I have actually watched several compelling, interesting, engaging and/or funny movies lately and have also had a couple of interesting adventures in Hungary and elsewhere (I went to Belgium for the weekend, you know, no big deal) and yet today I am in a strange mood and want to dedicate an entire post to making fun of Nicolas Winding Refn. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants.
Refn still has my grudging respect as an aesthete, but not much more. In the past I'd always excused his exclusion (or damning portrayal) of women from his films since I figured, hey, if he wants to focus solely on the interiority of the lives of men, it's not like there's a lack of those films, but what the hell? It's his movie. But honestly this movie was so slow, so painstakingly composed to be a never-ending series of tableau vivantes (art) and splashes of color (art!) and as always, flashes of brutal, abrupt violence (ART!!), that I paused it about an hour in to go get a snack and watch something else and had to force myself to come back to it. I'm not saying it's not a beautiful movie, no one could ever deny Refn of having that gift. But otherwise... this is just so alternatively shocking-for-shock's-sake, boring, and ridiculously stupid that I can't recommend watching it. Not even for the Gosling fans; he barely speaks and his face gets pummeled into the image of rotten tomato about 2/3 of the way through.
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