- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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I'm not well versed on witchcraft. What else could be considered to be in that category other than the cannibalism thing? I really enjoyed the visuals and the score was goddamn amazing. The Sun / Moon imagery was very interesting.
And is cannibalism something that witches practice or something? hosed up if true.
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Jun 27, 2016 19:56
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Apr 28, 2024 18:33
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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Still not sure why everyone is so sold on witchcraft having to do with anything here? Did they light a bunch of candles and make a ritualistic sacrifice? No. They just ate the girl.
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Jun 28, 2016 16:21
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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I don't think they were witches. I just think they were hosed up, sadistic people.
Hahaha this is awful, but when leaving the theater, the first thing my buddy says is, "They should have just named it 'Cunts: The Movie'."
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Jun 28, 2016 20:24
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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Witch stories aren't scary though.
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Jun 29, 2016 00:52
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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Witches aren't hot as poo poo and they don't take lezzy showers together, blood covered or not.
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Jun 29, 2016 04:02
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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Best part? No. Hilarious? Hell yeah.
Best part was Special Agent Utah hassling the pedobro the shower scene
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Jun 30, 2016 00:00
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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There wasn't much to any of the characters.
I feel like this was due to the incredibly accurate portrayal of individuals who work in the fashion world.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:23
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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So I don't think the following reviewer would like that alt title I mentioned, "Cunts: The Movie."
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/25/12024924/neon-demon-review-refn-necrophilia-scene
That One Girl in Undergrad posted:The Neon Demon tries to both fetishize and vilify young girls. It fails.
It's a film about women, made by a man, that misunderstands and misrepresents women on every level.
Updated by Kayleigh Hughes on June 25, 2016, 9:30 a.m. ET
Viewers first encounter the protagonist of The Neon Demon in a precarious position. The young girl, thin and pale and blank, lays prone on a chaise longue, drenched in blood. She is wearing a party dress. Her throat is slit, the blood coagulating thick and dark, and the camera takes its time sliding across her body and zooming out. There is loud electronic music.
The girl is 16-year-old Jessie, played with a soft and steadfast confidence by Elle Fanning. She is not dead but rather modeling, and the film follows her dark journey through the Los Angeles fashion industry, where she quickly learns that her natural beauty is the rare kind that will open all the right doors and turn all the right heads — as well as the wrong ones.
The film comes from director Nicolas Winding Refn, known most widely for 2011’s stylish and adrenaline-fueled surprise hit Drive. With this latest effort, Refn paints a lurid, confused portrait of girlhood and the fashion industry that is flashy, loud, and gory but unfortunately fails at all turns to touch on anything close to truth.
During a recent roundtable interview, Refn spoke with me about how The Neon Demon subverts traditional expectations of men and women. He told me that "the males were written as the girlfriends of other movies." And in an interview with Vulture, he declared the film "beyond feminist" because it is "all about women."
The problem with this statement is that neither The Neon Demon nor Refn seems to actually understand women. At all.
In addition to Jessie, who feels more like a wounded male’s idea of a 16-year-old girl — pure, soft-spoken and alluring, calculated and threatening in her self-awareness — the film also introduces us to Jena Malone’s Ruby, a gentle but intense and secretive makeup artist who immediately develops a strong interest in the young girl. As the film progresses, Ruby makes a series of less and less realistic decisions that undermine her character work while doing some notable damage to queer representation in media.
Elsewhere, Christina Hendricks is a bright spot, giving a solid, satirical take on an agent, but her expository scene is all too brief. Finally, we have a bevy of models jealous of how easily Jessie rises through the ranks of the industry. These bitter, beautiful people, scowling and slithering, are pure stereotype, their dialogue sounding like nothing I’ve ever heard come out of a real woman’s mouth.
A film made by a man that is entirely about men but understands its characters and represents them accurately — both as members of their gender and as unique individuals — is much less a failure to women than a film about women, made by a man, which misunderstands and misrepresents women on every level, repulsively warping the ways they engage with the world and why.
At one point in The Neon Demon, Jessie tells a story about how her mother used to call her "a dangerous girl." She was right, Jessie says, "I am dangerous."
It’s a common narrative. Young girls are raised to believe that their appearance makes them dangerous. That they "look like trouble." That their bare shoulders will distract boys from learning. That ungluing their knees from one another when they are sitting is both a threat to men and an invitation. These are lies. But The Neon Demon believes they are universal truths, which makes it difficult to take seriously.
What makes Refn’s best work (see: Drive) so successful is a combination of energy and well-modulated tone. Certainly his direction has always been notable for its emphasis on style, but as he would surely say himself, style can be awfully empty. If a film’s only goal is to be stylish, it might as well be a music video, and that’s what most of The Neon Demon feels like: a collection of flashy, colorful, high-concept music videos for songs that are dragged down by at least a couple of minutes of dull, self-satisfied noodling instrumental filler.
At one minute shy of two hours, the film is far too long and indulgent; the narrative is a meandering, joyless mess. During the roundtable, Refn admitted to that, in a sense, explaining that the protagonist and antagonist switch at the halfway point — which also marks the switch from "melodrama" to "horror film" — but that doesn’t make the tonal and narrative transitions any more graceful or, frankly, logical.
The result is a series of disconnected vignettes. In one moment, The Neon Demon is a bloated, hallucinatory prep session for a runway show; then it’s a smiley face with Xs for eyes being resentfully scrawled onto a mirror with lipstick. (Refn’s female characters spend an inordinate amount of time gazing into mirrors.) All of a sudden, we’re supposed to be invested in side characters who, just like that, have become sadistic protagonists.
Meanwhile, the thread of Keanu Reeves’s motel owner character, a grotesque individual who makes vile sexual noises at Jessie and encourages her boyfriend to direct his attention to a 13-year-old girl in the next room ("real Lolita poo poo," he says), is mysteriously dropped in favor of brutalizing girl-on-girl body horror, right around the time he escalates his behavior to far more terrifyingly villainous acts. (You’d be tempted to call him a caricature, if not for the upsetting truth that men exactly like him are plentiful in the real world.)
Whatever horrors men can inflict on women, The Neon Demon tells us, are no match for what cruelties women will commit against each other because they’re pretty and narcissistic.
If you’ve seen the film’s trailer or know anything about Refn as a director, you know there’s going to be blood. Refn is giddy for shock tactics, positively gleeful over the reaction this film — with its "cannibalism," "lesbian necrophilia" and "deep-throating [of] a knife" — has received so far.
However, the only truly shocking thing about The Neon Demon is how Refn, a middle-aged straight white man with wealth, power, and influence, can be so absolutely convinced that it’s young girls who are the real threat in today’s beauty-obsessed society.
.........
This entire review absolutely slays me. She is so so very angry, and she doesn't understand the film at all -- only superficially (hint hint).
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Jul 1, 2016 07:38
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Apr 28, 2024 18:33
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- Preston Waters
- May 21, 2010
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by VideoGames
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It blows my mind how some of these reviewers have jobs at respectable papers. Seriously, I don't understand how you go about having that large of a platform to speak from and when you're so shallow. These fuckers all have English degrees mostly I'm guessing?
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Jul 3, 2016 20:55
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Jun 27, 2016 19:56
