• The 13 hour work from Refn has it’s throwaway stretches and astonishingly beautiful stretches—it’s too striking to ignore, and too flawed to be anything but a simple recommend
  • It’s Refn’s 8th archiveable film—the first 4 are different in visual style—the last 4, starting with Drive in 2011 are soaked in neon and feature electronic Cliff Martinez scores (Martinez started as a Soderbergh guy—Traffic
  • Refn isn’t the controlling master Tarkovsky is—but there are really impressive sections where it does feel like Tarkovsky directing Bad Lieutenant
  • Stoic performances– drained—more like Bressonian models—or Dreyer performances from Ordet or Gertrud
  • Using the cop high beams for neon lighting
  • Like Drive it’s largely an LA story—Neon Demon–
  • Incredibly odd Billy Baldwin performance—growling like a stuffed tiger
  • There are hour stretches between them but a few nice doorway shots
  • The shot with the rose petal background—a stunner
  • —episode 10 as a big snake mural on the wall of a bar—it’s very Fassbinder
  • Long take tracking up and down the execution line
  • Some of the long takes are almost imperceptibly moving they are so slow—really nice
  • Marvelous soft focus dissolves in the bar in episode three. You never see the bartender’s face
  • Love the dialogue “do you have to run?” to which someone replies “No, I can sit awhile. You?”  “I’ve got time”.  Sounds like most television series. Haha
  • Politics on talk radio like Dominik’s Killing Them Softly from 2012
  • Other visual highlights include the lighting on the Korean gangsters hangout, the way Refn will occasionally stagger the actors in front of the camera, the party in episode 6 with neons just pouring in from the outside, the slow motion tracking shot in episode 8 of everyone dancing with Christmas lights
  • So in 2011’s Drive– Refn has one character (Goslings) that acts and talks like this—here—really every character acts like this with the stoicism and long pauses—maybe Baldwin is the exception
  • Episode 9 montage like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point finale
  • It’s still a exquisite picturesque feat—he’s working with Darius Khondji and Diego Garcia here as DP’s- no slouches—
  • Refn still needs to slow down and make an 80 minute highlight reel film – there’s a top 10 of the year film or maybe even better inside of the 13 hours you have to sift through.
  • Recommend