It took twenty years

But Kevin Costner is a badass again.

Still uncertain on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Thoughts anyone?

YES! YES! YES! EAT IT!!!!

Woke up this morning and what did I find online...?

This fine article about how 3D movies are sucking camel dick in pretty much every direction.

YES YES YES LET'S GET DRUNK AND WATCH FLAT MOVIES AGAIN

Thor: The Neverending Story

Directed by Alan “couldn’t afford Branagh again” Taylor

Starring No one you care about, except Jaimie Alexander, who is smoking and in my Top 20 for life

No poster this time; you're getting Jaimie

I realise I have been neglecting this column recently. In my defence, I have a job at which I must be present every day at 9 am, something that is hard to stick to if you’ve had a 8/10 damage night leading into it. Naturally, some of my more zealous friends will say ‘C’mon bro, that’s not how winners roll. Rule 71: No excuses! Play like a champion!’ The truth is, though, even Tucker Max retired. This shit gets played out after a while.

You know what else gets played out? All these fucking Marvel movies. These people have given up, you know. They don’t even shoot locations anymore, just green screen, and the backdrops they superimpose with their CGI voodoo isn’t even convincing.

Also this movie is two hours long and I struggle to think of something that happens in it other than ‘moderate destruction,’ or characters that I know more about at the end. I saw a great demonstration recently of why, specifically, the first three Star Wars episodes smoke pole. An interviewer talks to a few of his friends, asking them to describe characters from episodes 4-6 in single words. For instance, Han Solo gets qualified as ‘renegade’ or ‘lothario’ or ‘antihero,’ all of which are spot on. However, these people drew complete blanks when asked to describe Qui Gon or Amidala. It’s because they’re ciphers; they’re not real people. 

Solo, on the other hand, is about as real as it gets

 

In fairness, I can describe Thor in single words, but they are words like ‘dutiful’ and ‘humourles,’ which is not the kind of guy I want to hang out with for two hours when I’m drinking. Lemme give you a hand with this one, Marvel:

Dudes that dudes want to hang out with when they’re drinking

Vince Vaughn
Jean-Claude Van Damme
The Rock
Louis CK
Snoop Dogg
Stephen Hawking (you will raise an eyebrow at first but imagine the Hawking voice in your head and paste in the following :

‘Dudes, I’m so ripped I can barely stand. Oh, wait, hahahahahahaha.’

‘I would offer to be the designated driver… but my wife has the car tonight. Haha, gotcha again motherfuckers.’

‘Pass the pretzels please, I gotta get my snack on. ABS, boys. Always Be Snacking.’

‘Keep the refills coming bro, I’m drinking myself into a black hole tonight. OOHHHHH!’

Ahhh, classic boozy Hawking

Marvel is getting complacent and so are we. These movies are such predictable financial successes that the studio can afford to procrastinate. Do you realise Thor and Amidala haven’t banged yet? I bullshit you not; it has been two movies spread over two years and these cats still haven’t gotten jiggy with it. Marvel’s all like ‘Meh, we have movie release dates through 2020 – we’ll just throw it in there somewhere’ and it’s a giant fuck you to anyone with a brain. See, the thing about Natalie Portman is that I want to see her boobs. As of right now, the only person we know for sure who has seen them is her French ballerina husband, which is like God hitting you in the face with a brick. We need, like, six The Dudes to abide that shit.

It’s like in Avengers, when Captain Bromerica comes aboard the Hovering Fury and the camera lingers on Cobie eye-fucking him for a solid minute and you’re like ‘They’re totally gonna bang’ and then THEY DON’T. Fuck that noise. I call Chekhov’s Gun on that shit. If you’re gonna put it in there, use it. Problem with Marvel execs is they’re like ‘Oh, we’ll use it… three movies from now!’ and then laugh maniacally before retiring to the nearest janitor’s closet to snort lines of cocaine off each others’ dicks.

The villain in this Thor is equally bad. His motivations for, like, plunging the universe in darkness (which, dudes, what does that even mean??) are, uh, he’s evil? I know, I know, you could say the same about Joker in The Dark Knight but Joker is a fully realised character and one of this generation’s best performances, full stop. In this one, Christopher Eccleston just puts on a bunch of makeup, leers menacingly, and says stuff like ‘At last we willl destroy the Jedi’ in Dark Elvish, a language they must have decided to use at the last minute because it isn’t even internally consistent in the scope of this movie.

The problem with Marvel: brawn always beats brain

You know what would be better? Seeing Thor fight Eccleston as Dr. Who, that’s what. And why not super-size and have the rest of the cast speaking Old Norse. Fuck it. It’s not like what they’re saying matters anyway. The dialogue in this movie is so goddamn stilted it sounds like Thor and Hannibal Lecter learned English phonetically for this movie. So whatever.

Damage: 3/10

Boozy rating: 2/10. Fuck you right back, movie.

Next week: Bad Grandpa (Surely Knoxville can cure this movie)

Pain & Gain

Are you ready to get PUMPED UP??!!

You had better be you limp-dicked troglodytes, and all you haters had better put that Hatorade away because Michael Bay is coming to town and he knows who has been naughty and who has been nice.

Welcome to 1995 Miami where the only currency is how PUMPED UP your muscles are. If you are not using your time judiciously to get Rock Hard then you need to wake up and smell the bacon and think seriously about where your life is going and how you got to be such a droopy-eyed, listless jabroni.

EXPLOSIONS ARE FOR WINNERS

 

Kidnapping is for real people with real muscles. So is money and biznatches and C-C-C-C-COCAINE BABY so you need to stack all of those up and sit atop the mound so you can look Arnold dead in the eye when he’s riding atop his BEASTFUCK MEGAHUMMER.

 

This is a movie so jacked up that its biceps have biceps and it’s Marky Marks have Marky Marks. YES YES YES this sumbitch will straight up strong-arm you into forgetting that The Happening ever happened, which sounds counterintuitive because language confusion but this movie is about using muscles, not words, so keep on rocking in the free world.

This movie has so much steroid use in it it’ll make your pecs hard and your dick soft. That’s called osmosis, whereby the movie screen is the motherfucking membrane.

ANALOGIES GALORE!!!

Pain & Gain wastes no time so neither do we. We use the screening as an exercise in getting pumped up by buying a Rock-sized bag of protein and showcasing it like the suave minstrels of jackedness that we are. Showcasing it like a pimp superfly jetski on the Price is Right. $7,995!!!1!!

MY PROTEIN!!!

Then we look at the milk/protein combination like all those bears must have looked at goldilocks all those years ago before they shredded her to pieces and put leftovers in the fridge for the next day.

 

Instead of resorting to those beginner tactics we up our game by making a protein mix drink that St. Mike himself would call the breakfast of motherfucking champions. We have in common that we both play to win, and as we all know winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

 

As you can see, I have put on my winning face

 

We make & watch movies about bodybuilding, explosions, guns, strippers, and the CIA because reading the newspaper is for fags. The only good scenes in The Room was when those guys were throwing the football around! FRISCO!

During the screening peeps next to me was all up in my business, asking me if I’d ever heard ‘Silence is golden,’ whereupon I asked this Jabberwocky-looking mofo if HE’D ever done hard time. Then I flashed my neck tattoo and took a dump on the hood of his car. You can’t spell CREATINE without CREATE fuckfaces.

Oil rules and Greenpeace does other stuff that is NOT RULING because we said so, so go have a protein shake and forget about all the seals. Paul McCartney and everybody else would forget about them if they looked like cockroaches, you can believe that one.

KUMITE!!

Our heroes/avatars fight everything in this movie, ranging from drugs to the police, to addiction, to inmates and everything in between except maybe tigers. But fuck it Van Damme has that one covered and he LIFTS BATHTUBS for a living.

No I can’t stop shouting, cause that’s how I talk!!!

I know it will worry you that there’s a lot of gay paraphenaglia (spelling catastoptrophe but I don’t core I do alright for someone who never finished high scholl) in this movie but DON’T WORRY it’s all part of the plan. Just like the Joker said it was.

I'm an agent of chaos, BRRAPP BRAP

I have to quiet all these voices in my head for the making to make sense again. Micheal bay, yeah?! Fuck man. You did it again. There are so many plum-colored cars in this movie fuckin Rod Corddry doesn’t know which one to ride in!

If your girlfriend asks you to pleasure her this month just take her to GODDAMN PAIN & GAIN so she can see what a WINNER        looks like.

Go big or go home. And that’s not a dick joke like you think it is. There are enough dick jokes in this movie already that we can’t touch it with a ten foot dildo. Pluus if we ever had a ten-footer we’d have bigger fish to fry, am I right mike?

BOOM

YEAH. Trucks, no aliens, no zombies. Wait, maybe no trucks either but this movie has a turck for a soul so git some git some git some. fUCk it; le’ts throw the camel in there too!!!

It’s PRO-tein, not CON-tein and that’s an important distinction for an important person. Nothing you can say about this movie other than “Go see it”

I swear this movie had better win all the Oscars this year: actor, director, sound, actor, and all the supporting ones they give to the hot chick or the fat chick because this movie has both of those hanging out like a big muscular pair of balls.

FUCK. YES. MUSCLES. CARS. GO JUICE JUICE JUICE ACTIVATE GO GOGOGO.

Revenge of the Selected VRROOOOOM

An in-depth analysis of Only God Forgives

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

(Not only does this spoil the movie, it will be incomprehensible if you haven't seen it first)

So we’re about to get into something unusual for BMC: actual film criticism. Yes folks, it’s that time of year again. I’ve seen the One Serious Movie that I’ll probably see this year, which also happens to be one of 2013’s most divisive.

I saw Only God Forgives with a film student friend, whose initial reaction was: ‘Well… it was no Drive.’ And he’s right – it isn’t. However, people are wrong in expecting it to be simply because of the Nicolas Winding Refn/Ryan Gosling pairing. As such, it cannot be judged on the same merits. These are entirely different –in fact thematically opposite – movies (more on that later).

I was more disappointed by is the lack of critics truly probing this film than by the film itself. Analyses I’ve seen so far have been cursory at best, except Chris Stuckman, who is an avowed Refn fan and seems to have drawn a lot of the same conclusions as I.

The following is my interpretation of the film – and there are bound to be many – which hinges heavily on two points.

1. Everything we see is deliberate. There are a lot of critics who felt the movie was light on plot, that Refn didn’t have the same degree of control or assuredness with this movie as he did with Drive, or that OGF was just a flat-out poorly executed revenge tale. I think the opposite. When you look at a film as meticulously crafted as Drive, and observe the quality and care in the cinematography and production design here, it’s impossible to conceive of anything haphazard being in this movie. I believe we are seeing exactly what Refn wants us to. This is not to say that all his decisions are good, merely that they are all purposeful.

2. This is an allegorical tale. This is the main way in which Drive and OGF differ. While the former is a literal tale with symbolism inserted tactically, Refn’s latest is entirely symbolic, with minimal situational elements thrown in for it to have some basis in real life.

Considering Refn’s previous work, I don’t think these are such radical assumptions to get behind.

Only God Forgives is, unsurprisingly, about redemption (no shit dude it’s in the title). Specifically, it’s about Julian’s redemption. This man clearly has a tortured past and is being pulled in two directions. We see this manifested in an idealised, compassionate self, and a brutish, violent self.

Assuming nothing is an accident in this movie, I think that costuming plays a big part. For the opening act of the movie, we see Julian in either a plain black or white t-shirt. I considered the actions we see Julian perform in the white shirt:

• He feeds the stray dog (something that is more of a folkway in developing countries)
• He lets his brother’s killer go free and later tries to reason with his mother about it
• He imagines himself touching Mai delicately (something he does not do in real life)
• He gives Mai a dress and proposes they pretend to be in a relationship

Then of course we are introduced to the dark side (dark shirt), in which he:

• Oversees drug deals
• Mimics/idolises the muay thai fighter statue (in fact he's always clenching his fists in this shirt), which I would argue is tantamount to worshipping violence
• Has his hands tied by Mai (I don’t remember him ever touching her or behaving affectionately while wearing the black shirt)
• Has a vision of his hand being severed by Chang (i.e. his guilt manifests itself darkly)
• Beats the shit out of two guys for no reason

And drags one of them by his teeth through this fucking gorgeous shot

With practically no dialogue, we are introduced to the two warring sides of Julian. We later meet his mother, who obviously brings out the darkness in him (and is implicitly the cause of it).

The relationship between Julian and Crystal is pretty unmistakably Oedipal. The similarities are glaring:

• Parents contemplating infanticide
• Relationship of sexual nature between mother and son
• The son killing the father
• After committing said murder, the son enters a self-imposed exile

Freud argued that the Oedipus complex was a man’s subconscious desire to return to the womb. He asserted that this desire manifested itself sexually, but in OGF’s most shocking scene we see Julian doing this more literally but cutting Crystal’s stomach open and immersing his hand in it.

But before that she looks incredible in this movie. EVERYTHING looks incredible in this movie.

 

These parallels are clear and, as per my initial assumptions, almost certainly deliberate. I feel the link to Greek mythology is paramount, as it carries deeper implications and meaning for the rest of the film.

The Greek notion of the Underworld is not one of burning for eternity; it is more like a waiting room for the damned. The realm of Hades is where souls wait to be judged for their actions during life, and they are either rewarded or punished for these. Hades himself is the ruler of this Underworld, acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

No critiques or interpretations of the film that I have seen have given any consideration to Chang’s name, which I’m certain is also no accident. Chang is the Thai word for ‘elephant,’ an animal that is a symbol of royalty, power, and purity in their culture. This explains not only who Chang is in this movie, but also why everyone treats him with deference or reverence.

The Greek vision of the Underworld is a facsimile for Refn’s ominous Bangkok. Chang is the acknowledged ruler of this Underworld, and therefore the de facto lawgiver or moral epicentre of the film. 

You know what else rules? This shot.

He distributes justice as he sees fit, specifically (and this is super important) punishing people who mistreat children and sparing people who tend to them.  

In the film’s third act we see Julian don the three-piece suit, which sees the light and dark garb intermingled. This is appropriately the moment where we observe the conflict in him surge. He lashes out at Mai, challenges the God figure to a fight (which Refn has straight-up said was a thematic driving force of the movie), and appears ambivalent about exacting revenge on Chang. We see in these moments the dark influence of his mother opposing the desires of his idealised self.

His ultimate test, and the act upon which I posit he is judged, is the last decision he makes in this movie: whether or not to murder Chang’s kid. Crystal orders Julian and another lackey to ‘kill them all,’ and here we witness his first decisive disobedience of her. He overcomes the hold she has on him and saves the child from death. Tellingly, this is the structural climax of the film, rather than his fight with Chang.

The final scene shows Julian offering himself up for judgment in a peaceful environment. Whereas earlier in the movie, his visions of judgment by Chang’s sword came from a dark, cavernous, frightening place, he now meets it in the light, graced by an abiding calm. Chang does not kill him; instead, he severs Julian’s hands, much as he did with the young girl’s father at the beginning of the film. I interpret this as an acknowledgment of sin and repentance, but one that spares Julian’s soul, since he has proven himself as a moral being. This is the diametric opposite of Drive, the point of which was that Driver couldn’t really escape his nature.

Redemption is perhaps the most commonly recurring narrative theme in film. Only God Forgives, however, demarcates itself by stripping the plot bare and dealing with it in a far more mythic and appropriately violent fashion (theology is brutal, for those who need reminding). Julian’s road to redemption is told not through words, but striking imagery, significant allegory, and more than a few dashes of blood.

Interpreted this way and judged on these merits, I feel that Only God Forgives is a strong, if flawed, piece of filmmaking. More importantly it is a case in point for why critics are assholes. Two years ago critics lined up to suck Michel Hazanavicius’ dick for The Artist, saying his return to the silent film was stylish and triumphant. Here and now, you have Refn basically doing the same thing (trying to tell a story non-verbally) and everyone is treating him like a fucking chauch.

There are admittedly many things in the film I didn’t like:

• The violence is gratuitous and, by Refn’s own admission, fetishistic
• Gosling’s performance would arguably not have suffered from him being a little more expressive
• The karaoke scenes are lost on audiences who don’t understand their place in Thai culture (like me)
• The film doesn’t treat women with much sympathy. Strictly speaking I suppose you don’t have to, but come on dude. Women exist in this movie either to be brutally murdered and/or have their bodies defiled. To be fair, the men don’t get much better but there are at least some male characters to like in this movie.

But even when I don't like it, it looks like fucking THIS.

All totalled, the film does more things well than it does poorly. Its imagery is lush and rich, its proceedings have palpable intensity that keep you captivated, the Cliff Martinez score is sure to be one of the year’s best, and stylistically it is one of the most distinctive films you’ll ever see. Despite its detractors, it is a bold piece of work that I’m convinced will be studied and discussed for years to come.