Not long ago, the French "Cinebook" selected the top ten movies of 2016. For ordinary movie fans, this list has a deep sense of distance. The French are still arrogant, and most of the movies they choose are still literary and artistic movies with unique styles. For ordinary movie fans, they lack the 2015 "Mad Max", which has a strong topicality, appreciation and artistry. The best popular movie. And I have always been repelled by various ranking lists...
In this list, "Neon Demon" is a relatively controversial movie. Some admirers and some despise others. The film circle is not the Olympics. Who is better and who is worse? Everyone has a certain number in their hearts.
"Neon Demon" has its own unique style technically and formally. This style may not be acceptable to everyone, but if you can't understand the director's intentions in photography, soundtrack, scenes, and props, it's difficult to have a more comprehensive understanding of the film itself in detail. And the basis of these problems is the need for an A-level script to exist. In the feedback on the viewing level of "Neon Demon", the script itself is the most criticized place.
In the process of watching the movie, I suddenly thought of the two movies "Wolverine" and "Black Swan". In "Wolverine" by Japanese photographer and director Mika Ninagawa, she tells a story of beauty and destruction in the fashion world through colorful camera lenses, which is in a way the same as "Neon Demon". Sawajiri Hideyoshi's beautiful body and Elle Fanning suffered the same pain that should not have been endured. In Darren Aronofsky's masterpiece "Black Swan", Natalie Portman's pursuit of dance is also strange twists and turns and horror, but it is different from "Neon Demon" in addition to beauty. The Elle Fanning, Portman in "Black Swan" is a life test in the pursuit of art.
"Neon Demon" is not a movie of popular taste. The artistic "beauty" expressed in this film is the same as the truth contained in the words "arsenic for you, honey for me". Love and hatred are all based on self understanding. For me, perhaps only the word "beautiful death" can resonate.
A sweet and innocent girl from the countryside, who is harmless to humans and animals, came to Los Angeles with a bright vision for the future. In the end, her body and dreams were ruined in this bustling city...
I haven't seen the work of director Nicholas Winding Refn before. I heard that he is colorblind, but I just couldn't imagine that in the movie "Neon Demon", which focuses on image allegory, the sense of picture can be used in technology. It's so unique. The MV-style slow motion of multiple scenes, and the geometric composition composed of various neon tubes all leave his benchmarking imprint on the image.
The scale of violent eroticism in the film is also staggering. A pure little flower is swallowed up by the fire of desire, showing the competition in the spiritual level of "cannibalism" society through the weak visual level. The make-up artist played by Gina Malone made the audience's eyeballs even more shocking when courtship was not a lewd corpse! These large-scale representations of social and emotional problems all reveal the brutality of Nicholas's attack on such phenomena in this simple story.
In fact, the same story in the real world has been played out without stopping. Who has never met or experienced a beautiful girl who entered the city from the countryside, the desire for success, the reverie of the future, the embarrassment of the current situation, and the confusion of the society? The cruelty of reality erodes people's heart a little bit. Leaving the care of the family and coming to the ocean of desire, wrapped in the tide, he moved forward involuntarily.
The jaguar that popped up in the room resembled the indifferent Elle Fanning in the dining room. The behemoth that should not have appeared in the small hotel room in California is like the girl's heart that is gradually eroded by the world, and the place where the wine and fragrance are entertained should not be the place where a sixteen-year-old girl appears. Everything is like a dream, as if the savior Neo in the nightmare had a sharp blade in his mouth, unable to escape and unable to move. The screams of the girls in room 214 turned into silhouettes on the wall.
If you can guess the reason for the vision of "Cinebook", I think the first award is Nicholas's unique expressiveness of audio-visual language, which is actually no different from last year's "Mad Max". "Mad Max" also expresses an easy-to-understand theme with the rare mad, cool and handsome burst visual effects in film history. In contrast, "Neon Demon" is just a slightly different version in terms of completion of the same type. "Mad Max".
The heroine in "Neon Demon" is Elle Fanning, the younger sister of Hollywood's most famous child stars. This year is eighteen years old. Although the Fanning sisters are also beauty benchmarks, it is not convincing enough that the twenty-eight girls presented in the movie make everyone extremely amazing and crazy. However, the beauty of the human body, like the beauty of art, never has a standard line recognized by everyone. Few of those famous for their "beauty" on the century-old screen are recognized by the vast majority of audiences.
Spoilers are also a no-brainer for this film, which is known for its audio-visual reputation. Although I seem to have spoiled a bit. For film fans who like to listen to electronic music and have a preference for photographic composition, this is a film that can meet the requirements, but that's all...
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