MOVIE REVIEW | ***FOREIGN LANGUAGE WEEKEND*** Pusher (1996)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “A really impressive effort from a first time director.”

The main reason I started this blog was to make me watch more movies, and to vary the kinds of movies I watched. The first part of that has been well and truly accomplished with me watching hundreds of movies for the first time, instead of falling back on old favourites over and over again.   But l’m not sure if I’ve varied my selections enough. I still watch mainly American movies, with directors, writers and actors that make them a pretty safe bet. So this year, I’m forcing myself to seek out more international movies. With Foreign Language Weekends, every weekend(ish) during 2016, I’ll review two(ish) non-English language movies.

“For instance, there was this Turkish guy once. He fucked up and owed Milo some money. So I went over to his place. I’d been there many times before, asking for the money in a polite way, without any luck. Finally, I took a knife, stabbed it in his kneecap and teared the shit up. Sometimes, I’d like to have another job. Believe me.”

Before scoring a massive, mainstream hit full of Gosling goodness with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn directed one of the most mind blowing movies I’ve stumbled across in recent years with Bronson (it’s like Chopper…  If the main character was more insane, more violent, more darkly hilarious and based just as much on a real world figure.  Seriously, if you haven’t seen Bronson, you really should).  But before that, and whole lot of other stuff, Nicolas Winding Refn kicked off his career with Pusher.

As the title suggests, this is all about the world of drug dealing.  Kim Bodnia plays Franky, a low level Copenhagen dealer who’ll sell whatever he can his hands on to make a buck and fund his own habit, as well as drinking and hanging out with his partner Tonny, played Mads Mikkelsen.   Franky already owes Milo, his local wholesaler of the hard stuff, 50,000 kroner, until the promise of one big sale to an ex-prison buddy puts him closer to 300,000 in debt.

Soon, Franky is going from one end of Copenhagen to the other, trying to call in money owed to him, borrow more, make deals and do anything he can to pay his debts and save his life.  I don’t think it’s any accident on the part of the screenplay that almost every “deal” is done on credit.  Constantly Franky and others buy and sell everything from drugs, to firearms, to mobile phones, and on almost every occasion, when it’s time for money to change hands, the buyer is asking for credit with a promise to pay soon.  It’s like the entire black economy of the movie is nothing more than numbers floating in the air, based on and handshakes and promises.  Which makes it only hit harder when the very real, very mortal consequences begin to bare down on Bodina’s Franky.

One thing I really liked about Pusher is its objectivity.  This is no cautionary tale about the pitfalls of a life of crime or drug use.  But at the same time, it’s in no way a glorification of any of that either.  It looks like an accurate, fly on the wall account of people doing a particular job and the bullshit that comes with it.  Well, it looks accurate to my white bread, suburban, upper working / lower middle class eyes, anyway.  Franky is never portrayed as a hero or tragic victim.  He’s a man doing what he thinks needs to be done it.  He’s not misunderstood, he’s not struggling with any inner demons, he’s just dealing with decisions he’s made and the consequences that come with them.

As pretentious as it may sound to say, the camera really is almost its own character in Pusher.  Constantly in motion, even when the characters it’s shooting are not, the camera work goes beyond hand held.  Almost every single scene starts and finishes with the camera following someone in and out of the given location.  This might be one of the only movies I’ve ever seen where we see characters’ backs almost as much as their faces.  But this non-stop motion really does add to the movie, making the viewer almost as anxious and on edge as Franky when the walls start to close in around him.

This is a really impressive effort from a first time director and you can see hints of where he was headed with something like Drive more than fifteen years later.  And maybe the Scandinavian setting, characters and costumes threw me off, but it doesn’t look fifteen years at old at all, it has aged really well.  Seriously though, if you haven’t seen Bronson, see it first.  Then give Pusher a go if you have time.

(Review originally posted Aug 5, 2013)

Pusher
Directed By – Nicolas Winding Refn
Written By – Jens Dahl, Nicolas Winding Refn

MOVIE REVIEW | Only God Forgives (2013)

We open on Bangkok, an ex-pat American of obvious ill repute is in a brothel.  He demands the resident pimp finds him a 14 year old girl.  When the pimp refuses, the American smashes a bottle over the pimp’s head.  Cut to, a badly beaten and dead young girl, obviously the victim of the American after his teenage girl request was denied.  Cue the music, Yackety Sax.  Coz this is gonna be a laugh riot !

OK, so maybe I made up that last part of my description of the opening few minutes of Only God Forgives.  But after watching the movie, I felt so down and depressed, I had to lighten the mood, if only for my own sanity.  A reunion of writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn, with actor/dreamboat Ryan Gosling, this makes their previous collaboration, Drive, look like The Care Bears Movie.

After the death of the cranky American, his brother, Julian, played by Gosling, does some investigating and finds his killer, the father of the film’s original victim.  Gosling and his brother are local drug runners and he assumes the murder was work related.  When he discovers it was revenge over his brother’s terrible act, Gosling decides the grieving father was justified and doesn’t deserve to die.  So now we know who the good guy is.  But with the evil brother dead, who will we be the movie’s villain?

Soon, Gosling’s mother, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, arrives.  And when meeting his girlfriend for the first time, she refers to her as a “cum dumpster”.  Ding! Ding! Ding!  I think we’ve found our villain.  While Scott Thomas puts out a hit on her son’s killer, an ex-policeman named Lt. Chang (delightfully nicknamed the “The Angel of Vengeance”) is also trying to keep his streets clean, one sword stabbing at a time.  As their paths cross more and more, the body count rises until  it’s Julian Vs. his Mum, Vs. Angel of Vengeance Vs. random hit men Vs. anyone else unlucky enough to get in their way.

The story is super pulpy and exploitative, the violence is stylised and kinetic, but somehow, at the same time, the pacing of Only God Forgives is glacial.  But in an interesting way that really works.  It’s almost like Tarrentino wrote the screenplay, but Interiors era Woody Allen directed it.  If you took every shot of someone staring blankly into the distance and cut it in half, the already short 90 minute running time would come down to less than half an hour.   Which brings me to one thing I didn’t really like about this movie.  There’s a very fine line between an emotionless stare looking like intense brooding and a blank stare looking like bored, or post lobotomy, obliviousness.

Only God Forgives is great…  I think…  I really don’t know…   I do know I’m still thinking a lot about it, so that has to be a good thing…  Right?  At the very least, it looks amazing.  It’s the kind of movie you could leave on with the volume down and be blown away by the visuals every few minutes.  Or the kind of movie you’d see flickering on a cracked screen in the background of a serial killer’s lair.

One last side note, here’s a little tip for Winding Refn.  If you’re film revolves around an intense badass, maybe don’t name the character “Julian”.   It’s just too wet and floppy of a name.  I can only think of a couple of names that would make him even less intimidating….  Tristan and Sebastian.

Only God Forgives
Directed By – Nicolas Winding Refn
Written By – Nicolas Winding Refn

MOVIE REVIEW | Pusher 3 (2005)

Over the course of almost ten years and three movies, director Nicolas Winding Refn showed a real, tangible evolution as a film maker and story teller with his Danish Pusher trilogy.  In 1996’s Pusher, it was all selfishness, narcissism and badass style.  In 2004, Pusher 2 showed he could bring real characters with real emotions and depth to the series.  Then, a year later, Pusher 3 upped the anti again.

Milo, played by Zlatko Buric, was the antagonist of the first movie.  He showed up for one short, but pivotal scene in the second, and is now the main character of the third.  Until now, he has been the highest ranking of the small time dealers in the Pusher world.  He’s the wholesaler who has the big bricks that the lower level dealers will break up into little plastic bags.  But Pusher 3 is about the next level up, who wholesales to the wholesaler and who does he answer to?

The original Pusher confined the story to one very clearly depicted week.  While it’s not as definite as the first, Pusher 2 seems to be have been condensed to just a few days.  Winding Refn gets even more microscopic with Pusher 3, confining the entire story to just one day.  A day the starts with Milo at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting before heading to a drug deal where it turns out he’s bought a butt load of ecstasy instead of the butt load of heroin he was expecting.  Like the movies that preceded it, Pusher 3 shows the quickly unravelling efforts of a man getting increasingly desperate as he tries to fix one mistake, with every short term solution escalating into bigger, more dangerous problems.

The original was all about one selfish man and how his decisions affected him.  Pusher 2 widened the perspective to show the effects its characters actions had on the innocents around them.  Pusher 3 brings it back to mainly one man, but this time, the story starts with a character who’s already seeking some kind of redemption.  Milo has already learned from his mistakes, he just hasn’t learned quite enough yet to avoid what will go down on this one, horrifically eventful night.

Like the two before, the third film in the trilogy finishes on a maddeningly ambiguous, yet perfect note.  We’ll never know what ultimately happened to Pusher’s Franky, outside of one quick line of dialogue that all but dismisses him in the sequel.  Is Tonny from Pusher 2 living the quiet life of a suburban dad?  Where will Milo go after the events of Pusher 3?  It doesn’t matter.  None of these films are concerned about wrapping their stories up with a neat bow.  They’re about what happens when these characters make one mistake that spirals out of control and how they handle it in the short term.  Real life doesn’t have a neat ending to every story, and neither does Nicolas Winding Refn.

This is a great final installment to a really interesting and complex series that only got more interesting and complex with each addition.  But seriously, I’ll say it again, as good as this series is, you really need to see Bronson.  Even if you have, watch it again, then give the Pusher movies a go.

Pusher 3
Directed By – Nicolas Winding Refn
Written By – Nicolas Winding Refn

MOVIE REVIEW | Pusher 2 (2004)

When the end credits roll on 1996’s Pusher, there’s no concrete answer to what might have happened to main protagonist, Franky.  It’s a frustrating, yet somehow perfect, way to finish that story.  When director and this time sole writer Nicolas Winding Refn returned to this world with Pusher 2 eight years later, Franky’s fate is still frustratingly, yet perfectly, left up in the air.  Not only does Franky never appear in the sequel, his entire character is reduced to one line of almost thrown away dialogue.  Pusher 2 is all about his sidekick, the promoted to main character Tonny, played by Mads Mikkelsen.

Written out of the first movie soon after the halfway mark thanks to a baseball bat to the head, the character of Tonny was pretty one dimensional.  He was the loser best friend, a bit dumber and a bit more short sighted than main character Franky.  In Pusher 2, Winding Refn’s script and Mikkelsen’s performance round Tonny out to be a much deeper, well formed character who proves himself more than up to the job of carrying the story.

Mikkelsen begins the movie in prison, serving out the last days of a sentence and already on the back foot, thinking about how he can pay off his prison debts once on the outside.  On release, Mikkelsen goes straight to his father, local small time crime boss, known to everyone, even his son, as, The Duke.  The Duke obviously gave up on any hope for his son amounting to anything a long time ago and only agrees to give him a job after Mikkelsen is reduced to all but begging for another chance.

Throughout the movie, almost everything Mikkelsen does only reiterates his father’s negative attitude and proves what a loser he really is.  While the original focused mainly on Franky and his drug trade colleagues, Pusher 2 shows the effects their choice of profession has on the people who never got to choose to be a part of this world, their kids.  Constantly, adult characters are doing drugs (hard and soft) in front of children, talking about horrible things and generally being the worst influence possible.  The role of parents, especially fathers, is a major theme, with Tonny dealing with daddy issues from both ends.  He’s still trying to gain his father’s approval while also figuring out how to be a father to his own son, born while he was in prison.

Another difference between this and the original Pusher is the momentum of the story.  The original builds and builds on each mistake, decision and action Franky takes until they all add together to become one massive, seemingly unavoidable obstacle.  In Pusher 2, the real cause of Tonny’s ultimate possible downfall comes down to one split second decision, initiated by a simple knock on the door of a hotel room.  That’s it, one instant, one quick decision and his whole world comes crashing down.

Pusher 2 manages to keep all the visceral, violent impact of what came before, but it also shows Winding Refn’s changing of priorities as a film maker and story teller, relying much more on character and emotion, than guns and action.  Which you can see done even more effectively in Bronson.  Seriously, you should really watch Bronson.

Pusher 2
Directed By – Nicolas Winding Refn
Written By – Nicolas Winding Refn

MOVIE REVIEW | Pusher (1996)

Before scoring a massive, mainstream hit full of Gosling goodness with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn directed one of the most mind blowing movies I’ve stumbled across in recent years with Bronson (it’s like Chopper…  If the main character was more insane, more violent, more darkly hilarious and based just as much on a real world figure.  Seriously, if you haven’t seen Bronson, you really should).  But before that, and whole lot of other stuff, Nicolas Winding Refn kicked off his career with Pusher.

As the title suggests, this is all about the world of drug dealing.  Kim Bodnia plays Franky, a low level Copenhagen dealer who’ll sell whatever he can his hands on to make a buck and fund his own habit, as well as drinking and hanging out with his partner Tonny, played Mads Mikkelsen.   Franky already owes Milo, his local wholesaler of the hard stuff, 50,000 kroner, until the promise of one big sale to an ex-prison buddy puts him closer to 300,000 in debt.

Soon, Franky is going from one end of Copenhagen to the other, trying to call in money owed to him, borrow more, make deals and do anything he can to pay his debts and save his life.  I don’t think it’s any accident on the part of the screenplay that almost every “deal” is done on credit.  Constantly Franky and others buy and sell everything from drugs, to firearms, to mobile phones, and on almost every occasion, when it’s time for money to change hands, the buyer is asking for credit with a promise to pay soon.  It’s like the entire black economy of the movie is nothing more than numbers floating in the air, based on and handshakes and promises.  Which makes it only hit harder when the very real, very mortal consequences begin to bare down on Bodina’s Franky.

One thing I really liked about Pusher is its objectivity.  This is no cautionary tale about the pitfalls of a life of crime or drug use.  But at the same time, it’s in no way a glorification of any of that either.  It looks like an accurate, fly on the wall account of people doing a particular job and the bullshit that comes with it.  Well, it looks accurate to my white bread, suburban, upper working / lower middle class eyes, anyway.  Franky is never portrayed as a hero or tragic victim.  He’s a man doing what he thinks needs to be done it.  He’s not misunderstood, he’s not struggling with any inner demons, he’s just dealing with decisions he’s made and the consequences that come with them.

As pretentious as it may sound to say, the camera really is almost its own character in Pusher.  Constantly in motion, even when the characters it’s shooting are not, the camera work goes beyond hand held.  Almost every single scene starts and finishes with the camera following someone in and out of the given location.  This might be one of the only movies I’ve ever seen where we see characters’ backs almost as much as their faces.  But this non-stop motion really does add to the movie, making the viewer almost as anxious and on edge as Franky when the walls start to close in around him.

This is a really impressive effort from a first time director and you can see hints of where he was headed with something like Drive more than fifteen years later.  And maybe the Scandinavian setting, characters and costumes threw me off, but it doesn’t look fifteen years at old at all, it has aged really well.  Seriously though, if you haven’t seen Bronson, see it first.  Then give Pusher a go if you have time.

Directed By – Nicolas Winding Refn
Written By – Jens Dahl, Nicolas Winding Refn