MovieChat Forums > Only God Forgives (2013) Discussion > Redn thinks 5.8 rating equates to great ...

Redn thinks 5.8 rating equates to great Cinema

posted 10 years ago by maritze
8 replies | jump to latest

In the Ego-mentary 'My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn' he claims - "You know when you have made great cinema when half love it and half hate it." This sounds deeply dubious to me so, what is he referring to?

Only god forgives gets a 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic assigns the film a weighted average rating of 37 out of 100. Both those are far from 'half love it and half hate it'. Or is he only relying on the rating here on IMDB, which is a pretty dodgy rating system -as I think most people will agree.

To illustrate the paucity of his argument even more clearly, lets accept the IMDB rating as a legitimate and creditable rating system. And in doing so lets list some of these 'great cinema' classics Refn is so smugly happy to be in company of that have received 5.8 too...

I googled 'imdb 5.8 rating'. Here's a random sample:

2012
Hostel
Phantom
Sabotage
Zambesia
Chicken Little
Spilce
Stuck on you
Black Sheep
Firewall
Clash of the Titans
Battle for L.A.
3 men and a baby
G.I.Joe, rise of Cobra
Observe and Report
Days of Thunder
Free Willy
Legal Eagles
Harry and the Hendersons
More here: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~davet/movies/i5.html

Yeah, great cinema indeed!

I could not find one title that would count as 'great cinema'. Yet. Maybe there are some out there, but I'd say the evidence is against Refn. OGF was a critical and commercial dud. But I guess Refn can always make himself believe his paper thin rational as solace, even if it's evidently nonsense.

[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] TheBeardedWonder 10 years ago

Precisely. Refn's point is larger than 'what the internet thinks about stuff' obviously. It's about knowing you've made a piece of real art because people have such extreme views on it. If it's universally loved and praised it probably doesn't have much edge or artistic merit to it, because that kind of stuff is lost when trying to appeal to mass audiences. If it's dumb and silly and universally hated, nobody even gives it a 2nd thought, so they can't even have a stance on it.

But if you have half the people calling it genius, and half the people calling it garbage, with very few views that fall between the two, then you've probably made something worthy of being called 'art' or 'experimental' or whatever other word you'd like to give it...

'Get yourself a real dog. Any dog under 50 lbs is a cat and cats are pointless' - Ron Swanson

[–] sabaitis 9 years ago

And yet this movie is definitely not polarizing. See the ratings- it is a pure bell curve, with almost all votes saying 'average'. I like most NWR films- Pusher trilogy was not bad for a starting director, Valhalla was where he started to do art, and Drive was pure pleasure. But he failed with this one. I rated 5/10- and only polarizing thing in it is it's visual style and sound quality of 9/10 versus it being just bad in everything else. Which, I guess, makes this a better filmed, somewhat artful version of 'films' like '47 Ronin' or 'Upside Down'

[–] jpwysong 10 years ago

This film was very controversial and required much focus to understand it. Most audiences cannot pay attention to a movie such as this one, for example, Donnie Darko flopped at the box office due to many factors, one being it was a confusing movie; like this one. This was a very good movie, it just wasn't well recieved.

[–] ACureforPain 10 years ago

OP: the world is bigger than the fücking internet.

You have to make the money to buy a ticket. - Nightcrawler

[–] m-slovak79 10 years ago

Going by the average, which is a 5.7/10, that's a bit more negative than positive as i see IMDb average ratings like this in terms of wide opinion...

4.x/10 and lower = crap (Showgirls (1995) is the only exception for me)
5.x/10 = generally negative opinions
6.x/10 = mixed opinions (probably slightly more negative or positive depending on which side of the 6's it's on)
7.x/10 and higher = generally positive opinions

high 7's on up is when the movie starts to get more praise, pretty much.

personally i think Only God Forgives would have had a higher average rating (at least low 6's) had it not been released after Drive which everyone seemed to praise Drive and when Only God Forgives did not live up to that movie then people dissed it even more than they otherwise would have.

even average rating aside and just going by what people are saying about it around here... i think it's one of those divided opinion types of movies as some people think it's one of the better movies of the year (like myself. see below.) and others act like it's horrible etc.

for me, out of the 115 2013 released movies i have seen here is the best movies of 2013 for me...

1.The Wolf of Wall Street - 8/10
2.Before Midnight - 7-7.5/10
3.At Middleton
4.Adore - 7/10
5.Only God Forgives
6.Spring Breakers
7.Captain Phillips
8.Rush
9.The Artist and the Model
10.Nebraska
11.Warm Bodies
12.We're the Millers
13.The Lone Ranger

p.s. i have seen all thirteen of those movies at least twice so i know they hold up on re-watches.

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My IMDb Movie Lists etc = http://goo.gl/pZ8XG
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[–] objviewer 8 years ago

Trying to decide if I want to watch this movie.

I have never seen a movie which, in the critic's ratings, had a couple of 100's and a couple of '0's. I guess I'm really curious now.

I'll be bahck.

[–] MariX2 8 years ago

Jesus OP, way to miss the guy's point.

If 200 people give a film 5.5 it will have a 5.5 rating. If 100 give a 10 and another 100 give it 1, it's gonna be 5.5. Can you see the difference?