Cult hero Nicolas Winding Refn continues his career as the anti-Chris Nolan with this deranged medieval odyssey. Reported By A Pakistan Times.
One of the reasons I had this week marked with a gold star on my 2010 movie calendar was of course Christopher Nolan's "Inception," no doubt the most newsworthy event of the Hollywood summer. Even more intriguingly, that auteurist labor of love -- and whether you like it or not, "Inception" is clearly that -- is opening opposite another one, eccentric Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's hallucinatory Viking odyssey "Valhalla Rising."
This makes for an irresistible compare-and-contrast between two extraordinarily talented mid-career cinematic visionaries, starting of course with the fact that Nolan's movie will have 1,000 times the audience, at a very conservative estimate. (It could be 10,000 times, or 100,000.) "Inception" is largely set inside the world of dreams, which look like conventional Hollywood action movies. "Valhalla Rising" is set in the real world of medieval Britain and North America, at least nominally, but plays from beginning to end like a feverish nightmare.
"Inception" is nothing if not calculated, and while I didn't like the movie that much I don't actually mean that as a dig. Nolan is trying to push at the outer edges of blockbuster possibility, while still ensuring he packs the multiplexes deep into next month and makes a profit for his investors (who are in for a reported $200 million or so). Refn has tumbled out of the Viking longboat in the opposite direction; I assume he wants people to watch his movies or he wouldn't keep making them, but based on his erratic career to date he doesn't give a crap about commercial considerations and couldn't make a pop movie -- at least not on purpose -- to save his life.
Sources:www.salon.com
