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

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.

"self-aware" han't been worth points since 1995

It is tagged as a revenge movie in which the main character has decided to take bloody vengeance against a serial killer, he better be morally bankrupt or I want my money back.

"spent way too much time leering at the villain's sadistic crime spree."

That does get a bit too strong in parts of the movie and it does sag a bit in the middle. I was thinking at the time that Min-sik Choi is such a big star over there that maybe the director might have had studio pressure to give him more scenes.

wuh happend in 1995?

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1010/46229.1010.A.jpg

oh right

This wasn't very good but was pretty at times

like Ryan Gosling himself

found this pretty disappointing. just alternates between sadistic violence and Gosling walking silently through unpopulated primary colored rooms + throw in the occasional faux David Lynch surreal shot for variety. all style & little substance.

Kristin Scott Thomas is practically the only character who speaks & is thus the most interesting.

the violence in this felt so much cheaper than in Drive ... there was so little human interaction in between that it was hard to care. bunch of blank-faced ciphers stabbing and slicing each other emotionlessly.

word that kept coming to mind while I was watching this was "lurid."

It'll be on John Waters' year-end top 10 for sure.

Drive at least had Albert Brooks's fairly original gangster performance. And some cool driving sequences, although not enough of them -- I'm with the fast-and-furious lawsuit lady on that.

Refn was looking for a Rocket From the Tombs album, but he has skipped over to Lou Reed. He rifles through the CDs, then pulls out Transformer, the one with "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Satellite of Love" and all those classic pop songs. Then he yanks out Metal Machine Music, Reed's infamous atonal guitar freakout. He points: "First this, then this. There is a great satisfaction from going from Transformer to Metal Machine."

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9490223/the-career-nicolas-winding-refn-director-drive-only-god-forgives

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)