THE NEON DEMON (France/US/Denmark - 2016) Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Written by Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham. Cast: Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Desmond Harrington, Alessandro Nivola, Charles Baker, Jamie Clayton, Stacey Danger. (R, 118 mins) With his latest film THE NEON DEMON, DRIVE director and cult filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is aspiring to be the same kind of poking-with-a-stick provocateur as his fellow Danish countryman Lars von Trier. Refn's last film, 2013's hypnotic and hyper-stylized masterpiece ONLY GOD FORGIVES (infamously booed at Cannes, which is essentially a badge of honor, if not the entire endgame to guys like Refn and von Trier) is a key influence here, at least in terms of the throbbing synth score by Cliff Martinez, the obsessive perfectionism of the Kubrickian shot composition, and the red and blue Dario Argento colorgasms. But THE NEON DEMON is Refn's worst film, a huge disappointment that looks like the equivalent of an ONLY GOD FORGIVES B-side, with the visual and aural elements crammed into a puerile, simplistic, and embarrassingly heavy-handed metaphorical allegory that's part supernatural spin on BLACK SWAN and part good vs. evil lecture on whatever it takes to get ahead in the Los Angeles modeling world. One senses around 3/4 of the way through that it's all a goof to amuse Refn, no doubt chuckling to himself thinking about how cineastes will sift through every last bit of faux symbolism and gawk in astonishment at some of the shocking imagery on display. Sure, THE NEON DEMON is the most transgressive summer release to hit mainstream multiplex chains in years, but it feels like lukewarm leftovers otherwise: Refn seems like he's just copying himself, and even the score sounds familiar and uninspired. The busy Martinez--a former drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers back in the Freaky Styley days-- has composed some of the most memorable film music of the last several years, but even he appears to be on autopilot here, with only the sights and sounds of an early club scene hitting the exhilarating, intoxicating heights of DRIVE and ONLY GOD FORGIVES.
A proverbial wide-eyed innocent just off the bus and on her own on the mean streets of L.A., Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a 16-year-old orphan posing as 19--"18 is too on-the-nose," she's told by her agent (Christina Hendricks)--and trying to make it in modeling. She befriends nice-guy photographer Dean (Karl Glusman of Gaspar Noe's LOVE), who takes some shots for her portfolio, and at a test shoot, she meets makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone, in the film's best performance). Ruby senses Jesse is something special, and more or less takes her under her wing, advising her how to navigate the pit of vipers that is the world of fashion modeling. A natural beauty of virginal purity who catches the eye of every photographer and designer she meets, Jesse quickly earns the jealous derision of Ruby's friends Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), models in their very early 20s who have undergone extensive cosmetic surgery and are quickly aging their way out of the business. It doesn't take long before Jesse is well on her way to becoming the next big thing after a photo shoot with starmaker Jack (Desmond Harrington) and closing the latest show by L.A.'s hottest fashion designer (Alessandro Nivola). It's the designer who drives home the notion that "Beauty isn't everything...it's the only thing," passive-aggressively chastising Gigi and her cosmetic artifice. As Jesse is indoctrinated--in an almost ritualistic, sacrificial way--into this new world, she rejects the sincere affections of both Dean and Ruby, starts lording her gift of beauty over others, and the seething Gigi and Sarah decide they've had enough of the ingenue usurping the attention and adoration for which they've had themselves almost completely surgically reconstructed but have yet to reap the benefits.
I suppose it's some kind of auto-critique that a film calling out the shallowness of surface beauty is all shallow surface itself. THE NEON DEMON is an exercise in tedium for its first 90 minutes, riddled with cliches and going nowhere slowly, and by the time the really sick and twisted shit starts in the last half hour, it doesn't come off as shocking, but rather, juvenile and attention-seeking. Refn has nothing new to say here about L.A., fashion, or fame--he's just trying to outrage people and get a reaction. All the foreshadowing about "fresh meat" and the like should give you an idea of where at least some things are going, and it ultimately plays like an unfilmable short story from the halcyon days of splatterpunk, a lot of stuff that reads better on the page than it can possibly play out on the screen. Refn manages to create a few striking images here and there, mostly in the early going (the aforementioned club scene is a highlight), and Hendricks has a memorably acidic line about small-town girls pursuing modeling because "some guy named Chad in the food court told them they were beautiful enough to be a model." But there's an awful lot of very little otherwise, from extraneous supporting characters who serve little or no purpose (Glusman's Dean is absent for long stretches, then just vanishes altogether, and Keanu Reeves seems to have put in a day's work tops, as the repugnant manager of the fleabag motel where Jesse lives) to its painfully obvious metaphor for the way "the scene" chews up the naive innocents and spits them out. There's absolutely no doubt that a cult will form around this and I'm not ruling out another look at it down the line, but this seems like it's all smoke and mirrors, with Refn making a lot of noise but having very little to say.
Legendary Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has been best-known for his surrealistic midnight movie classics EL TOPO (1970) and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), as well as his 1989 masterpiece SANTA SANGRE. Now, however, at the age of 84, he's gotten the most attention of his career for a film he didn't make, an abandoned adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 sci-fi novel Dune. Jodorowsky and French producer Michel Seydoux began putting their DUNE together over 1974-75, with the director given carte blanche by the producer with a then-enormous $15 million budget. Jodorowsky's ambitions for the project almost went beyond what cinema of the time deemed capable--he wanted the film to resemble an acid trip without actually dropping acid--and he began to assemble a team of what he called "spiritual warriors" with the ability to pull it off. He commissioned artists like H.R. Giger, Jean Giraud (aka "Moebius"), and Chris Foss to design elaborate storyboards compiled in a tome thicker than a phone book, copies of which were eventually shipped to Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky got Pink Floyd and French prog band Magma to compose the music, and DARK STAR's Dan O'Bannon to design the special effects after declaring 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's Douglas Trumbull too "technical" and not spiritual enough. He secured what would've been a once-in-a-lifetime cast including Salvador Dali as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Jodorowsky's son Brontis as Duke's son Paul Atreides, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, plus Udo Kier, Dali muse Amanda Lear, and Gloria Swanson. With the script, crew, and cast already locked down, Jodorowsky and Seydoux sought $5 million in additional financing from a Hollywood studio and the project--and Jodorowsky's dream--promptly collapsed. Studio execs balked at the extent of the filmmaker's vision and the lack of commercial appeal. The studios liked the storyboards but felt Jodorowsky, based on his sales pitch and his past films, was too "out there" and too unwilling to compromise. They wanted a 90-minute sci-fi movie, where Jodorowsky's script, if shot as it was, would've led to a film running at least 12 hours. With Jodorowsky and Seydoux unable to obtain further funding to construct the sets and begin filming, their DUNE was cancelled in pre-production, and the two men parted ways.
Documentary director Frank Pavich ultimately presents JODOROWSKY'S DUNE as a classic "art vs. commerce" scenario, with the gregarious but obsessive Jodorowsky committed to the DUNE he wanted to make and not really interested in how much money it would cost or lose. Only when the subject of money comes up does Jodorowsky demonstrate any bitterness and resentment, grabbing a wad of cash out of his pocket and bemoaning that "it's just paper...it has no soul." Of course, DUNE was eventually made by David Lynch for Dino De Laurenttis in 1984, and though Jodorowsky says he admires Lynch greatly, he was happy that he found the Lynch film "terrible." Jodorowsky's DUNE exists only as an epic storyboard book, and Pavich, via animation, plays out a number of the sequences in a film that never was. What's very intriguing is how much imagery and ideas in these storyboards ended up in other movies: O'Bannon, Giger, and Foss all worked on ALIEN (1979), and the influence in some of the designs, even in the much later ALIEN-related PROMETHEUS (2012) is obvious when you see the work they did for Jodorowsky. DRIVE director Nicolas Winding Refn states "His DUNE never got made, but its fingerprints are all over other movies that came after. If he made DUNE, history is changed. You wouldn't have ALIEN, and without that, you wouldn't have BLADE RUNNER or THE MATRIX," adding that the Hollywood studios were "afraid" of Jodorowsky and how his DUNE would've changed everything. Jodorowsky's storyboards circulated around Hollywood for years and Pavich shows that designs and artwork in them are apparent in numerous future films from that time, from STAR WARS (1977) to FLASH GORDON (1980) to THE TERMINATOR (1984), and the later CONTACT (1997). Pavich lets Jodorowsky speak at length and the film is just as much about his failed, would-be game-changer as it is his dedication to his art itself, which he conveys without ever coming off as pompous or pretentious, often telling great stories like one where he gets a firm commitment Welles by promising to hire his favorite chef to prepare his meals daily (some of the filmmaker's stories sound a little suspect, especially in the way he never seems to know how to contact the people he wants but instead keeps happening to bump into them somewhere in Paris). JODOROWSKY'S DUNE is a fascinating film that contemplates just how much film history might've been altered if Hollywood was willing to take a chance on one man's impossibly audacious and quite possibly lunatic vision. (PG-13, 90 mins)
STAGE FRIGHT (Canada/US - 2014)
This blood-splattered horror musical gets off to a solid start with a very Dario Argento/OPERA-esque prologue and a legitimately inspired opening credits production number before rapidly exhausting every bit of its gimmick. Films like Brian De Palma's classic PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974) and SAW II, III, and IV director Darren Lynn Bousman's more recent REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA (2008) have done the horror musical thing in a stronger fashion in the past, and regardless of how you felt about REPO, at least it was sincere and stuck to its convictions, right down to the casting of Sarah Brightman in a key role. STAGE FRIGHT can't decide if it wants to be a legitimate musical or one that's ironically bad-on-purpose, with a killer who uses a butcher knife as a capo before a shredding guitar solo as he shrieks like a laryngitic Rob Halford-by-way-of-Axl Rose while offing his victims. The novelty wears off quickly, though writer/director Jerome Sable does a nice job with some of the outrageously gory giallo-derived killings. Teenager Camilla (Allie MacDonald) and her twin brother Buddy (Douglas Smith) work in the kitchen at Center Stage, a summer performing arts camp for kids run by the manager (Meat Loaf) of their late mother Kylie Swanson (Minnie Driver), a beloved stage star brutally murdered ten years earlier by a masked killer in the opening sequence. This summer's Center Stage production is the musical The Haunting of the Opera, which, of course, was Kylie's last production. Camilla tries out for the lead role to honor the memory of her mom, and naturally gets the part, and before long, the same masked killer--looking like a refugee from the EYES WIDE SHUT orgy--starts murdering those behind the production one by one. STAGE FRIGHT sometimes resembles an old-school '80s splatterfest and would probably function better as such, but after the opening credits (done in the John Carpenter font), the musical numbers do nothing but slow things down, making this fairly short film seem much longer than it is. Some of the killings are imaginative, and MacDonald is an appealing final girl, but the killer's identity and an accompanying twist are both obvious. A passable time-killer, but if you feel the need to watch a slasher film titled STAGE FRIGHT, where members of a theater troupe are dispatched one-by-one, you're better off checking out Argento protege Michele Soavi's identically-titled 1987 cult classic again instead. (R, 88 mins)
Written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Cast: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm, Rhatha Phongam, Gordon Brown, Tom Burke, Byron Gibson, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Kovit Wattanikul. (R, 87 mins)
Anyone who expressed concern that polarizing Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn would go mainstream after his 2011 American debut DRIVE can rest easy. His latest, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, might reunite him with DRIVE star Ryan Gosling, but it sprints pretty far away from commercial cinema, probably ending up as more of a companion piece of sorts to Refn's VALHALLA RISING (2010). ONLY GOD FORGIVES got some pretty toxic word of mouth after being booed at Cannes, and most American critics have expressed vehemently negative opinions of it (for what it's worth, Rex Reed declared it "one of the five worst movies ever made," which, given Reed's sunken rep, should actually be used as a positive blurb right out of the David Lynch playbook). This is unquestionably a divisive film that isn't meant for multiplex consumption. If you're looking for narrative, plot, a fast pace, or DRIVE II or some kind of accessible Gosling vehicle, then you'd best steer clear. It's decidedly not for everyone, but if you approach it with an open mind and the idea that it's a Nicolas Winding Refn and if you give it time to settle in and allow yourself to get accustomed to its style and its rhythms--and if you have a strong stomach--you may find ONLY GOD FORGIVES to be a richly rewarding experience.
Chances are there won't be another 2013 film that looks better than this one. Refn dedicates it to still-with-us EL TOPO and SANTA SANGRE director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and gives an additional shout-out to IRREVERSIBLE and ENTER THE VOID director Gaspar Noe, and while there's indisputable nods to both filmmakers, ONLY GOD FORGIVES struck me as Refn's Kubrick film. The cinematographer is Larry Smith, and this isn't the first time he's been recruited by Refn--he also shot 2003's misunderstood FEAR X and 2009's BRONSON. Smith is a former Kubrick associate, having shot his last film, 1999's EYES WIDE SHUT, in addition to working on the camera crew for BARRY LYNDON (1975) and THE SHINING (1980). FEAR X had elements of Refn mimicking Kubrick's cold and detached style, but Refn and Smith take that even further with ONLY GOD FORGIVES. I'm not one to throw around terms like mise-en-scene very often, but the tracking shots, intricate compositions, the almost obsessive detail, the visual and thematic dualities, and the way that everything in every shot is positioned where it is for a specific reason is vital to a proper experience of this film. If you're just looking for the plot, you're going to miss what Refn is doing here. It's a character study told in the most visual of means--through the framing, the colors, the camera movement, the editing, the timing, the cutting. He utilizes a lot of Kubrickian editing techniques that recall the legendary bone-to-space station cut in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). From a story standpoint, ONLY GOD FORGIVES is a fairly standard B-movie revenge/redemption saga. It doesn't break any new ground in that department. But it's Refn's crowning achievement thus far in terms of purely visual, symbolic, cinematic storytelling.
In Bangkok, depraved American boxing club owner/drug dealer Billy (Tom Burke) brutally kills a 16-year-old prostitute. Lounge-singing, sword-wielding renegade warrior cop Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) allows the girl's father Choi (Kovit Wattanikul) to kill Billy. Billy's quiet, withdrawn brother Julian (Gosling), who also works in the drug trade, attempts to avenge Billy's death by going to kill Choi, but when he learns what Billy did and that Chang cut off one of Choi's arms as a penance for not being a better father and permitting his daughter to sell her body, he decides to let him go. Julian's mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives from the States and demands blood (when told what Billy did, she huffs "I'm sure he had his reasons"), sending Billy's enforcer Gordon (Gordon Brown) to kill Choi. Once Choi is dead, Crystal wants Chang dead since he allowed Billy's murder. This sets off a back-and-forth war between Crystal/Julian and Chang/the corrupt Bangkok police.
For a while, it feels as if Gosling is a supporting actor in his own movie. Much of the film follows Pansringarm's Chang, a dirty cop who does what he needs to do to maintain law & order in an unfathomably sleazy part of town. With the arrival of Crystal, Gosling's Julian starts to take center stage. He's so detached, aloof, and emotionally stunted that his only "friend" seems to be Mai (Rhatha Phongam), a prostitute who ties his hands to the arms of the chair while he silently, sullenly watches her masturbate. Julian brings Mai to dinner with Crystal, and Scott Thomas immediately establishes Crystal as one of cinema's great reprehensible monster mothers by discussing the differences in the penis sizes of her sons ("Billy's was so much bigger than Julian's"), telling Julian how weak and pathetic he is, and when Mai tells her she's "an entertainer," Crystal spits "An entertainer? Well...how many cocks can you entertain in that cum dumpster of yours?" Crystal has incestuous designs on her sons and it's strongly implied that she had a sexual relationship with Billy, and also reveals that Julian fled to Bangkok after killing his father. Quite obviously, Julian is carrying some significant emotional baggage. When Mai asks him "Why do you let her talk to you like that?" he mumbles "Because she's my mother."
Refn spills gallons upon gallons of blood in some sequences with some truly startling, audacious violence, almost the "beautiful" kind of bloodletting you see in samurai films, though there's one torture scene that, even for a jaded viewer who's seen pretty much everything, is pretty tough to endure. But even if you have difficulty finding the narrative accessible, the film is utterly hypnotic. The score by former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Cliff Martinez, who has slowly become arguably the best film score composer working today, melds perfectly with the unique look that Refn and Smith bring, the humidity and stink of the Bangkok red-light district coming through in every shot that's bathed in melancholy neon red, pink, and blue. ONLY GOD FORGIVES is probably most ideally viewed at 2:00 am in a depressed, sleep-deprived state of mind--with its colors and trance-like feel, maybe it would make an interesting double feature with BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW--though I'd love to see it on a huge screen (Radius/TWC only released it on 78 screens in addition to VOD). This is one of those movies that will overcome its initial round of almost unanimous critical and audience dismissal and outright scorn and it won't take long for it to become a genuine cult classic. When it was over, I wanted to immediately watch it again. I'm calling it now: this is a masterpiece.
This $60 million sci-fi epic sat on the shelf for over two years before getting a 39-screen US release, grossing just over $100,000. Sporting the kind of concept that completely collapses under any serious scrutiny, UPSIDE DOWN is easily the dumbest sci-fi film since BRANDED, and sets a land-speed record for a movie bailing on its own established rules, already contradicting itself approximately five minutes in. The film is set on twin planets with "double gravity" orbiting around the same sun, where the rich and privileged live "Up Top" and the poor and disenfranchised "Down Below." Contact between worlds is forbidden and Each world has its own gravity and its own concept of matter--for instance, "inverse matter" taken from one world to another combusts after a short period. Adam (Jim Sturgess) from Down Below has loved Eden (Kirsten Dunst) from Up Top since they were children and their forbidden relationship was broken apart by the authorities. Eden was shot in the dust-up and suffers from varying degrees of amnesia. Years later, Adam finds out she works for Trans World, a Big Brother-type corporation whose skyscraper headquarters exists in both worlds, with floor zero being the point where Up Top and Down Below people can co-exist, even though the Up Top people are upside-down. Adam gets a job at Trans World, trying to sell his aunt's flying pink pancake mix as an expensive beauty product, when in fact it's a secret formula to negate the gravity of both worlds. By stealing various metals from Up Top, Adam is able to fashion a temporary protective under-armor to buy him some time appearing normal in Up Top (though he has to spray his mop-top down to keep it from floating up) before he inevitably starts to ignite. Because of her amnesia, Eden doesn't remember Adam, who will stop at nothing, dueling gravities or plot logic be damned, to be with his one true love.
Is there any wonder why this barely got released? It's fascinatingly stupid. Writer/director Juan Solanas obviously concentrated so much on the visual element that he never really mapped out the logistics of the concept. Even then, for a film this expensive, the CGI visuals are pretty second-rate, oversaturated, and unconvincing. The interiors and the exteriors frequently look like a cheap fusion of Orson Welles' THE TRIAL (1962), Luc Besson's THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997), and a prog-metal album cover. Even if the visual effects were up to par and Dunst and Sturgess weren't the dullest cinematic romantic pairing in years, the rampant lack of logic would be too much for UPSIDE DOWN to overcome. The story ignores its own basic rules when it's convenient for the plot or can provide a nice visual, and constantly backs itself into a corner only to simply make something up to explain it away. The only jaw-dropping thing about UPSIDE DOWN is the astonishing number of emergency dei ex machina that Solanas has stored up his ass. (PG-13, 108 mins)
PUSHER (France/UK - 2012)
DRIVE director Nicolas Winding Refn commissioned this London-set remake of his 1996 Danish breakthrough about one week in the life of a low-level drug dealer who has to come up with some fast cash to get out of trouble with a powerful crime boss. While PUSHER 2012 is fast-moving and highly watchable, the biggest question is "Why?" Unless you're a complete subtitle-phobe or have an intense dislike of the sound of the Danish language, there's not really any need to see this almost carbon-copy redux, which goes so far as to cast the same actor (Zlatko Buric) as the pusher's main antagonist. Ambitious but small-time London coke dealer Frank (Richard Coyle) sets up a potentially lucrative deal with heroin borrowed from Serbian drug lord Milo (Buric). When cops bust the deal, Frank dumps the dope in a lake and is on the hook to Milo for its value plus money already borrowed, plus a tacked-on fee that Milo imposes simply because he's pissed off. Frank spends the rest of the film pursuing debts from his clients and setting up additional deals that inevitably fall through, all to keep Milo and his goons off his back. Director Luis Prieto goes for a hypnotic, flashy sort-of Danny Boyle meets Guy Ritchie look, all set to a throbbing, driving score by Orbital, and it's not a bad film at all, just an unnecessary and overly familiar one. It doesn't add anything to Winding Refn's original (which was successful enough to spawn two sequels), and everything about it seems like you've seen it all before, because you have...if not in the earlier PUSHER, then in any number of other British crime thrillers over the last 15 years. Coyle is solid in the lead and Buric is very entertaining as the outwardly gregarious ("Easy peasy lemon squeezy!") but thoroughly ruthless Milo, but PUSHER's biggest problem is its complete lack of a reason to exist. (R, 89 mins)
HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED (US - 2013)
Coming soon after the lackluster HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS and neither the HAROLD & KUMAR comedy nor the shitty Asylum knockoff that the title would indicate, HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED is a blood-splattered and at times engagingly silly horror movie that gets a lot of mileage from a campy and self-deprecating performance by Lara Flynn Boyle as Agnes, a "little old lady from Pasadena" who's a weed-dealing witch getting younger with each stoner customer she kills and eats. Hansel (Michael Welch, one of the TWILIGHT guys who's not Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner) and Gretel (CASTLE's Molly Quinn) are siblings with the house to themselves for the weekend (their folks "went to visit the Stiltskins") only to end up searching for Gretel's boyfriend (Andrew James Allen) who went to buy weed from Agnes and never returned. Agnes also tangles with gang leader Carlos (Reynaldo Gallegos) who wants a cut of her sales since she's stealing all of his customers who are never heard from again. Directed by Duane Journey and written by co-star David Tillman, HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED is a essentially a one-joke idea played surprisingly straight, with some welcome and plentiful old-school gore courtesy of makeup effects veteran Vincent Guastini. It's no great shakes, but it's well-made, doesn't fall into the trap of repetitive and annoying stoner humor and Boyle, who hasn't been seen in much since the 2005-2006 season of the NBC series LAS VEGAS, really gets a chance to cut loose here and have some fun, even if her performance is more than a little inspired by Heath Ledger's work in THE DARK KNIGHT. Also with Yancy Butler (looking much better than she has in recent SyFy movies) and Lochlyn Munro as cops, and an unrecognizable Cary Elwes in a cameo as a schlubby meter reader with Coke-bottle glasses. (Unrated, 87 mins)
