Word: subjective
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There are a number of flannel-wearing, facial-hair-sporting folk who took a cursory glance at the album cover of “Don’t Stop,” its subject replete with neon lettering and flawlessly coiffed ’80s hair, and dismissed it without a second thought. But while the music the album contains has a lot in common with the 1980s-throwback synthpop those people believed they were tossing aside, it also does not deserve such a careless dismissal...
...years later it still garners praise. That album’s second single—a giddy, entrancing pop anthemcalled “Heartbeat”—celebrates the carefree joy of the dancefloor as effectively as any of the endless parade of disco songs on the subject. The rest of “Anniemal” almost lived up to that track: the angular, percussive “Chewing Gum” and funk-tinged “No Easy Love” proved highlights for an album that provided pop hooks from beginning...
...Bronson,” has made a name for himself hawking violence as a product. Most widely known for his “Pusher” trilogy that explores Denmark’s deadly drug underworld, Refn is surely more than aware of the parallel between himself and the subject of his sixth feature when it comes to making a spectacle of violence. “My name is Charlie Bronson,” whispers Tom Hardy, who delivers a superb, essentially solo performance as the eponymous character, “and all my life I’ve wanted...
However monotonous the subject matter could potentially be, Refn finds a way to constantly reinvigorate the contrast between Bronson and the world around him; he’s taken to the hole, then to the insane asylum, where he performs and sabotages himself in bombastic fashion. It’s with Peterson as a free man, however, released from prison for nearly 70 days in 1988, that the film offers up the closest thing to a sensible psychological portrait of someone who, up to that point and from that point thereafter, resembles something more akin to a force of nature...
...film’s final third, where Bronson begins to produce drawings and paintings for his prison’s art program, synthesizes the film’s content with its narrative frame without reducing the enigma of its subject. Bronson’s art is, from what can be seen, mostly cartoonish grotesquery more reminiscent of Daniel Johnston than Basquiat, but his final “piece” is executed with as much theatrical verve and visual splendor in a series of moments as the rest of the film offers in its entirety...