★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

There’s a point about midway through Lost River, Ryan Gosling’s vibrant but frustrating feature directing debut, where the film takes an astonishing artistic risk, essentially lifting beat for beat an extended sequence from Blue Velvet, where Dean Stockwell croons “In Dreams” to a captive audience. It’s the point at which an engaging setup, exciting cast, and talented crew, are finally drowned by Gosling’s difficulty in finding his own directorial voice. The film invites the question, can you claim to have been inspired by something, if you do nothing new with those inspirations?

The film has an engaging enough premise. A decaying former industrial metropolis sits as at the edge of a fetid reservoir, formed on top of the flooded bones of several smaller towns several decades ago. Christina Hendricks stars as Billy, a single mother trying to save her childhood home from demolition by taking a job in a gory strip show on the edge of town. Her eldest son, Bones, spends his days raiding copper wire from abandoned buildings, and attempting to outrun Matt Smith’s Bully, a crazed, flamboyant hoodlum with a penchant for cutting off people’s lips.

At the same time, Bones is falling for Rat, Saoirse Ronan, who spends her nights with her vampiric grandmother, who sits in silent repose, still mourning the death of her husband long ago. Everyone is caught up in memories of the past. Time stands still, conversations get stuck in loops, characters watch old films again and again. The town is caught in a stupor. “The only way to break the curse is to bring the monster to the surface” Rat tells Bones.

It’s an anti-capitalist Southern gothic fable. The film has magic in its grimy, delicate lights and lurid colours which emerge from the inky blackness of the town. Gosling, if nothing else, has a grasp on tone, and an eye for an arresting image. The pastel miasma of the rooms beneath the strip joint, for instance, tie Billy’s struggle to that of Bones, as both descend into the town’s underworlds to retrieve various forms of monsters from the depths. And the film does have things to say. The bloody strip show, where under a campy Eva Mendes, women play at mutilating their faces and bodies for the baying crowd, strikes a chord as the women offer their peeled-off skin to their male audience in return for their tips.

The film has things to say about what people really trade in unbalanced relations, primarily between classes, and between genders, but these ideas are mostly obscured by Gosling’s unsteady stewardship, and the finger prints of the litany of directorial inspirations he employs. It’s Lynch, it’s Refn, it’s Malick, it’s Korine, it’s Noé. Yet somehow, improbably, it still feels a little bit Gosling. There’s something personal being expressed here. He conjures a stillness, an inconsequence, which feels like something of his own. But just like the film’s titular town, it gets lost amongst the murk.

But the film also deals uncomfortably with gender, and particularly race. If Gosling’s camera at least avoids leering at his female characters, he does locate a paternal protectionism in the film’s perspective, with the film’s treatment of women’s agency, whilst never entirely appealing, erring a little on the side of the puritanical. Worse, any characters of colour are bit parts, stereotypically earthy cyphers full of jive talk, mysticism and little else. They’re brought in and out of the film randomly, just more set dressing to go with the dilapidated buildings and poverty-porn.

Make no mistake, Lost River is a mess, but if nothing else it’s a brazen piece of filmmaking. There’s surely no way Gosling could have conceived of a positive reception to a film so derivative, so obvious, so unabashedly ‘arty,’ and from a first time actor-turned-director no less! But he made it anyway. Unfortunately, by the muddled, stifled ending, he reveals himself as an entirely inessential filmmaker, a curator of imagery rather than a true storyteller. Like his characters, Gosling can’t stop pining for what once was. In his case, for the giants of independent cinema.

During term time, it can be difficult to escape the ‘Oxford bubble’, but in the vac, its reassuring presence is ripped away. In the run up to Trinity, these songs will help you restore it just in time for going up.

1. ‘Itchycoo Park’ – The Small Faces

Enjoy the brief reference to our dreaming spires and bridge of sighs (where, if Oxford tour guides are to be believed, all finalists go to sigh with relief after their exams). Its ‘overt drug references’, for which the BBC banned it, might also help you recall nights in Cellar.

2. ‘Oxford Comma’ – Vampire Weekend

Your tutors might not be there to criticise your grammar and punctuation every few hundred words, but don’t fear, Vampire Weekend feel your pain.

3. ‘Crisis’ – Bob Marley

What would the Oxford bubble be without a few essay crises? Marley is here to soothe you through the distressing time without them. For a more authentic touch, play this at 3am with a very strong cup of coffee. 

4. ‘Oxford Town’ – Bob Dylan

Try ignoring the blatant fact that this song is not actually about the Oxford, and just listen to Dylan sing the word ‘Oxford’ over and over again as you rock back and forth.

5. ‘Politically Correct’ – SR-71

Oxford would be nothing without its political action, and if you’re struggling without that stimulus at home, try getting annoyed at this rather pointless attempt at a vaguely political song.

6. ‘Bodleian Library Sounds’ – Bodleian Library Oxford

If you’re really desperate to regain that longed for bubble, try sitting in a silent room with flickering artificial light, gather a huge pile of books on your desk and muster a gentle feeling of despair and play these relaxing library sounds, direct from our very own Bodleian. Depressing.

★☆☆☆☆

One Star

Kid Rock, singing 8 songs into his new album, First Kiss, and with two more to go, promises me that he’ll play just one more song. I am both relieved and appalled. The LP opens with the lead single, the eponymous First Kiss; and while this is probably the best song of the album, it is so filled with insincerity and Country Rock cliché that it might well have been phoned in from the cigarette stained, booze soaked, girlfriend draped tailgate of his first rusted-out truck; a Chevy of course. The joke is that this exact scenario appears in just the second verse.

Kid Rock isn’t a bad singer, he isn’t a bad musician, and he certainly isn’t bad at writing songs that millions of people will go out and buy. The problem is that Kid Rock knows this and First Kiss is simply song after song of regurgitated Country on autopilot. He references, off the top of my head: Jesus, Jim Beam bourbon, moonshine, Hank Williams Jnr, Johnny Cash, Kentucky, Tennessee, gun rights, and those ‘monkeys in suits writing laws and rules’ up in Washington; or in fact down, as Kid Rock was born and lives in Detroit. Probably his worst offence is the tired and turgid moralistic bore of a song, Drinking Beer With Dad, where a good old fashioned drinking session, young man, is enough to sort out the atrocious lack of God in schools and gun toting youths of a, ‘world heading down the drain’.

The only tune that gets anywhere near escape trajectory from the formulaic rock by numbers template is the last, FOAD ‘Fuck Off And Die’. An action that he tells the object of the song to do repeatedly as he is accompanied by a beautiful choral echo constantly repeating the phrase ‘fuck off and die’ until the heaven-sent end of the song. This is heartland rock that needs a coronary bypass and fast.

Starting out as rapper and hip-hop artist in the early 90s, Kid Rock has built his later career by selling millions of records consisting of broad and simple Country Rock and I’m sure First Kiss will continue in that trend; its obvious unoriginality and cliché probably helping more than a bit along the way. So while perhaps it’s unfair to suggest that Kid Rock mess with his obviously winning formula, Country is a genre rooted in heartfelt storytelling and maybe he should bear this in mind before he produces another album as inane and insincere as this one.