HOTEL ARTEMIS

In which Jodie Foster plays an old lady with a thick Noo Yawk accent who runs a secret hospital for the criminal underworld. In heavy make-up, with a shuffling gait, trying to keep the peace among warring thugs, she impresses with a truly immersive performance - her toughness matched by genuine melancholy at the death of her son.  The delicate equilibrium in which she lives is disturbed when Zachary Quinto (STAR TREK) brings in his mortally wounded father, Jeff Goldblum, violating the Nurse's strict code and dredging up painful events from her past. It also unleashes nastiness among her guests, including Sofia Boutela and THIS IS US' Sterling K Brown.

HOTEL ARTEMIS is the first directorial feature from Drew Pierce - the guy who wrote IRON MAN 3 - and as one would expect from that it's witty and high concept. The production design of the antiquated hotel is really beautiful and the cinematography from Chung-Hoon Chung gives it a suitably ominous claustrophobic feel.  I love the near future setting and delicate hints at sci-fi, but this film is best viewed as a nasty little drama of claustrophobic conflict, with the real suspense around who'll be the last man or woman standing.   It's a clever, captivating film - to be sure by the end I didn't really care who was left alive - but I really want to see what Drew Pierce does next. 

HOTEL ARTEMIS is rated R and has a running time of 94 minutes. The movie is available to rent and own.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

ONLY GOD FORGIVES is a visually stunning, austere, balletic movie that happens to contain one scene of particularly gruesome violence that has had critics up in arms at its "torture porn" aesthetic. I think this is a gross misunderstanding of what this film is trying to do and explore, and a rather facile reason to dismiss it. A more serious criticism is that the austerity - the slow tracking camera - the carefully staged tableaux - become wearying in their purity, and alienating insofar as they flatten out and forbid any real emotional engagement.

The plot is almost impossible to spoil - the movie is all concept and very little development. In a highly stylised but contemporary Bangkok an American crime family falls foul of a Thai cop cum avenging angel called Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm). Chang arranges for the death of the paedophile son Billy (Tom Burke - THE HOURS), which prompts the emotionally manipulative matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott-Thomas) to order her other son Julian (Ryan Gosling) to be avenged in turn.  This unleashes a wave of death with an unflinching logic - no-one who is guilty escapes, other than the man who, accepting his guilt, seeks an escape. 

The style of this movie is similarly unflinching and unrelenting.  Nicholas Windig Refn retreats from the small semblance of emotional authenticity and narrative contained in DRIVE to the more arthouse purity of his Mads Mikkelsen Viking flick VALHALLA RISING.  There's a sense in which that character, as well as Driver, reach their apotheosis in Chang  - the man whose motivation is primal and almost robotic.  He has no emotion - barely breaks a sweat - we get that he has a daughter but could any of us say that he is attached to her? 

In fact, the only real emotional relationship for us to get invested in, is that between Crystal and her son.  The typically elegant Kristin Scott Thomas is transformed into the Real Housewives of Psychoville, channelling Donatella Versace, Lady Macbeth, Livia from THE SOPRANOS.  Her performance elicits the few laughs of the movie, and could easily have slipped into spoof.  There's one moment when she's almost as nutso as MOMMY DEAREST, but somehow the film just manages to stay on the right side of serious.

As for Ryan Gosling, he's paring down the character of Driver into something even less dialogue-driven, and yet conveying a guilt, an honour, and a pent-up anger that is powerful and ultimately gives us the only catharsis of this movie. In a moment of levity, I thought he was like the Hulk, deliberately trying to constrain his anger. And then, at times I thought Julian was (rather improbably) like Alex Marchmain in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, using a hooker to shield himself from his mother/wife. 

Finally, to the real star of the show - cinematographer Larry Smith's breath-taking visuals - which combine the surreal, hyper-designed colour-schemes of a David Lynch nightmare and the slow deliberate tracking of Kubrick.  While the director has asserted that he was inspired by Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID, look at those bar scenes and tell me you're not thinking of the Twin Peaks' Red Room. Watch Chang singing schmaltzy Thai karaoke songs in an eerie tableaux setting, sometimes with the sound overdubbed, and tell me you're not thinking of the Club Silencio scene in MULHOLLAND DRIVE where the old woman lip synchs to a cover of Roy Orbison's Crying.  The sound design from Cliff Martinez is similarly fantastic and at times I felt like I didn't need any dialogue at all - just this expressionist electronic take on religious organ music and the Lynchian visuals. 

I guess I should address some of the objections to this film? Is it just torture porn? No.  The violence is largely off screen and is certainly at the service of Chang's deep ethics. The one full-on torture scene is difficult, but is in the context of a movie that is a massive Biblical metaphor, it serves a purpose in illustrating the "if the eye offends thee" vengeance imperative. To that end, it feels like some of the violence in Park Chan-Wook movies. And the final scene of grotesquerie is a masterpiece - echoing the seminal penetration scene in Georges Bataille's Ma Mere. 

Is the movie condescending toward its oriental setting?  No. It's making a point about how Westerners can view Thailand as a place to escape and indulge their base desires, and how frustrating and infuriating this must be for the local population.  The key scene between Chang and Julian is absolutely crucial in this respect. In fact, the choice of using Thai language title cards for this movie with English subtitles is a very clear move not to pander to Westerners. 

What can I say? I was transfixed by this film. I found it to be intelligent, deliberately styled, and, perhaps astonishingly, laugh-out-loud funny. It was absorbing even as I acknowledged that I didn't really care about the characters. It just wasn't that kind of movie.

This movie is available as a podcast below, or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES played Cannes 2013, and opened earlier this year in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland and Turkey. It is currently on release in Australia, Germany, Canada, the USA, Israel, Portugal, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. It opens on August 8th in Hungary; on August 22nd in Singapore; on September 20th in Latvia and Mexico; on September 26th in Russia; on November 1st in Spain and in January 2014 in Japan.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK for strong bloody violence. 

DRIVE - A Real Hero

I know a lot of guys who mess around with married women, but you're the only one I know who robs a place to pay back the husband. 

From the Hot Pink titles; to the electro-kitsch soundtrack; to Ryan Gosling's silver satin jacket; to the neon lights of Los Angeles, DRIVE is a movie that oozes cool.  It's hero, simply titled "Driver" is so cool, he barely needs to speak, has no discernible back-story, merely exists. As both a stunt- and get-away-driver, he barely breaks a sweat, and even when for a sweet girl (Carey Mulligan) and her son, he barely cracks a smile.  The courtship is so low-key, chaste, Driver's attitude so stoic, at times I even doubted he had been moved at all. And then, when his girl needs a hero, that's exactly what he becomes.  The change comes by stealth, jarring, shocking, and the movie, like its hero (now capitalised) shifts from quirky romance into hard-core ultra-violence.  Driver becomes the man his angelic, virginal girlfriend needs - maybe the man he always wanted to be, and just needed the excuse to become - the violence evidently so close to the surface.  Within what feels like seconds, we have descended into overwhelming violence, no-way-out kind of snowballing craziness.  Driver seems to welcome it.  It seems to be his fate.

DRIVE is another example of director Nicolas Windig Refn's obsession with, and objectification of, men who define themselves through violence.  Again and again - whether Tom Hardy in BRONSON or Mads Mikkelsen in VALHALLA RISING, Refn glories in the image of "hard" men covered in blood and gore.  The objectification is sometimes pretty disturbing, it feels voyeuristic, slippery, fascistic - we are being made complicit in, and enjoying to the point of nervous laughter, heinous violence. This sense of deeply, deeply black humour is heightened by some genius casting in the supporting roles - Albert Brooks playing against type as a sleazy B-movie producer cum mobster - Ron Perlman as a West Coast mafiosi - and Bryan Cranston as the semi-father figure who pimps Driver out for heist jobs.  (Sadly, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks' is underused in a cameo.) The humour also comes from Hossein Amini's tightly written adaptation of James Sallis' novel. But ultimately, given the glossy, seedy, look and feel of the movie, the ultimate praise has to go to Refn, for creating both his most mainstream movie to date, but betraying none of that particular brand of "violence and romantic sexiness" - and Gosling, who with but a flicker of eyes can betray a complexity of emotion beyond most of his generation of actors.  

DRIVE played Cannes, where Nicolas Windig Refn won Best Director, and Toronto 2011. It opened on September 16th in the US, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Canada and Poland. It opens today in Greece, Ireland, and the UK. It opens on September 30th in Malaysia and Italy. It opens on October 5th in France; on October 7th in Finland, on October 13th in Hong Kong, on October 21st in Estonia and Norway and on October 27th in Australia. It opens on November 3rd in Russia and Singapore, on November 18th in Sweden, on December 8th in Portugal and on January 26th 2012 in Germany.