Director's Gallery: Valhalla Rising Nicolas Winding Refn talks through his Norse opera
Hallucinogenic, haunting and entirely devoid of pillaging, runestones and horned helmets, Valhalla Rising is a Viking movie like no other. Fast-rising Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn guides us through his follow up to Bronson, a spectral Norse opera that follows Mads Mikkelsen's nameless monolith One-Eye to hell and back. As these stills from the film show, it's a trip you've never taken before. WORDS PHIL DE SEMLYEN
"Valhalla Rising is a sci-fi movie. It's about travelling into outer space beyond the stars. It's like an acid trip. It's almost like a post-apocalyptic future. I make genre movies. That's what interests me, because you can hide things under them - meanings, subtext, ambiguity, definitions. Because any good film has two texts. The subtext is what makes you walk away from a movie having it stay with you for the rest of your life."
Posted on Friday April 23, 2010, 22:46 by Incumbent
I guess Le Chiffre should have had a doctor examine that eye. Read More
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RE: This lad sounds like an up his own arse gobshite
Posted on Friday April 23, 2010, 09:39 by Cat_Corportation
It pains me to say it, but you're sort of right. I saw this at the London Film Festival last year, and was massively excited - I'm a huge Mads Mikkelsen fan and have a career connection with the Vikings, shall we say. Finally, a proper Scandinavian Viking movie, starring my favourite actor! I wanted so much to like it, but in my opinion it was pretty bad. Purposefully incoherent most of the time, maybe some would consider it 'arty' but after some brilliant, brutal action at the beginning, it just stagnated into a lot of staring, speaking slowly between huge pauses; basically, self-indulgent mooning about. There was a lot of unintentional laughter at my screening, and about half a dozen people walked out before the end. The longship scene, which Refn raves about in these pictures, is probably the worst part; if a Viking longboat is so iconic, why shroud it in so much fog that you can't see it? And it really, *really* looks like it was shot in a warehouse (hence the fog...). On the plusRead More
3
This lad sounds like an up his own arse gobshite
Posted on Thursday April 22, 2010, 13:03 by shanewire
Tenner says the movie's a piece of crap. It'll get a three star review, it'll deserve two. Read More
