Boorman between his Zardoz/Excalibur period, with the potential to make a Hell in The Pacific/Point Blank if he got his act together and stopped miscasting conveyor belt aryan-nazi-hollywood-athlete-pussy-clarts who are too fucking bland to add some pizazz to his thin veneer of content.

Refn
Gosling

LANCELOT

Those huffpost-reactions are ridiculously over the top. Poll?

4. "The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in 'Only God Forgives.'" -- Peter Debruge, Variety

haha yes

i hope michael phillips didn't just leave a word out and really means that almost biblical use of "least"

i keep reading it as "the worst, least dumbest picture" tho

it's not as bad as all those but i support the spirit of them if they get refn to not make another 1 or mutiple more exactly like this

Sounds like this in a double feature with Belly would be wallpaper paradise.

Refn will probably make many more exactly like this. His funding doesn't really depend on american reviews. Fun fact: The budget for Only God Forgives was half of what Drive was. So this one is pretty wrong: '6. "'Only God Forgives' is the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe'

maybe he wanted to do something cheap

it's humorless when KST is shouting about her sons' penis sizes?

forgot abt that, yea thats not bad

its def self-aware ie. - goz to the cop "wanna fight?" > then they literally fight & goz gets beat into jared leto in fight club

Enjoyed it. Hallway scenes, single point perspective and set pieces were all cool.

otm, this wasn't half bad. not great, but a good deal better than the shameful artistic faceplant described by the emerging critical consensus. it's portentous and arguably pretentious, but it's also challenging, involving & strikingly beautiful (when it isn't hurling gore at the screen). i can see why so many accuse refn of misogyny here, but the film is such a deliberately obvious and overheated freudian nightmare that such charges seem somewhat beside the point.

i've read a number of complaints about the wallpaper, as though slow tracking shots of textured surfaces were intrinsically risible, but i loved the photography throughout. i enjoyed the relatively slow pacing, too. no matter how static, the imagery is almost always suspenseful, dreamlike and charged with violent/sexual tension. and chang's magic sword is such a great touch.

i do agree that ryan gosling doesn't contribute much beside his sleepwalking good looks. with a more engaged and compelling leading man, this might have been better than "better than they say".

i'm legit impressed by this thing's metacritic spread

those reviews are funny

how does this compare to, say Spring Breakers?

less boobs, more wounds

Watched it tonight and wasn't dazzled at all and I dig a lot of movies that are pure style. Haven't any of you guys seen I Saw The Devil by Kim Jee-Woon? South Korean directors shit movies like this out without much Cannes fanfare or controversy and do it a lot better.

I would like to add I still enjoyed it!

Haven't any of you guys seen I Saw The Devil by Kim Jee-Woon? South Korean directors shit movies like this out without much Cannes fanfare or controversy and do it a lot better.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Saturday, July 20, 2013 3:37 PM (36 minutes ago)

that's true to some extent, but the slowth, freudian ichor and lynch cribbings do distinguish only god forgives from the likes of i saw the devil (which is, yeah, a much better film). while watching, i kept thinking of ki-duk kim's bad guy, another film to which refn's can't hold a candle.

^ another south korean film, i mean

"i kept thinking of ki-duk kim's bad guy, another film to which refn's can't hold a candle."

Not seen that one yet and I thank you for the recommendation.

Like Gosling, really like Refn, and loved them together last time out. Really hated I Saw the Devil, though, so what are my chances here?

(Are any of the better S Koean movies of this type on Netflix?)

What I found a bit distasteful about OGF was that the female characters apart from Kristin Scott Thomas's "evil bitch mother" were all quite invisible. In one of his other movies Valhalla Rising, the only women in the whole movie looked like they were post rape and naked. Get the feeling Refn is a bit of a schoolboy with long trousers sometimes.

The only Kim Ki Duk I've seen is Pieta, and that one is horrible. It's everything the haters claim OGF is, but worse. So I'm doubtful that Bad Guy is better.

dunno from pieta, but bad guy is the best of the few KDK films i have seen

What I found a bit distasteful about OGF was that the female characters apart from Kristin Scott Thomas's "evil bitch mother" were all quite invisible.

this seemed deliberate, though to what end i'm not entirely sure. most of the women in the film are prostitutes or bar girls, and they're often viewed through obscuring screens (as before the opening murder and in gosling's later observation/memory of a woman on display in a curtained booth). the early scene in which gosling's character watches his prostitute girlfriend perform with his own hands bound seems one of the film's key images. he's clearly in thrall to his poisonous mother, and his relationships with other women are correspondingly stunted. he reaches toward but cannot touch.

i've seen only four of refn's films, but they've all concerned profoundly isolated and alienated men who relate to the world primarily through violence. women barely exist in bronson and valhalla rising, films that reduce reality to an arena of masculine aggression. drive makes room for a love interest, but she's viewed almost as a creature from another planet, an idealized condensate of feminine purity and innocence. only god forgives, on the other hand, casts women either as monsters or objects. in all cases, real emotional connection remains unattainable.

i don't know how i feel about all this. it's tempting to call refn's work misogynist or fascist, homoerotic or w/e, but that presumes some understanding of his motives. personally, i'm not sure where he's coming from, what he means to express, portray or communicate. in the past, he's seemed to valorize and even fetishize his brutal protagonists' self-imposed isolation from corrupt society while foregrounding the artifice and dissociative creepiness of his own art. here, the abject hero worship is dialed back (at least where the protagonist is concerned), but the disturbing unreality of the fantasy landscape is no less clearly marked.

"It's like pornography. I'm a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. What I want to see. Very rarely to understand why I want to see it and I've learned not to become obsessed with that part of it."

If people are interested in the role of women in NWR's films, they should definitely check out Bleeder. It has relationships with women and everything! Also, Winding Refn married the female lead.

i buy that to some extent, but it seems glib and self-consciously "provocative". when i was younger, i painted a lot and wrote fiction. one of my explicit goals was to express whatever happened to be inside my subconscious self in an unfiltered manner. i was obsessed with outsider & fringe art that, it seemed to me, allowed strange and disturbing suggestions to peek through between the cracks of apparent artistic intent. in my own work, however, i was never able to escape awareness of the effects i hoped to generate. i might fill the page/canvas with disturbing sexual non-sequitur, but i never got to the point where i didn't know what i was doing.

perhaps i'm projecting when i say that refn is up to fsomething similar, but that's nonetheless the sense i get from his work. if he's letting his id loose, he's doing so in a rather contrived manner. in that slate interview EZ poasted upthread, he seems quite precise and self-aware about the implications of his artistic choices (see quoted passage below). here, the interlocking symbolic structure is so comprehensively worked out,] that i take his claims of heedlessly "pornographic" pleasure-seeking with a very large grain of salt. dude reminds me of lars von trier and werner herzog: a born button-pusher.

I have this process that I really used a lot on Bronson; that was the first movie I envisioned as if it was a piece of music, and what would it be. I came up with the concept that it must be the Pet Shop Boys. It would describe the Bronson character, the sexuality. There was a sense of camp with the Pet Shop Boys and yet a very heightened, club-beat pop element at the same time. Very well-conceived lyrics and melodies that essentially [represented what] the Bronson character was. So I would listen to the Pet Shop Boys constantly in prep, and even during the movie, and went so far as to meet with Neil Tennant and see if they’d be interested in scoring the film. They declined, kindly, because they were on other paths—this is when there was still money in the music industry—but they were very helpful when it came time to obtain a song of theirs.

^ xp to Number None

get the feeling that Refn is in thrall to Gaspar Noe, who is a malign influence on other directors

Gaspar Noe is one of the people the movie is dedicated to, though NWR gives the first pre-credits dedication to Alejandro Jodorowsky, if memory serves.

noe is such a fucking waste

Watched it tonight and wasn't dazzled at all and I dig a lot of movies that are pure style. Haven't any of you guys seen I Saw The Devil by Kim Jee-Woon? South Korean directors shit movies like this out without much Cannes fanfare or controversy and do it a lot better.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Saturday, July 20, 2013 6:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I saw this, but honestly, was underwhelmed. the first 30 minutes or so was captivating, and the ridiculous 'cat and mouse' plot taht ensued seemed lazy, and disinteresting (in making the lead character morally bankrupt in waging a personal battle with a serial killer rather than arresting him/killing him and allowing him to take more victims, it suspended all sympathy for him).

agree that the first half hour was better than most of what followed, but the protagonist's at-best-questionable morality didn't ruin the film for me. i'm a james ellroy fan, and i like stories about people who lose themselves in pursuit of what they think is right. what did bother me was that, about halfway through, the film seemed to lose all interest in its morally compromised hero and spent way too much time leering at the villain's sadistic crime spree. by the time the narrative got back on track, a film that shouldn't have run more than 120 minutes had been stretched nearly half an hour past that. last 20 minutes or so were just as good as the first though.

an impressive film, but one that left a bad taste in my mouth. still prefer it to only god forgives, at least on the fist pass through both.

What hilarious scene?

Watched this. Quite disappointed but I find it odd that people felt such passionate extremes for it (but I've been confused a lot lately by extreme reactions to films, I'm still coming to terms with the idea of some people really loving Iron Man, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Stakeland, American Graphiti 2:Dazed & Confused and Poltergeist).

Not nearly as violent as I expected. Not much incest either. Some nice images and sounds. I liked the scene of the boy watching the man being killed. Just too slow and not enough good stuff.

Drive was a nice snack, Bronson was fine but Valhalla Rising is better than any of the former by a long distance, really lovely film. I'm curious about the earlier films like Pusher trio, Bleeder and Fear X (opinions about those?) and I really want Refn to be great in the future.

I was very fond of Kim King Duk for a while but after seeing 8 of his films I felt like I wasn't going to get anything more out of further films. But I am really impressed by how quiet and slow he makes his films without ever getting boring. He always gets the right balance.

I Saw The Devil is pretty decent but I don't think the ordeal is really worth it for any element.

I still think Only God Forgives is better than Spring Breakers which is quite pretty at times but too boring. But it felt unpleasantly mean spirited to me, as if the whole film was just mocking these shallow boring people. One big feature length sneer.

I haven't seen a single positive review of Fear X but I'm still quite curious about it- John Turturro, surveillance thriller (yes more of these please), accusations from multiple critics of being a Lynch ripoff (yes also more of these too).

I liked Only God Forgives despite the sheer dumbness of the psychology and moralizing just for the visuals: this is a really fucking pretty movie, you guys. And Kristin Scott Thomas, and the scene set to "Wanna Fight" (the track in 4/6 with the ludicrous gothic pipe organ and synth lines running up and down the scale) that just builds and builds for ages until Vithaya Pansringarm just casually beats the shit out of a character whose only defined trait is "boxing". I mean, it's not great, but I don't regret it (and I definitely don't regret picking up the soundtrack either).

fear x is really good

been periodically ~thinking abt~ fear x since seeing it, stumbled upon this -http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/fear_x/

― johnny crunch, Monday, November 18, 2013 5:16 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pusher 2 + 3 are elevated above average genre pics by brilliant central performances from Mikkelsen and Burik, but I suppose tbh they are just above average genre pics but there is nothing wrong with that. Mikkelsen brings a lot of pathos to the heroically stupid Tonny character. Will have to give Fear X a dabble, I let the bad reviews dissuade me.

the refn doc 'my life' is p good, interesting that just days before shooting started for OGF he sez 'I don't even know what this movie's about' & he reads one of those super negative reviews upthread on camera

also further confirms gosling as an all-time bro

oh man I couldn't stand that piece of shit

xp should say "& LATER he reads.." the neg review, yknow after hes made the fim

film!

I love the fact that there has been made three docs on Refn. I think at least one of them was made due to money problem. The guy can be so good, but when he fails, he fails hard.

I might have said this before, but the best 'doc' on Refn was this long interview he did over several nights on a weird Danish late night show some time ago. It was before Drive, before Bronson, I think, at a time where his carreer was going nowhere, and the whole interview was the host asking him to explain, in detail, how he ended up as such a failure. I remember Nicolas ended up breaking down in tears, which made the host smile gloatingly as if that was the entire point. Now, it was probably staged, but it's absolutely incredible. And I can't find it. And it needs to end up as a dvd-extra on something.

refn seems to be kind of positioning himself as a von trier-like "personality" as much as a film director, or at least that's how it appears from over here

I wish the last doc had shown how his wife despises his films; it looked like it was going to!

She's been in a couple of them, so I guess she likes those?

maybe she just likes hanging out w/ her husband.

Reminds me of Gilliam laughing as he tells us how his wife thinks his films have went to shit.

terry gilliam's wife OTM

Knew that was coming but apart from Brothers Grimm and bits of Parnassus, I disagree.

Cut-and-paste reviews of this one and you have the reviews of the new one.

Refn's gonna Refn.

The new bad movie deserves its own thread.

The reviews I've seen have been more positive than ones for OGF, but I'm not ready to trust him again.

If there is god, he would not forgive Only God Forgives. Utter trash

If there is god, he would not forgive Only God Forgives. Utter trash

Fuck sorry for double post. Should've said he/she (recovering christian)