“Hey girl, I will smolder them. I shall smolder them all.”
Ryan Gosling‘s directorial debut, Lost River, dropped at Cannes this year. You can catch it on Netflix pretty soon under the title, Lost Every Single Award At Cannes.
Last year Only God Forgives, Nicholas Winding Refn’s movie starring Ryan Gosling, was booed at Cannes. This year, Gosling, there with his directorial debut Lost River is not doing much better. Lost River stars Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, Agents of SHIELD’s Iain De Caestecker, and Doctor Who’s Matt Smith as the residents of a broken down city, and though the film drawing comparisons to Refn and David Lynch, it’s not exactly receiving a swath of acclaim. Some of the initial tweets from critics were damning. Grantland’s Wesley Morris unleashed this particular gut shot: “If a $200 haircut and $900 shades were given lots of money to defecate on Detroit, the result would be Ryan Gosling’s directing debut.” Variety’s Scott Foundas said that it’s “a first-rate folie de grandeur. Echoes of Argento, Korine, Lynch, Malick in a tedious allegory of Detroit as ghost town.”…The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin enumerated Gosling’s influences. “The problem is, it’s like everything Ryan Gosling’s seen: David Lynch, Mario Bava, Nicolas Winding Refn, Terence Malick, Gaspar Noé and a splash of David Cronenberg for good measure,” he wrote. “But these filmmakers’ ideas and imagery aren’t developed, they’re simply reproduced: think Wikipedia essay rather than love letter.” Collin also called the movie “mouth-dryingly lousy.”
Man, poor guy. This has to be tough (he reportedly skipped his own film’s afterparty). I’m not sure how he’ll recover from this. A good way to start would probably be to stare at himself in the mirror.