Review: Only God Forgives

It wouldn’t be a new term without a slice of Gosling, and right on schedule, Screen co-editor Shefali Srivastava talks through one of the summer’s most controversial releases: the ultra-noir Only God Forgives.

If like me, you’ve seen Only God Forgives and didn’t walk out dazed and confused, wondering “WTF?”, then you probably fell asleep somewhere in the middle of it. Because the latest from Nicholas Winding Refn, who famously last collaborated with Gosling on Drive, is murky, confusing, and ultimately seems rather pointless.

Ryan Gosling as Julian
Image Credit: FT.com

Unlike Drive, which was a restrained masterpiece of atmosphere and action, stunning visual tableaux and a minimalist electro score, Only God Forgives manages to take all these same elements and yet comes out with completely different results.

Here, Gosling is more or less a continuation of his stoic, brooding driver from Drive – he speaks even less in this film – but whereas his driver had a heart and a moral compass, Julian (Gosling) appears to be empty on the inside: blank, vacant, and impotent, possibly in a literal sense: he’d rather watch his Thai girlfriend pleasure herself than engage in the act of conventional lovemaking.

The plot is as threadbare as its main character, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps. Julian is an expat American running a Thai boxing club in Bangkok, actually a front for drug smuggling, when his older brother Billy (Burke), a brutish loose-cannon, violently kills a young prostitute for nothing more than kicks.

Vithaya Pansringarm as Chang
Image credit: Dazed & Confused

Swiftly apprehended by the police, the murdered girl’s father is encouraged by a mysterious figure known as Chang (Pansringarm) to exact his own vengeance on Billy, which he does – before getting his arm severed by Chang as retribution for allowing his daughter to be a sex worker. For Chang is not only a feared and respected policeman, he’s a self-styled, sword-wielding Angel of Vengeance, who emanates an eerie aura of calm. His eye-for-an-eye philosophy threatens to destroy Julian’s whole world, and the tit-for-tat killings start to spiral out of control once his formidable mother arrives from the States, with increasingly graphic and deadly consequences.

Probably the single best thing about the film, Kristin Scott Thomas is a revelation. A peroxide-blonde, rotten to the core, über-evil Barbie, Crystal is a Mafioso mother come to collect the body of her dead son and exhort her living son, through cajolery and contempt to kill his killer.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal
Image credit: Guardian

Crude, corrosive and utterly callous, she emasculates Julian – he’s more affected by her presence than by his dead brother’s absence, and there are disquieting Oedipal undertones to their relationship.

But in the neon-lit world that Refn presents, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s psychosis. With the heavy red filter, the walls of Julian’s dwelling represent a murder house and it’s anybody’s guess whether his sinister imaginings represents Julian’s nightmares, paranoia or foreshadowings of the future.

The film doesn’t conclude so much as come to an abrupt full stop, and the only solid conclusion one can come to is that it works far better as an artistic piece than it does as a film.

2/5

Shefali Srivastava, Online Editor

Did you catch Only God Forgives this summer? Let us know what you thought via Facebook, Twitter or by commenting below.

Nerding Out On: Bill Murray

Continuing her domination of all things nerdy Online Screen Editor, Jess O’Kane, turns her critical gaze onto Hollywood’s favourite hero-outsider to examine just why there’s something about Bill…

It’s a favourite character arc of some less-frequented celebrity magazines to immortalise a point at which an actor passes from being that-cool-guy-who-makes-a-shit-ton-of-money to what they term ‘Hollywood royalty’.

Image Credit: Glamour

It’s a term that’s been applied of late to Bill Murray, still aging, still cool and still showing up to Cannes (in rainbow plaid).

And yet despite our idolising of his latter day eccentricity, Murray has always had an element of the outsider, possessed of a certain cynical self-assuredness that aged him even when he was first starring in SNL sketches.

Maybe it says something of his unique persona that I can’t remember a time when Murray hasn’t had the kind of mythic presence that seems to demand a more ceremonial title than just “Bill”.

When you take into account his personality – his reticence to embrace Hollywood life, even to have an agent (he has an answering machine, and no, he won’t listen to your message) – it seems extraordinary that Murray has got anywhere near the level of cult adoration that he has.

But then perhaps it’s precisely this rebelliousness that holds the key; from his first major movie roles in the ‘70s to 2012’s exquisite Moonrise Kingdom, Murray has never toed the line, or if he has, it’s been a looping, schizophrenic one.

The Classic

The hipster in me wanted to avoid the obvious choice, but then I remembered that my 10 year-old self once strapped a vacuum cleaner to her back in an effort to recreate a proton pack.

Image Credit: E! Online

There are so many things I could nerd out on about Ghostbusters; it’s slamming, effortlessly cool theme song; the chemistry Murray shares with his equally geeky co-stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis; the wonderfully snide romance between Murray and Sigourney Weaver; or the fact that its central conflict is with a giant marshmallow man.

But all of these things are just legs and arms of the film’s overarching commitment to fun. Ghostbusters works because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is – a perfect exercise in mischievousness. That its spirit should inspire kids and the more lonesome awesome adults amongst us to get dressed up is only testament to its frenetic and childish energy. It’s also the film that most clearly defined Murray’s cynical persona, and that’s what would define his output for the next half-decade.

The Cult Favourite

There are potentially many films in the Bill Murray back catalogue that might be described as ‘cult favourites’, but Stripes is one of the those that seems to demand inhalation of a good few illicit substances.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Again pairing Murray with Harold Ramis and director Ivan Reitman, Stripes transfers the same chaotic reverie of Ghostbusters to an oppressive U.S army base, captained by a craggy-faced Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch, Dillinger).

Where earlier Vietnam-era dramedies like M*A*S*H had a barbed sense of humour and definite political consciousness, Stripes purposely avoids any strong articulations, preferring to direct Murray and Ramis’s black outlook at just about anything and everything, and most often nothing at all.

A well-meaning range of performances from John Candy, P.J Soles and Judge Reinhold buoy the last half, which errs on the wrong side of messy.

But in its highest highs (try not rewatching a choreographed march led by Murray), you trust it implicitly, not least because the messiness seems fitting: the fun of Stripes encapsulates a post-war, post-luck, post-employment absurdity.

The Runt

This is probably the kindest negative review I’ll ever write. Because after all, a poor Bill Murray film isn’t as bad as say… a bad Nic Cage movie. And Meatballs isn’t a bad film, by any means.

Image Credit: Collider

The first Ramis-Reitman-Murray collaboration on the big screen sees Murray playing a dysfunctional camp counsellor named Tripper, who works in an equally dysfunctional budget summer camp.

The kids are riotous, the food stinks and to make matters worse, the rich kids at nearby Camp Mohawk are going to beat them in the annual Olympiad (again).

In amongst all this evolves a rather touching relationship between Tripper and a young outsider named Rudy (Chris Makepeace), who helps him find love with his headstrong co-counsellor Roxanne (Kate Lynch).

The poetics are limited by clumsy scripting, however; with superb moments (check out Tripper’s “It just doesn’t matter!” speech) undercut by sections of painfully corny slapstick (girls! In bikinis!). That said, ol’ Bill is magnetic as ever, and Meatballs provides enough laughs to cover its uglier parts.

The Verdict

With his latest collaboration with Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel out next year, Murray is still badass and most definitely still Bill. I can’t wait to see what the plaid-laden twilight years bring.

Jess O’Kane, Online Screen Editor

Think there was a Murray masterpiece that was left off the list? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or by commenting below.

 

Beyond Hollywood: Dogtooth

The second instalment of Ben Lewis’s view on foreign film sees him perplexed by Dogtooth, a chilling drama from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, and winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes.

After the screening of Regarde la Mer by François Ozon for my contemporary French cinema module, the general feeling was that of revulsion and invariably along the lines of what on earth have we just watched? (A toothbrush being rubbed in feces and then actually used by actress Sasha Hails, for example). People have walked out of cinemas for less shocking films.

Image credit: The Guardian

Yet, upon reading about Dogtooth and watching the bizarre trailer, I felt I was up to the challenge of watching it – at the very least so I could report back to the readers of Exeposé. I thought that whatever happened, it ultimately would not be as shocking as Regarde la Mer. Apparently readers, Ozon has a long lost Greek brother.

So where to begin? To its credit, Dogtooth is one of the most memorable films I have ever seen, and an important film in Greek cinema being only the fifth Greek film to be nominated for an Oscar. It rivals Requiem for a Dream, Compliance and Regarde la Mer for impact, but of the three, it is probably most comparable to the unnerving and uncomfortable feeling experienced in viewing Compliance.

The film revolves around a Greek family who, barring the father, live an isolated life in a large countryside house. However, this family differ from others in that the parents have chosen the wildly popular and completely healthy option of bringing up their three late-teen, to early twenties children, completely oblivious to the real world.

Image credit: Rotten Tomatoes

Their methods include changing the meanings of words such as ‘phone’, so that it means a salt pot. The children are terrified to leave the grounds of their house, and they believe that the cat is the most ferocious and deadly animal in the animal kingdom due to the laughable act and story concocted by their father. This example provokes one of the many memorable scenes of the film, in which the father teaches his children to defend themselves from the cat, by getting all three children and his wife on all fours, and to bark manically like dogs.

The success of the parents in keeping their children effectively ignorant and afraid of the world is incredibly chilling, and it makes for even more uncomfortable viewing when we realise this fictional portrayal has real-life similarities, such as with the case of Josef Fritzl and the imprisonment of his daughter in his house for over twenty years. Thus we can’t reassure ourselves that this film is just crazy art-house cinema.

If this wasn’t memorable enough, there are also scenes where the father smashes a VCR recorder around the head of his female security guard for bringing traces of the outside world into the house (two movies including one of the Rocky series), as well as the elder daughter performing an eerily accurate rendition of a dance from Flashdance.

This subsequently leads to her smashing out her ‘dogtooth’ with a dumbbell. Her reasoning? The parents tell the children over dinner one night that they will only be ready to leave the house when their dogtooth has fallen out.

Image credit: Slant Magazine

There are definitely allegorical references to authoritarian power and oppression. The namelessness of the children (promoting conformity), their brainwashing and vulnerability bear many resemblances to the lives of citizens in former extreme right and left-wing nations. The son killing an innocent cat may be seen as a metaphor for what the parents have done to the children.

They clearly would not function in the real world, or would at the very least, need a month’s slot on the Jeremy Kyle show.

Ultimately, the film is probably more for the film buff or individual that wants to claim to have seen the weirdest movie ever – and that’s without me revealing the most repulsive aspect of the movie, which is the catalyst for the demise of the father’s control. I will leave that for you to discover for yourselves.

Regardless, the fact that I am still questioning what exactly I witnessed means that the film has at least been original. I’m just glad that there hasn’t been a co-production between François Ozon, Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) and Giorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth). I don’t think the world, or Jeremy Kyle, is ready for that just yet.

3/5

 

Have you seen Dogtooth, or anything quite as bizarre? Let us know your favourite grotesque cinematic moments via Facebook, Twitter, or by commenting below.

From Toronto to Tribeca: Exeposé Screen looks at film festivals!

Exeposé Screen Online LFF Video Blog (Video credit: Olivia Luder)

Back in October, Exeposé Screen had the privilege of attending the 2012 BFI London Film Festival.  Check out how the Exeposé Online Screen Editors, Liam and Olivia, got on in their video blog above!

For those uninitiated into the world of film festivals, here’s a quick run-down of what you need to know:

Firstly, film festivals are not like music festivals. Venues are usually spread out across a city and they are structured around people hopping from cinema to cinema. Think a lot less camping and a lot whole more sitting down in a dark rooms. Other than screenings, festivals often put on a range of events including parties, ‘q and a’ sessions and discussion panels.

Films festivals often have a theme. Some look at a film genre – from feminism, to horror, to anti-war, while others celebrate a particular filmmaker or period in filmmaking. Many festivals specialise in short-films, providing a unique viewing opportunity for short-film fans and filmmakers.

An important point to note is that usually anyone can go along. Some believe that only people within the film industry are welcome at film festivals. Not so. While some screenings may not be open to everyone, film festivals are often there for the very purpose of getting film lovers of all kinds together.

Film festivals are also a key place for new films to debut. Filmmakers often choose to hold special premieres to capitalise on the concentration of critics and people in the industry. Crucially, they are a place where film producers hunt for distributors to buy their films to release.

A festival provides the perfect environment for a film to gain that all-important buzz. For instance, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene won him the U.S. Directing Award for Best Drama at the Sundance Film Festival last year and gained a huge amount of critical praise. The film went on to do well in cinemas and launch the careers of both Durkin and the film’s star, Elizabeth Olsen.

This highlights another important aspect of film festivals: awards are a big deal. They can give a film a particular critical legitimacy, as well as gain it the attention of critics and audiences alike. Winning the Palme D’Or from the Cannes Film Festival can mean as much as winning the Academy Award for Best Film, if not more.

Image credit: BFI Southbank

Finally, now you’ve read about film festivals you may well be wanting to attend one. The previously mentioned Cannes is the most prestigious and well-established festival whose awards are perhaps most sought after. Unfortunately, it is invite only. The Venice Film Festival is another long-standing European festival, and is actually the oldest in the world. Berlin Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival round out the European heavy-hitters, each providing a wide range of cinema from across the world. The USA’s big two are Sundance Film Festival, established by actor Robert Redford, and Tribeca Film Festival in the filmic-heaven that is New York. Lastly, Canada’s Toronto Film Festival showcases the best of Canadian film as well as much from across the world with some considering it to be the second most influential behind Cannes.

If venturing out of England seems a little extreme, don’t worry – you can find film festivals much closer to home. Animated Exeter, an established animation festival, is on 18-23rd February 2013, while the Exeter Phoenix has their short-film festival, Two Short Nights, on 29-30th November 2012.

Screen Editor, Olivia Luder