“The Neon Demon” opened last weekend and performed rather poorly at the box office, but there’s still a lot to discuss about the film and its director, Nicolas Winding Refn. That’s where Joe von Appen and myself step in on this latest episode of Adjust Your Tracking. Most of the podcast is spent discussing Refn’s latest (and, appropriate for his typically divisive work, you’ll find us more negative towards the film then most other Playlisters), where his career can go from here and in the back half of the show we even dig into spoilers and what the film is trying to say. First, we open on a brief review of the newly released South Korean genre hybrid, “The Wailing.”
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When our critic at Cannes caught “The Wailing,” the newest film from auteur Na Hong-jin (“The Chaser,” “The Yellow Sea“), he called it a “bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes.” We recently interviewed the director, and recommend you check that out, in addition to seeking out the film.
As for Refn, he’s long been a favorite of this podcast, and though we’re more mixed on this latest release, “The Neon Demon,” a dreamy fairy tale starring Elle Fanning that spins off into nightmarish horror, it’s still a film that demands you reckon with it. That’s what we do in this chat. Audiences may not be turning out for it, but Refn’s insistence in interviews that good or bad doesn’t really matter, and calling his films the modern cinematic equivalent of the Sex Pistols, still provokes a loud, passionate minority of film fans on the web.
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