Computer Animation Arts

For those of you delighted, horrified and / or baffled by Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives today, check out a documentary on the man himself. My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn is a documentary by Liv Corfixen, Refn's wife, chronicling the production of the film. It's an insight into the struggles Refn faced whilst working through production, and also his fixation on the if it all makes sense. It's available on Netflix too, so you can check it out right now. Enjoy! No matter what you thought of Only God Forgives , it's worth viewing again. The conceptual underpinnings make it a refreshing rewatch, it gets better, darker and more interesting on a second trip through the neon filled Bangkok.

I'm coming a little late to the Ryan Gosling fan club.  I'm still yet to watch Drive (2011) -  but I did watch Derek Cianfrance's  The Place Beyond The Pines  (2012 ) recently, which I enjoyed for what was quaint and reactionary about its macho romanticism and reverence for the motorcycle as the signifier of  uncomplicated masculinity and Thanatos made literal.  It comes as little surprise to me that Gosling is the straight man's crush du jour .  He is Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden to Edward Norton's average Joe.  Ryan Gosling as the motorcyclist bank-robber in The Place Beyond The Pines (2013) Ryan Gosling as Julian in Only God Forgives (2013) In all truthfulness, it wasn't Gosling's blank-faced, shell-shocked machismo that had me so transfixed in Nicolas Winding Refn's  Only God Forgives - no, it was Kristen Scott Thomas's terrifying Crystal, the Gosling character's castrating, terrible mother, the monstrou...