{"id":36687,"date":"2013-07-19T09:48:29","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T16:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/?p=36687"},"modified":"2013-07-19T09:48:29","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T16:48:29","slug":"rethink-reviews-only-god-forgives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/2013\/07\/19\/rethink-reviews-only-god-forgives\/","title":{"rendered":"ReThink Reviews: Only God Forgives"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul class=\"inline-playlist playlist\" title=\"\"><li><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/20130719Uprising\/2013_07_19_rethinkreview.mp3\">Listen to this segment <\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n<p><a href =\"http:\/\/www.rethinkreviews.net\"><img decoding=\"async\" align=right width=55% src=\"\/home\/graphics\/rethink_reviews_small.jpg\" alt=\"Rethink Reviews\" \/><\/a><strong>Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. <\/strong>  <\/p>\n<p><em>Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. <\/em>  <\/p>\n<p> Read his reviews online at <a href=\"http:\/\/ReThinkReviews.net\">ReThinkReviews.net<\/a>. Watch his videos at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim\">www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim<\/a>, and follow him on Twitter at <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/ReThinkReviews\">twitter.com\/ReThinkReviews<\/a>. ReThink Reviews&#8217; theme song is by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/restaurantmusic\">Restavrant<\/a>.    <\/p>\n<p><strong>ONLY GOD FORGIVES<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In 2011, Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s film \u2018Drive\u2019 was released, a so-called arthouse action movie that struck a chord with critics (earning a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), as well as audiences, creating a buzz that finally launched Ryan Gosling\u2019s simmering career into superstardom. It seemed like nearly everyone was psyched about \u2018Drive\u2019 \u2014 that is, except for a few people like me. Other than \u2018Drive\u2019\u2019s opening scene, which really might be one of the greatest and smartest car chases of all time, and the film\u2019s cool 80s-synth-inspired soundtrack, I had major problems with \u2018Drive\u2019, problems which have persisted into Refn\u2019s latest film with Gosling, \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019. But by the looks of things, it seems like more people may be starting to notice them.  <\/p>\n<p>Gosling plays Julian, another nearly silent, largely unemotive small-time crook on the edge of the criminal underworld, much like Gosling\u2019s nameless character in \u2018Drive\u2019. Julian and his brother Billy (played by Tom Burke) run a kickboxing gym in Bangkok that\u2019s a front to move drugs. However, Billy is a horrible, violent scumbag who gets beaten to death by the father of a teenage prostitute whom he raped and murdered.<\/p>\n<p>Julian and Billy\u2019s estranged mother Crystal (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives in Bangkok to bring Billy\u2019s body back to the States. But it\u2019s soon obvious where Billy got his awfulness from, since Crystal is perhaps the most hate-filled, cartoonishly evil mom in film history, swearing constantly, making sexual insinuations towards her son, and insulting everyone else in the most vulgar ways possible. She implores Julian to kill Billy\u2019s murderer, but Julian refuses when he learns that the real man responsible for Billy\u2019s death is Lieutenant Chang, a mysterious policeman (played by Vithaya Pansringam) with an obsession for justice who handles matters with a samurai sword. Crystal\u2019s attempts to go around Julian to get to Chang begin a chain reaction of increasingly gory violence.<\/p>\n<p>The similarities between \u2018Drive\u2019 and \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019 start with their maddeningly slow pace, which feel like incredibly lazy attempts to pad a 30-page script into a feature-length film. But instead of writing additional scenes, Refn just decided to have characters walk, talk, and turn REALLY slowly, stare at each other way too long, and wait at least five seconds for no reason before delivering any piece of dialogue. When people do speak, it\u2019s so slow, stilted, and artificial that there\u2019s hardly a single sentence of realistic dialogue in the entire film. And in the case of Crystal, her lines are so offensive that Thomas said that she could barely bring herself to say them. But they\u2019re hardly clever, like the work of a seventh grader who thinks being \u201cedgy\u201d means spewing every nasty phrase he can think of, even if doing so makes no sense storywise.<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of nasty, both films display Refn\u2019s affection for sudden, graphic violence, with dozens of scenes full of severed limbs, gushing blood, bullet-riddled bodies, and skewered flesh. But instead of feeling gritty, harsh, and realistic, as it sometimes did in \u2018Drive\u2019, in \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019 it mostly feels like a cheap attempt to goose the film\u2019s otherwise glacial pace. And in a world where we\u2019re all too exposed to the heartbreaking results of real-life violence, the cruelty in \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019 is hardly worth putting yourself through if it\u2019s only function is to keep the audience awake. The result is a movie that feels like it was made by a fan of Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and splatter films who was then dosed with heavy sedatives.<\/p>\n<p>The saturated color palette, the slow camera moves, the stone-faced, silent hero bursting into sudden and uncharacteristic aggression \u2014 we\u2019ve seen all this before. But what critics supposedly loved, or at least tolerated, in \u2018Drive\u2019 they\u2019re now howling about in \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019. While this film is truly an unpleasant ordeal that feels way longer than its 90 minutes, I\u2019d like to challenge fans of \u2018Drive\u2019 to see \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019, then explain why \u2018Drive\u2019 is such a superior film despite sharing so much of the same DNA. But as much as I\u2019d like to prove that \u2018Drive\u2019 is overrated, anyone who decides not to see \u2018Only God Forgives\u2019 has my full support.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Only God Forgives\u2019 is rated R and opens today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rethink-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36705,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36687\/revisions\/36705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}