Take care of your daughters or he will

When it comes to sheer unadulterated cool in cinema no one has been able to touch Nicolas Winding Refn since Only God Forgives (2013, Nicolas Winding Refn). How does one define cool? In the cinematic context? It’s subjective. Although the easiest way to describe it is pretentious. Aesthetically high fashion. Incoherent. Avant garde. Transgressive. Controversial. Self-aware. Fearlessly alternating between absurd shock audacious hilarious grotesque kinky sexy saccharine nihilist innocent naive humane alien artifice. Postmodern. Post cinema.
     Every Man for Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard) is the first cool film. Gummo (1997, Harmony Korine) is cool. Lost Highway (1997, David Lynch) is cool. What about Gaspar Noé? Gaspar Noé isn’t cool he’s warm. Too Old to Die Young (2019, #NWR) is the Mount Everest of cool. 
     Why am I so afraid of ordinary? Because if you’re just like everybody else that must mean you’re afraid to think for yourself? Normal is another word fraught with subjective implications. In the cinematic context? Cinema is escape. Escape from what? Reality. I.e. a ticket into an exhibition of artifice. There’s a distinct elastic Germanic Scandinavian resemblance between the style of mannered performances and wooden deadpan bad acting delivery of detached aloof cadence throughout the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and by NWR. They get it. Everyone else is conformist Spielbergs.

 

If you think anyone cares to hear anyone else attempt to describe Refn’s work you’re too stupid. Instead what’s up with Her Private Hell (2026, NWR)? It’s not about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique. Is it about Elle’s feelings towards Dominique?
     Have you experienced mistfortune? I am a victim of the mist. It’s not the mist you need to worry about it’s what the mist brings. Mist you. The central narrative motif of Her Private Hell is the mist. The Tragedy of the Leather Man. A father cursed to look for his lost daughter for so long that eventually he forgets. Until the mist makes him remember. If you see him he sees his daughter and will kill anyone to get her. His gloves are embedded with razor sharp diamonds.
     Most people call him the Devil. Johnny Thunders wears the leather jacket. Elle tries on the leather jacket. Private K wears the leather jacket. In the final showdown K fights the Leather Man hand to hand. Elle Only God Forgives the Leather Man’s hands off whereupon K his spacesuit daughter the golden hatchet and the leather jacket all vanish. But Johnny Thunders is nowhere to be found. All that remains are the razor sharp diamond gloves. If Elle were to put them on she would find out what she had lost. What has Elle lost? Does saving K and reuniting him with his lost daughter grant Elle redemption or damnation? Does Elle becoming the devil in her private hell require her overthrowing the money man make any sense to you? Is she an allegory for the art film?
 
Recurring motifs are always a lot of fun. Historically comic books are low culture. Base. Trite. Garbage. Contemporaneously superhero films are too. Hollywood. Commercial. The daughters are Candy Floss means they are the shameful offspring of great art. A tongue in cheek joke in itself that title evokes using the worst thing possible for its intended purpose. This movie is going to be hell. Hollywood slop is hell. It’s not going to save Elle and Dominique’s strained relationship or cure their tensions. Better Elle speeds through hyperspace suicide mission into a planet complete destruction oblivion.
     The four Candy Floss women are also the money man’s daughters. Dominique is the general public. Box office revenue. Elle wallows in her self pity. Basks in her father. When he looks at her all he sees is a gaping maw of need. Because Elle is art. The human condition. And just as Dominique first found little matchstick girl Elle who told her she was an orphan so too does Elle find little matchstick girl Hunter at her door. Hunter who gave away her room and all her luggage lost by the airline because of the mist. Dominique turning on Elle recurs when Elle turns against Hunter. Her Private Hell is about Elle reconciling her ambivalence towards everything that constrains her. And as is customary with Refn this is expressed through sex and violence. And sexual violence. 
 
To catch a ghost you must become a ghost. Private K doesn’t become the Leather Man. Elle becomes Private K. The Private K movie within a movie is the ghost of Hollywood films of the bygone era when they could be artful yet also pulpy. Film noir 1944-1958. As transcendent as Her Private Hell gets is when K all of a sudden is in that room with the bloody yakuza pleading dying wanting the woman who he has in bed it is revealed has just castrated him murdered.
     But it didn’t end in 1958. The Pino Donaggio wall to wall Forties Hollywood emotional underscoring romantic swells bridges noir into Sixties Giallo into Eighties De Palma urban slasher into Twenty-tens and beyond NWR. This movie has the most amazing climax of all time on so many levels. When Elle is getting fucked by Nico and she orgasms as Hunter’s sternum is ripped apart while she yells Daddy on the other side of the curtained glass wall while leather K is trapped helplessly fighting to stop it on the other side of yet another impenetrable glass wall is cinematically glorious rapturous breathtaking colorful visceral passionate decadent dangerous over the top self-assured. How fun is this movie? It's like Disney Giallo.
 
7/25/2026 AMC Parkway Pointe 15
7/27/2026 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA

Drive, He Said

Summer brings big budget blockbusters. But this summer, there have also been a number of minimalist-structured narrative art films: Like Someone in Love (2012, Abbas Kiarostami) and To the Wonder (2012, Terrence Malick) in March kind of kicked things off; followed by Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine); The Bling Ring (2013, Sofia Coppola); and Prince Avalanche (2013, David Gordon Green). Another word to describe these films would be slow.

My first Nicolas Winding Refn film was Bronson (2008), which I hated because it treaded over the same dramatic elements too much: it was a movie about a badass who fights when cornered, so he goes to prison where... guess what?... he gets cornered and fights. In the film's defense, it looked amazing with its theatrical lighting stylization, and I had been burnt out by a festival schedule where I had already seen three films before Bronson that night.

Drive (2011, Refn) is a treat. Cliff Martinez's synthesizer 80s New Wave madness and pop songs really characterize Drive. And Carey Mulligan's damsel is the right kind of distress The Driver (Ryan Gosling) needs to check his desires. Comedy and violence finally add to create a work that can travel around to plenty of audiences effectively.

Power attracts beauty.

Only God Forgives (2013, Refn) is an urban Crime Drama that takes place in Bangkok and focuses on the few individuals who wield substantial power in the close-knit criminal underworld, and the attainability of beauty, justice, and morality that their respective statuses and power afford them.

The film opens with a kickboxing ring Julian (Gosling) runs. Slow camera dollies fluidly present sumptuous production design, highlighted by real Thailand locations, elaborate black-on-red wallpaper schemes, strong red lights, and ornate floral arrangements. This Bangkok, like Tokyo in Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé), is painted in its most dark, dangerous, and aesthetically elegant form.

Once the tone is established, the following 85 minutes sludge forward charged with the behemoth Cliff Martinez score, which is unlike his recent electropop funk arrangements. Martinez's score features foreboding low strings that sound like tectonic plates must be shifting, along with bizarre atonal percussion arrangements that sometimes sound like the music from the stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick). In the film's third act climax, Martinez finally brings out his Moog funk for a big fight though--what fun.

Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) is the central character of the film. He rules Bangkok as a Police Chief, dishing out his own brand of justice, as he sees fit--which usually involves bloodshed. His stoicism seems contagious. The entire cast barely moves a face muscle, appendage, or even mutters a word that they don't absolutely have to. This movie is heavy. It's about a triangle of powerful people who cross each other, and the ensuing resolution.

The brothels and 12 year old Thai prostitutes are shockingly beautiful in their context here. And so is the venerable Chang's karaoke performances, with his adoring disciples (Bangkok PD) solemnly and piously granting him audience.

The blocking is very important in Only God Forgives. Audiences must pay close attention to eyelines to decipher where Julian is looking often, as cuts mismatch geographical and temporal unity. Is all of this real? Is some of it imagined? Obviously we are meant to decide ourselves, but we can assume the shots of the bloody samurai sword, for example, represent something more than your typical connect-the-dots narratives.

Only God Forgives meets the challenge of the cliché, "Go big or go home." I love the way the gargantuan metropolis Bangkok can represent the pinnacle of exotic beauty and vice, and we get to study the power dynamic through a few White expatriates primarily--it's fun to imagine that these criminals are so big that they just live off the fat of the land down there pursuing the classic safe haven for American outlaws, while running shit and living the life of luxury. And it is even more fitting that they all answer to Chang, the benevolent Chang.

I just dig Chang. Something about how formidable his presence is, always wearing that short-sleeved black shirt and slacks uniform. And Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas) is hilariously adept at being the termagant who commands her own empire.

--Dregs