The Conjuring

There's a scene in the original Saw where one of the characters is snapped out of sleep by a strange noise. He fumbles at the light switch for a while before realising the power is out. As it always is, the batteries in his torch are dead and so the only source of illumination he has available to him is the split-second flash he gets when he takes a photo with his camera. He navigates through his pitch-black apartment, jumping at every disfigured, household object that emerges from the dark before he hears a noise come from the closet. He slowly moves the door, until it's wide open. Whatever is in there has been staring at him, unmoving and unknown, for a good ten seconds before he clicks the shutter button. The light goes off and we catch a second's glimpse at the monster before it screams and runs at him. In a film much more focused on being a well-written, smart murder thriller, it's a terrifyingly effective horror scene, and one that would happily sit in a Top 10 Scariest Movie Moments, should I ever create one. Since then, James Wan has gone on to make quite a few horror flicks. He made Dead Silence, a longer and slightly more mature episode of Goosebumps. He made Insidious, a love letter to the fun-loving spookiness of Poltergeist. And he's now made The Conjuring, a love letter to the holy fuck shit-your-pants terror of Poltergeist.

One of my favourite things about The Conjuring is that there are no cynics. There's no token asshole who exists just to sneer and say "There's no such thing as ghosts, doofus!" so the story can justify why they don't just say "Yeah, alright" when the ghost tells them to fuck off. The tormented family of The Conjuring can't bail, because their finances are tied to the house. They didn't know about the series of murders before their arrival because Rhode Island state law prohibits realtors from releasing that information. But more importantly, when the calm, level-headed man of the house sees and hears genuine terror from his daughter, he gets the Ghostbusters in whip-fucking-smart. And it's those Ghostbusters that this movie's actually about. Did you know that back in the 70s there were two rock-star demonologists named the Warrens, one of whom was the only Vatican-certified exorcist to not be ordained, who checked out the Amityville house? Yeah, me neither. This flick is loosely based on their real experiences with a family tormented by a scraggy old dead woman and her prankster dead son. It's a genius move that I'm surprised to have not seen in more horror movies: if we come to know and care for the superheroes and they start to get scared, what does that say about the evil they're up against?

I fucking love horror. It's one of, if not my favourite genres of film and as such, it's also the genre I'm most snobbish about. Paranormal Activity (hear me out) didn't scare me when the ghost accidentally ran into a wall and decided to make the sound resonate so it would seem intentional. Paranormal Activity did scare the shit out of me when the female protagonist was ripped out of her bed and dragged down the hallway screaming and clawing at the floor, trying to escape the unseen entity. Of course, fear is 100% subjective, and I'm totally aware that some people find the Mr. Magoo Ghost really very spooky, and that's fine, but for me, it's not scary, but startling. Real horror isn't switching the lights off when I'm walking down a hallway, jumping in front of my face and shouting "FUCKIN' BOO WAAARRGHHH." Real horror is presenting me with an image so astonishing, so terrifying, so...horrific even, that I can't jump at it, because I'm frozen in fear. Those are the images that get under my skin and prevent me from sleeping. And The Conjuring got me fucking good a few times. I'm not going to spoil the fun, but there's a scene involving a game of hide and seek and another involving laundry that gave me chills and have been burned into my brain. The smartest thing Wan does here is employ the best trick in the horror book - sometimes, something is scarier the less you see of it - and takes it one step further: sometimes, something is scarier when you don't see it at all. Many scenes employ a beautiful level of restraint and silence, so that rather than keep you jumping and filled with anxiety, it may keep you frozen and filled with dread. Take note: this is what makes a horror movie memorable.

Next to the scares, the two most integral elements to a horror flick are characters and camera. In Halloween, the relationship Laurie shares with her friends feels real, not overblown and full of stereotypes, which makes it all the more tense and harrowing when these likable people start falling prey to Michael Myers. In The Conjuring, there's no suburban drama bubbling under the surface of paradise or suppressed familial hatred that jeopardises their safety in a time of peril. This is a large family that loves each other very much, being protected by a husband and wife that exude warmth and affection, and it's these attributes that makes the scary things happening to them all the more scary. As for the cinematography, holy shit. You can ask the person I saw this with: I squealed when a long zoom tracking shot was used. John R. Leonetti deserves a massive cuddle for shooting a film that understands the power and potential for terror that grace and stillness can provide. Just like Insidious too, his eye for framing is unbelievable as well, lending as much weight to the film's most terrifying shots as the monsters themselves. Clapping hands will make you shit yourself. 

So, in case it's not yet apparent, I really, really dug The Conjuring. There's a few things I haven't yet praised it for, such as its balls to the wall awesome soundtrack (The Zombies and Ryan Gosling's music project Dead Man's Bones? FUCK!), its almost total lack of CGI (read my Evil Dead review if you haven't yet for a rundown on my love for practical effects), its location (somehow, the location scouts found a spooky as hell old American home, with a twisted up dead tree and a black lake out back), and its loving nods to Poltergeist (including the TV static and two goofy characters that show up to help the exorcists), but ultimately, that's just sprinkles on the ice cream. All up, it's a beautiful, restrained, scary-as-all fuck tribute to the great horror films of the 70s and 80s, and in a world where a studio will make millions from Paranormal Activity 18: Loud Noises and...I Don't Know, Fuck You, it's nice to see they can make just as much from a real movie. Thank fuck for James Wan.

The World's End

A quick disclaimer: I usually don't bother with spoiler warnings, but this is a movie that kept some of it's bigger secrets hidden away, and I'm going to talk about all of them. If you don't want the magic spoiled, wait until you see The World's End before giving this a read. Hell, I'd prefer it if you did.

One of the biggest problems people will have with The World's End is that it's not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And they'll be right. The World's End is not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. But let's be honest: Hot Fuzz was not Shaun of the Dead. And Shaun of the Dead was not Spaced. It's been 14 years since Spaced, 9 years since Shaun of the Dead and 6 years since Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are much older than they were when they started The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. How could they possibly catch lightning in a bottle again? It's easy: they couldn't. They're not who they once were, so they made a movie about not being who they once were. If Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are about getting older, then The World's End is about being old. Oh, and body-snatching robot aliens.

The World's End opens with Simon Pegg's Gary King cheerily recounting the greatest night of alcoholism he and his four friends shared; a twelve-stop pub crawl when they were beautiful teenagers with the world at their fingertips. "I thought that life couldn't get any better than this. And you know what? It never did," King proudly states, as it's revealed he's regaling this story to an addiction support group. Not the brightest way to start a film. Gary decides it's time to get the band back together and give the "Golden Mile" another crack. The problem is, while he's stayed rooted in the free-wheeling, devil may care attitude of his youth, all of his friends have come to terms with the dangerous consequences such a life carries and have moved on to promotions, families and fitness instructors. This won't stop Gary, who's less concerned with seeing his old friends again and more concerned with indulging his alcoholism in company that allows retention of his arrested development. Their triumphant return to their hometown of Newton Haven isn't quite the loving welcome Gary was hoping for. Nobody seems to recognise him, all of the pubs have been swallowed by corporate franchising and the youth look upon his attitude and demeanour with total apathy. "Perhaps we're not the local legends you thought we were," says Nick Frost's Andy. It seems that way until Gary accidentally decapitates a teenager in the toilets, popping his head off like a Ken doll and shooting a blue, inky substance all over the toilet walls. It turns out that most of the town's citizens have been replaced with replica robots, in some sort of intergalactic merger designed to eradicate humanity's uglier traits. Does this revelation give Gary King the wakeup call he needs to realise the selfish, self-destructive path he's dragging his friends down and force him to call off the 'Golden Mile' so that they may focus on getting out of town alive? Not even a little bit.

Now, I can talk about how this film is funny. Because it is very, very funny. But I was just as affected by and would rather discuss the equally as prevalent serious side The World's End presents. Because I like a comedy that can make me cry; good humour has to come from relatable experiences, and life is never just the laughs. Gary King comes very close to being an irredeemable dick. He lies about his mum's death to convince Andy to join the drunken reunion, he hastily changes the subject when the conversation strays from drinking and when everything goes to shit, his top priority is finishing the 'Golden Mile'. It starts out funny, if a little bit pathetic, but as the movie continues, it starts to become much darker. Why is Gary so intent on finishing this arbitrary, adolescent activity? We are watching a man who is so unbelievably desperate to recapture the false former glory of his youth that even an alien invasion doesn't sway him from that determination. Andy sees this from the start ("We're not your friends, we're your fucking enablers"), and it's his relationship with Gary that is the most emotionally complex and rewarding in this film (as it always is with Pegg and Frost). Something's clearly been driven between them, more so than the others, and about two thirds of the way through, we find out that sixteen years ago, Gary had a drug overdose and Andy, four times over the limit, totalled his car trying to drive him to the hospital. Gary woke up and took off into the night, leaving Andy to nearly die. He doesn't drink anymore, against Gary's oblivious behest, and when he realises Gary was lying about his mum, he's almost overcome with hate. But when Gary takes off to finish the mile when a clear exit out of the city is in their reach, it's Andy who resigns to the fact that he has to follow after his best friend. Because he knows this man, he loves him, and he can see where he's going. And where it's going to end. When Gary eventually reaches the final pub, a pint has already been poured for him. He's about to take his final first sip when Andy smacks the glass out of his hand. They begin to fight, and all of their demons come spewing out. "YOU'VE GOT YOUR PERFECT LIFE," Gary screams. "THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT." Andy reveals that he doesn't; his wife left him, and he's trying to get her back, but he knows he won't win. It's not enough for Gary, who tries to have that last drink again. Andy throws him back, Gary's sleeves come down and we see the bandages wrapped around his forearms. He wasn't in a rehab clinic at the beginning of the film; he was in a hospital. "It was never as good as that night," he says, tears in his eyes. "You don't have to do this," Andy implores. "Yeah," Gary says, hand on the lever, glass at the ready. "I do."

Previously in the film, Rosamund Pike's Sam says, "Not everything's about that night, Gary." "Isn't it?" he replies. What does it take for someone as blindingly self-destructive as Gary to change his lifestyle? It's simple: the end of the world. When he pulls the aforementioned lever, he and Andy are lowered into a cold, metallic chamber. A big, bright light appears and, with the smooth, sultry tones of Bill Nighy, it explains that what they've become privy to this evening is the result of nearly a decade of intergalactic espionage; a merging operation to get Earth on track socially with the rest of the galaxy. Advances in telecommunications are their biggest present to us: making us more robotic and disconnected from each other, but hey, at least we're not pissing in the streets anymore! What follows is an unbelievably hilarious and razor sharp argument between the "big lamp", Gary, Andy and Paddy Considine's Steven, in which the drunken fucks point out all of the flaws inherent with this grand scheme: none so much as the fact that everyone in the town bar three people resisted and have since been replaced with robots. The three guys drunkenly berate the luminescent alien ("Why don't you hop in your rocket and fuck off back to Legoland, you cunt"), until it can't stand any more. "Just what is it that you want?" it politely asks. Beautifully quoting Primal Scream's Loaded, Gary says "We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do." The alien relents. "Yeah. Fuck it," it says as it switches the lights off. Unfortunately, in switching off, it also releases a massive EMP explosion that sets the world back to the Dark Ages. They are literally left to their own devices. Their individual fates are covered in a very brief epilogue, but what happened to Gary? With young robot versions of his four friends, he roams the wasteland looking for water (not alcohol) and slaying robot racists. I'll admit, this threw me a little. At first, I wasn't sure if this hurt or helped support everything the movie had said about Gary preceding it. But then, I came to this conclusion: a man like Gary King can never change who he is fundamentally. When he's willing to attempt suicide because he doesn't understand the concept of growing up, that's a tough shell to break out of. But if there were two things he did well, even if it only applied to a few years of his life, it was being a leader and being a rebel. He rebelled against growing up, he rebelled against life, he rebelled against an all-powerful spacial entity and now he's rebelling against the new world the apocalypse has wrought: one that doesn't accept robots. And there's a whole mess of those robots looking for some leadership.

Early on in The World's End, Eddie Marsan's Pete encounters the bully who made his life a living hell when he was a child. Their exchange? He asks Pete if he can use a vacant stool. "The worst part is he didn't even recognise me. It's like all of that torture meant nothing," Peter says. Of course, the real reason he didn't recognise him is because he was a robot, and later on, when Peter's had much, much more to drink and gets lost in the forest, the bully appears again, and offers a hand, to apologise for his actions when they were younger. When Gary, Andy and Steven catch up, Peter is savagely beating him into the ground. "Come on mate, it's not worth it!" they implore. "YES, IT FUCKING IS," Peter roars back at them, tears streaming down his face as he throws the last punch and breaks open his head. It's a brutal, gut-wrenching scene that gave me chills and made me cry. And then it made me laugh, uproariously, when in the following shot Pete is running at the robot with a large tree branch in a fantastic throwback to a Fawlty Towers episode. And to me, there's no better summary of The World's End than that. Edgar Wright and Co. have created an utterly beautiful commentary on adulthood, friendship and addiction that somehow also manages to socially satirise the human race in the most affectionate way possible and bring an end to their genre-drenched legacy. As repetitive as I know I'm beginning to sound, it made me laugh just as much as it made me cry, but I think the reason I keep saying that is because I'm struggling to find the words to say just how much these movies mean to me. The list of what I truly treasure in this world isn't very long, but The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy is most certainly on there. They are a fucking triumph of modern film-making, and the day I get to show them to my children will be as monumental to me as the day my father took a fourteen-year-old me to see Shaun of the Dead.

The Wolverine

I hate Hugh Jackman. I hate that he doesn't think he's better than me, but is in almost every way. I hate that he can sing, that he can dance, that he can be the first man in Hollywood to offer Jennifer Lawrence a hand up when she falls at the Oscars, that he can strap a pair of balls to his chin for a shit movie and everyone forgives him because he's such a nice hunk. Oh, and I hate that he can play one of the best comic book characters to exist like a fucking champion to the point where he can be in a movie for all of five seconds and it's hailed as the best part, that he can get away with a "Well, at least he was in it, heh heh. That's our Hugh!" when his first standalone movie is such a goddamn travesty, and that it doesn't stop him from getting another. I hate Hugh Jackman. I hate that I love him so much. And I hate that The Wolverine comes so fucking close to delivering the movie he deserves to play that character in. 'So fucking close' doesn't always win the race, and The Wolverine trips up in it's final act and falls flat on it's face, letting First Class, X-2 and X-Men jog briskly past it. But hey, at least it beats The Last Stand, which is still on the ground at the starting line, running circles around it's head shouting, "Woopwoopwoopwoopwoop!"

The Wolverine kicks off an indeterminate amount of time after The Last Stand. Yeah, they're pretending that still happened. Logan's not dealing with killing the woman he loved that well. He's off in the American wilderness somewhere, sharing a patch of forest and a strained relationship with a bear. He regularly dreams about laying in bed with Jean, who acts as both sympathiser and tormentor, sometimes in the same conversation. His clear and obvious need to "just fucking get over her" manifests itself when an old and dying friend from Japan named Yashida sends an errand girl to see if he'll come over to say hooroo. Upon arrival, Yashida reveals he's worked out a way to remove Logan's powers and impress them on himself, effectively curing his nuclear radiation poisoning and allowing Logan the thing he wants more than anything else: to die. "You don't want what I have, bub," Wolverine grunts, and goes to bed ready to head home the next day. That night, he's infected with a parasite that wraps around his heart and prevents his body from healing, a fact he doesn't discover until he's shot five times the next day. And so begins a tale of murder, corporate espionage, the yakuza and a gigantic adamantium mecha-samurai that teams up with a bald snake lady who spits on people. One of these things is not like the other.

The first two thirds of this movie were surprisingly good. Even really good every now and then. The film's opening blew me away: a chilling and brutally effective recreation of the bombing of Nagasaki that sets up Wolverine's friendship with Yashida. Another highlight was a point later in the film where Yashida's granddaughter, Mariko, lies in bed with Logan. She tells him about her grandfather's bedtime story: the story of the Wolverine. A magical protector unable to be killed, he watches over her family and keeps them safe. And it's within those two scenes that we find the film's biggest strength: in a larger X-Men film, Wolverine is just the coolest of the cool. In this film, he is alone. He is legend. Which is something that carries all the more weight when he's suddenly made mortal. Now he's just a man with six swords against the Yakuza. This leads to some incredible action set-pieces, such as the exhilarating bullet train roof sequence, in which Logan and a Yakuza member desperately try and slash at each other while also trying to avoid low-hanging signs and such by dislodging their blades and jumping into the air. Hands-down though, the best example of this comes at the end of the film's second act. Logan works out that the reason he's been protecting Mariko from the Yakuza is because her father, Shingen, ordered the hit so as to prevent Mariko from becoming the heir of her grandfather's company as stipulated in his will. After performing surgery on himself to remove the parasite sucking on his heart and dying for a little bit while his regenerative powers kick back in, he awakes just in time to catch the down-swinging blade of Shingen; drunk, insane, decked out in samurai gear Shingen (don't ask why). What follows is an unbelievable sword fight: Shingen furiously slashing at Wolverine, who either blocks or allows himself to be cut, because fuck it. At one point, Shingen sticks the blade through his chest and out the other side. Wolverine twists his body to snap the sword, flexes and pushes the blade out. Shingen is finished. Wolverine looks like he's about to gut the fucker. He pauses. "You tried to have your own daughter killed," he growls. "Live with that." Ten out of fucking ten. He walks away from the man defeated. Unable to live with that, he runs screaming at Logan, sword held high. Logan turns at the right moment and sticks his claws through Shingen's throat. I could have cheered. Movie over, right?

Sadly, movie not over. Some executive must have gotten cold feet over the idea of an X-Men movie with only one mutant and demanded that someone, anyone, get chucked in to give Logan a supernatural run for his money. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and pulled out Viper. When I said earlier "a bald snake lady that spits on people", that wasn't hyperbole. That's literally her role in this film. She spits on people, they get pimples and die, and later she's dead until she hisses and sheds her skin, losing her hair in the process. Her other ability? She's immune to all poisons. A formidable opponent, if at any point during the movie she was ever in danger of being poisoned. Oh, and there's the mecha-samurai, too, existing only to keep Wolverine in mortal danger with its adamantium blades and to fuck the story. It turns out it's not a robot, but the previously thought dead Yashida in disguise. Seems he was a bit miffed that Wolverine wasn't willing to give up his gift, so he figured the best course of action was to spend an exuberant amount of money to create a gigantic robot that's only real use was hacking his claws off with the sword and sucking out his bone marrow with a drill. Spared no expense! It's not enough for this to just be a weak ending though, it has to go and ruin all of the good stuff preceding it. Wolverine saved this guy's life in Nagasaki, and he was so in awe of this ronin that he offered his sword to him and made him legend. Until the possibility of everlasting life and power came along. Poor Yukio having the scummiest fucking family ever. But it's not just the impact on the story that makes this last act so bad; it's the fact that it's so unbelievably out of place. Wolverine spends most of the movie mortal, risking his life fighting humans wielding swords and guns to protect Yukio, before regaining his powers to take down the most dangerous of them all. And then a robot. It's like finishing No Country for Old Men with a game of Super Smash Bros.

Ultimately though, the worst thing is that the stuff I liked about The Wolverine wasn't even that great. It was just good. Adequate. Competent. This is what gets me excited about summer movies these days. The best I can hope for is something that just ticks the boxes. It's not unrelentingly violent and schizophrenic for the sake of being dark and edgy, it's not racially insensitive for the sake of moral protection, it's not bad for the sake of being like the bad thing it's referencing. It's just...there. And then it fails to even do that. A perfectly good movie ruined by the fear that Wolverine can't just fight humans. That he can't just be an interesting character we can relate to; someone unable to ever receive rest from his demons. Someone whose abilities are such an unbelievable burden that he wishes weren't his, because of the subsequent unquestionable obligation to use them to protect people. People he'll inevitably have to watch die. No, you can have a bit of that, but then he's got to punch the bald snake lady before she spits on everyone! I don't know, maybe I just expect too much of movies. Then again, fuck that. I'll do what I want, bub.

So I've got a little something different prepared for you blessed few today: a second opinion from both the most good looking dude I know and perhaps the only person who reads further into films than I do: my good friend Jeremiah Smith! He was keen to put his own two cents in and has done a bang up job tearing this flick to shreds. If you dig his style, let me know and I'll try and get him in on more in the future!

The Wolverine and I go way back. From the awesome 90’s animated series, to a stack of comics, and eventually the live action X-Men films. So, I'd like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what Logan's deal is. But after the release of the The Wolverine, apparently I was totally wrong, and the Hollywood people know better (yeah, its gonna be like that). Being marketed as 'the Wolverine movie the fans have been waiting for', I can't help but feel a little bit abandoned. The Wolverine doesn't cut it.

The film starts strong, with an opening flashback sequence that reminds me a bunch of the opening sequence of the original X-Men movie (both of them WWII related). And like the first film, I'm getting hints of a truer version of Logan's disposition (and he hasn't even murdered anyone yet). We're off to a good start, keep it up and we have a Wolverine movie. 
A dream sequence follows, and in some clumsy dialogue with the ghost of Jean Grey, Logan expresses he made a vow to never hurt anyone again. Awesome, a chance to build some tension and to push Logan to his limits - hints of the Old Man Logan comic. I'm still invested. Hobo Logan wakes up and wanders the Canadian wilderness. He encounters some ignorant assholes and they hurt a bear. This would usually mean trouble for these D-bags, but Logan made a vow. He's gonna have to handle this in a different way, or walk awa- oh wait, the claws are out. "Sorry Jean" is expressed without any semblance of remorse. We're losing Logan and I'm losing faith. We're about 12 minutes into the movie.

A Japanese girl walks in with a katana. She says things and scenes change. She and the Wolverine are now in Japan. Exposition; pay attention, you need to know the dude practicing sword fighting can sword fight. The only way this could be lazier writing is if there was a voiceover, or onscreen titles that pop up. Logan reconnects with an old Japanese dude Yashida, and they have a pretty interesting conversation. Mortality, atonement, honour: these themes are on the table now. I'm reminded of a deleted scene from X-Men, in which Logan is letting Rogue know she's not alone by telling her he can't show her the scars from all the times he's tried to kill himself. He wants out, now more than ever with Jean haunting him. I'm listening again. But Logan says no. Um, what? A chance at a normal lifespan, to age, to love without fear of outliving his partner, to atone for all the carcasses in his wake. At the very least a chance for some tension in the film. I realise what I'm watching. I'm checking out mentally.

The Wolverine is a huge tease. Those themes I mentioned earlier? It doesn't matter if you don't remember, because they don't re-enter the film. We get bullet train fights and Yakuza hit-men and corporate BS instead. We get a jacked-up version of Walter Matthau (Grumpy Old Logan) and a giant robot samurai and plot holes and a bald snake lady. And ninjas. I'm sure it looked good on paper (literally, it is a comic). It’s the most frustrating thing about this movie: you know they know better because they laid it all out for us, and then pissed it away for some shallow bastardisation of a much-loved character. See, Logan is, in essence, a tragic character. He will outlive everyone he gets close to. The dude is quietly grieving 24/7, so don't disturb him or he'll get pissed. Innate to this dude is sadness, not rage. Enough with the rage. But that's all the studios want from Hugh Jackman, it seems. And I have much love for Hugh; he's pretty solid (anyone that saw The Fountain would agree), but a couple of thousand-mile stares and a sad face every now and then would help the audience believe that Logan is carrying the weight of 200 years plus of shitty living. He did it in X-Men awesomely. But they want the raging beast, and so do some fans, which is fine. But don't put a badass in an M rated film. The guy with claws in a samurai movie doesn't cut off a single limb (or lose any). Blade is laughing at him.

 
The Wolverine movie I was hoping for was a more traditional samurai film, something patient and deliberate and a character study of a genuinely interesting and tragic character. Instead, this film is the tragedy. With the studios taking a 'risk' by ditching the X-Men moniker, The Wolverine had the potential to reboot the character in a standalone film, and to totally blow the audience away. I wanted something that respected the audience as well as the character and some well-placed action to break it up. It had the potential to be the Skyfall of comic book movies. The 12 year olds that love this stuff - they have their Wolverine movie. Who are we kidding - they have four of them.

There is a scene in The Wolverine where we see Logan shaving himself with a razor. He has claws, I can't imagine Logan ever using a razor, let alone shaving that regularly. They got him all wrong. I haven't seen Logan since X-Men, and I need him to return before this character gets any staler. They're beating a dead Wolverine and he’s refusing to die. But they have to pump these out before Hugh gets too old to convince us he's not ageing.
 
Notably bad dialogue:

Logan: Don't hurt my friends!

Some Japanese dude: What...are…you?
Logan: I'm the WOLVERINE!

Logan: Go fuck yourself, pretty boy.

Only God Forgives

Man, people aren't really digging Only God Forgives. It's currently sitting at 37 on Metacritic, and critics are calling it long, boring, vulgar, misogynistic, cruel, vicious and overly violent. You know, all the things that Drive was. But I'm going to play the snobby hipster who's almost always wrong and say that they didn't get it. Here's the thing: Drive hid all of the aforementioned within a classic Hollywood story and a European arthouse aesthetic that got all the critics nostalgic and googly-eyed. So Nicolas Winding Refn decided to see how much they loved it. How much they were willing to experience. He pulled a Hangover Part Two. I love Nicolas Winding Refn. I hold Bronson, Valhalla Rising, Drive and now Only God Forgives as some of the most unique, gorgeous and entertaining movies I've seen in recent years. What I find even more entertaining is watching a director with Hollywood at his fingertips dovetail his career just so he can tell them to go fuck themselves. Cheers, Nic, you're a top bloke.

Only God Forgives is arguably even more bare bones than Drive was. Julian (Ryan Gosling) runs a boxing club in Bangkok that doubles as a drug dealing operation. His partner in crime and brother, Billy (Tom Burke), gets a bit jippy one night and hits the town looking for an underage girl to rape. He eventually finds a willing participant in a brothel owner, who brings his daughter in. Billy ends up deciding rape wasn't all he was feeling, and savagely murders her. The police are brought in, and the sergeant, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), brings the girl's father to the scene of the crime and leaves him alone with Billy, offering him the chance to do what he feels is right. The father beats Billy to death, and Chang takes the father's hands as punishment. Meanwhile, Julian and Billy's mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), flies in and demands that Julian take appropriate revenge for the family. He gets the handless dad in a room, but after hearing the man claim that he was forced to kill Billy by the "Angel of Vengeance", he's unable to do the deed. Not long after, Chang's involvement becomes apparent to Crystal and all hell breaks loose as she takes increasingly violent means to see someone, anyone, die for the death of her son. Just a nice little trip to the movies, right?

But it's not this unrelentingly disgusting and vulgar just for shits and giggles. Instead, it serves to both cover and accentuate the themes underpinning this film. At it's heart, this movie is about spiritual honour; what it means to be wholly and unquestionably responsible for something (in Julian's case, family, and in Chang's case, humanity) and the deeper understanding of life and existence that such a level of thinking can provide. Early on, the film establishes the concept that though we view the film largely from Julian's point of view, we're not necessarily always operating within reality. Just following Billy's death, Julian is walking down a narrow, neon-red corridor towards a pitch-black doorway. He's clearly fearful of what exists in the dark, but he's compelled forward anyway. As he arrives at the doorway, he slowly reaches his hand into the void. Chang emerges from the darkness, sword held high above his head, and swings it down, severing Julian's hand. In the following scene, his hand is back on his body. At another point, Julian sits in a club, admiring a prostitute on stage, dancing. He imagines putting his fingers in her, but becomes irritated when men further down the table are ogling her as well. He calmly walks towards them, and as one of the men raises a glass to his mouth, he slaps it into his face. Bleeding profusely, he drags the man into the hallway by his upper jaw. Halfway down, we cut back to Julian on the chair. This was merely what he wanted to do, and as he stares at the dancer, his gaze eventually moves down to his hands stretched out in front of him.

Julian is obsessed with his hands, in these visions and in reality, because he knows that by the end of the film, he will lose them to Chang as judgement for the crimes of his family. What affords him this understanding is the honour that he operates with. From the beginning of the movie, he knows that he will lose his hands, but he does not know why. When he meets Chang, he understands: he is in the presence of God. This isn't exactly revelatory for him, nor does it change his actions from then on: once again, from the beginning, he operates almost mechanically, because he knows that whatever he's done, does or will do has been predetermined. And make no mistake: Chang is God; an all-powerful, all-knowing judge, juror and executioner that commands as much adoration, respect and fear from his colleagues as he does anyone who comes to be beneath his blade. When Julian asks if Chang would like to fight him, he knows that he is about to receive the beating of a lifetime, but that doesn't matter: this is God's will, and he is powerless to fight it. In operating with honour, he shall die with honour, which, within his shitty existence, is the best he can hope for.

What threatens his honour most throughout the film is his mother. Kristin Scott Thomas does an unbelievably disgusting and brilliant job as Crystal; never have I heard someone bring this much weight to a phrase like, "And how many cocks can you entertain with that cute little cum dumpster of yours?" She paints the picture of a mother connected and disconnected to her children in all of the wrong ways. An incestuous relationship with Billy is hinted at; which sheds a bit of light at both his actions at the beginning of the film and what he says to Julian before doing so. "It's time to meet the devil," he mumbles, because there's no way Satan can be as bad as her. She demeans, insults, berates and belittles Julian at every turn, but when the prostitute he disguised as his date for a dinner with her has the nerve to suggest she's a little unbalanced, Julian violently defends her honour. There's that word again; Julian wishes she wasn't his mother, but that does not excuse his responsibility to her. Later in the movie, Chang passes judgement on Crystal and stabs her in the throat. Julian comes across her body, cuts open her stomach and puts his hands inside her, to see what she was made of; to see if there was any shred of a mother in there.

What I love most about this movie is that I could be completely wrong in my interpretation. It's so refreshing to watch a film that assumes its audience has the intelligence to connect their own dots. Only God Forgives is an intentionally ambiguous, gorgeously filmed piece of art that I loved every minute of. But I'd be a fool to think it's something everyone should enjoy. Despite being shorter than Drive, it feels immeasurably longer. The film operates like some sort of sedated fever dream, with a pulsing, hypnotic aesthetic that's almost sleep-inducing. It helped that I was a little bit drunk when I watched it. In describing its scenes, I know for some people the movie will sound like an utterly disgusting, reprehensible piece of shit, and I wouldn't be one to do anything but respect their opinion and respectfully disagree with them. There are movies that present their answers upfront. There are movies that try and whip a little bit of symbolism in there for those willing to look for it. And then there's Only God Forgives, the whacked-out junkie in the corner, who everyone would be hearing the world's greatest story from if only it wasn't pausing every three seconds to stab at the air and shout "FUCKIN' GUTTER CUNTS." I'm grateful there's people like Nicolas Winding Refn out there, but I'm even more grateful that he doesn't care if I am.