In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 July
In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)
Martin Creed ~ Work No. 232 (2000) at Tate Modern (@tate)
With a film, some will want to go into it, already knowing everything about it...
Or having (in its proper sense of reading every word) perused what Little White Lies (@LWLies) – or even Picturehouse Recommends – had to say (or did say, without ‘having to’ say it), and which will have determined them to watch - or to shun².
'when you were young, you dressed yourself and walked where you wanted'
John 21 : 18
Nicolas Winding Refn's (NWR¹'s) The Neon Demon (2016) is very deliberately mannered, and to the extent that his dialogue desires - in massive swathes of overly-delayed reaction - to be portentous. However, alongside its mise-en-scène³, instead it ends up just feeling very ponderous : nigh tediously so, with an affect that aims at insightful awkwardness, but largely conveys leadenness.
Music choices, as ever, are strong, but, having made a graphic point of doing so in Drive (2011), NWR seems unable to do other than try to shock his audience, as if crediting that it will have a lack of interest in the first-blush, well-worn premise of the traps of (the topos of) a beautiful young girl, come to California to trade on attributes that she knows herself to possess.
-> In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', but is The Neon Demon (2016) also echoing the unnatural atmosphere of 'Lamia', etc. ? pic.twitter.com/ehcUj8UiHO— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 23, 2016
Prey on her what may - which, of course (and in order to provide the shocks), it duly does...
This is what [some] others said, at more length… :
He goes on to say 'So what. You could say the same about Kafka’s The Trial and it fell pathetically short in the lesbian necrophilia stakes'— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 22, 2016
Was Clarke dissatisfied by the whipping at Josef K.'s office or the sex with Leni, etc. ? :https://t.co/7tkxBWSimI https://t.co/nJRnaADzJx— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 22, 2016
[...]
Kermode's review of The Neon Demon goes on (needs to, to fit in all these comparisons ?), but no one finds Keats :https://t.co/mc5fqOri1K— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 22, 2016
Both @knightofcupsmov and @tnd_film, for those who love them, are triumphs of style over substance - precisely why they'll also be hated ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2016
-> If NWR relies on shock, Malick employs the music of Peer Gynt, Pärt and RVW, with much wide-angle and fish-eye. https://t.co/MbvRmzm1yM
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2016
End-notes :
¹ Winding Refn is now monogrammed, with the claimed status of the royal or the regal, at the head of his films. (Although, according to Wikipedia®, A series of uncombined initials is properly referred to as a cypher (e.g. a royal cypher) and is not a monogram.)
² Maybe it is the bane of many a film-maker (or distributor) that a book is judged by what is not even its cover, though those in the latter category do not entirely help their cause when a trailer makes an excellent film seem weak, or a poor film worth the watch, because of how scenes, snippets and elements of dialogue have been unrepresentatively mixed up and divorced from their filmic setting, in favour of creating an impression that the work itself does not substantiate (let alone footage that is in a trailer, but did not make the cut to appear in the film itself…).
³ Which obviously heavily evokes Tony Scott's Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993) (whose being shot by Scott left Tarantino himself free to direct Reservoir Dogs (1992)).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
