Is there not yet a thread for DRIVE, the forthcoming Ryan Gosling vehicle (geddit)?

i appreciate the Yaris punchline, admrl

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
I am an auteurist at heart, and as much as this film is hand-tooled and sleekly designed as a vehicle (okay, I'll stop) for Ryan Gosling, in many respects it is Winding Refn's show. This is my second encounter with the director; most of his work, although lauded in some circles, has been rooted in genres to / for which I have no allegiance and limited patience. Little dollops of the Pusher trilogy I'd catch on the IFC channel never made me want to delve; his "Tarkovskian" (?!) medieval bloodbath Valhalla Rising just looked ponderous. And the only previous film of Winding Refn's I've seen, Bronson, was an irksome disappointment. Much like Valhalla among genre buffs and the "Game of Thrones" crowd, Bronson rode in on waves of buzz. Tom Hardy's charismatic performance as Britain's most famous career criminal was, so the story went, staged like an abstract opera of performative violence. Comparisons to Kubrick and to Derek Jarman abounded. But to me, Winding Refn, and Hardy for that matter, seemed to be stuck in a mode of second-order imitation, incapable of breaking through the stylistic aping to find the spontaneity and fresh gestures that bring a picture to life on its own terms. (The thing about tableaux vivants is that they depict violent acts that have already occurred; they can inform, but they cannot threaten or thrill.)

With Drive, Winding Refn hits the magic formula. I won't make great claims for the film, save to say that it is both stark and succulent, economical and baroque. The key is that Drive replicates a strain of cinema that, in its own way, was its own replicant. The 70s car film -- Two Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry -- but also the drive-in quickie more generally, a post-Corman recasting of the L.A. noir and the gangster flick in an urban neon key, evolved into an 80s cinema that, like our hero The Driver (Gosling), became "respectable" only in retrospect. Who, at the time, gave a shit about To Live and Die in L.A., or Thief, or Street Smart? Some hardcore auteurists were ahead of the curve. But just as gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) half-jokes to the Driver, the cheap films he used to produce in the 80s were trash, but some people considered them "European." Get it? So, unlike Tarantino, whose recombinant, hash-slung hypertexts demonstrate an active thought pattern, a maneuvering between high and low as a nonstop argument, Winding Refn can lovingly recreate a cinema that was in itself reductive, sculpted around iconicity, clipped dialogue, and velocity as a formal force.

And this is why Gosling is so perfect in this role. All he has to do is brood, look pretty and semi-tough, strike poses, help the jacket catch the light. (Drive, like so many Lynch and Scorsese films, owes so much to Kenneth Anger it's absurd.) Likewise Brooks, who delivers a miraculous turn as the ambivalent, aging Jewish crime boss who, along with his brother Nino (Ron Perlman), is stuck in the Mob equivalent of middle management. In Brooks's case, Winding Refn's shrewd against-type casting allows us to witness the swallowed, passive-aggressive rage of every schlemiel unloosed like a spring-trap. Far less successful, however, is Carey Mulligan as Irene, the designated innocent female / verboten love interest. Ordinarily I would complain about the lone woman character being so poorly fleshed out, but in truth she only needed to be an emblem like everybody else. She didn't have the presence to telegraph anything more than waifishness (which, regrettably, film executives seem to get off on). Though a shocking five (!!!!) years Gosling's senior, supporting player Christina Hendricks would've been a much stronger match for Driver.

At the same time, the very quality that serves Gosling (and Winding Refn) so well in Drive is a rapidly diminishing commodity. Gosling is a highly gifted actor in the Method mold; his versatility is, in some sense, a reversibility, a penchant for projecting masculinity as either cocksure (Murder By Numbers, Blue Valentine) or existentially uncertain (The Believer, The Slaughter Rule, Half Nelson). The key, of course, is that these are two sides of the same coin. All of this hits its apotheosis with Drive, becoming almost a Sunset Strip billboard for a faded fin de siècle doomed-romantic Quiet Man. Even though Drive wasn't the box office hit or Oscar magnet its studio (or critics) thought it would be, it has entered the vernacular in more sidelong, viral ways. Fan-produced posters dot the Internet, amateur artists all finding their own way to connect Drive and Gosling to that same gritty, disreputable movie history Winding Refn plumbs for its stoic gravitas. Gosling himself, meanwhile, has become the subject of the "Hey Girl" Internet meme, his brooding visage an all-purpose come-hither that can be jokingly tied to various unlikely messages (most of them leftist / feminist but not exclusively) in order to sex them up. What all of this means, of course, is that Gosling is in serious danger of becoming a parody of himself, something halfway between an expensive prop and an ersatz James Dean.

But the reason Drive works is because, like the incarnation of Gosling it utilizes, it is never less than immaculately composed. What's more, it does more than simply cut a sleek figure across the wide screen. It moves. (The near-silent opening getaway sequence is the best argument for Winding Refn's complete success.) It is perfectly appropriate, finally, that although our putative hero is "The Driver," he is not awarded titular status. Drive is named for an action, an imperative statement, or perhaps even one of the basic psychoanalytic forces. And what both The Driver and his final journey share at the film's conclusion is that they remain ambiguous and unknowable. Their vanishing points recede into an infinite distance.

Academic Hack

Friend's birthday party had tracks from this soundtrack playing here and there, reminding me that this flick was probably the one flick since "Up" maybe that's stuck in my head the longest.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=drive2011.htm

BOM lists the budget at $15M, flick has brought in like 5x worldwide that so far

agree with academic hack that christina hendricks as the main female character would have improved the film immensely. mulligan is badly miscast here and it makes the film so much weaker. i don;t like her anyway but it's not her fault that she can't play the part she's given - she would never have been in a relationship with the ex-con, it's just not believable.

relationship with the ex-con wasn't the unbelievable part imo

I'm not sure Hendricks really has the chops either

http://shapersofthe80s.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/hendrix.jpg

really wish the entire movie had been as good as the first ten minutes :/

this movie is so dope

watching it on blu-ray was o_o

really wish the entire movie had been as good as the first ten minutes :/

Yeah, not that I didn't like the remainder of it, but that first ten minutes was really really great.

the opening scene was pretty awesome but i kept being nagged by the fact that he just left the two dudes in the car and walked out -- pretty rad on the one hand, but also kind of a cop-out resolution by the writers

What nags about that? Basketball game had just let out, big crowd was forming, they had as good a chance of getting out of there unnoticed as he did (which I assume was the plan all along). The car was always disposable.

idk it just makes it seem like he does kind of a shitty job there... like he parks the car and abandons his clients, who happen to be wearing all black and carrying huge black bags presumably of cash just as the police swarm the garage

i know he gives the whole "outside of this 5 minutes" speech but it sorta broke the wall for me... and i was more than willing to take him murdering a dude with shotgun with a metal bar that he ripped off the wall of a bathroom

watching it on blu-ray was o_o

― J0rdan S., Sunday, February 26, 2012 11:25 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I need to watch it on blu-ray now.

yeah ditto

i appreciate the Yaris punchline, admrl

thanks!!!!

watching it on blu-ray was o_o

― J0rdan S., Sunday, February 26, 2012 11:25 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I need to watch it on blu-ray now.

― wolf kabob (ENBB), Sunday, February 26, 2012 5:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah this movie is gorgeous on blu-ray. it really is an immaculately shot & composed flick

lol that reads like I'm being sarcastic.

it really is an "immaculately" "shot" & "composed" "flick"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qykzFSF0q14

Toss up between this and The Iron Lady for worst film of 2011. Seriously, even Transformers: Dark of the Moon had more to chew on.

breaking str8boy hearts there kev

http://www.flagpoststore.com/images/gift_card.jpg

rlly, cuz heads being blown apart don't dazzle everyone, chile? tsk tsk have a lollipop.

It might not be your bag, but "worst film of 2011" is a bit absurd. I'm guessing you didn't see I Am Number Four, Something Borrowed, Conan the Barbarian, Beastly, Arthur, Paul, Season of the Witch, The Change-Up, Abduction, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, What's Your Number?, I Don't Know How She Does It, or Prom.

btw I am excluding films I hated like Bellflower or The Green Lantern that I imagine some might actually rep for.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Ha! Just saw this today and adored it (apart from the anti-abortion angle) so...

Morbs, I'm getting the impression that you finally caved in and saw Drive. But on the off chance you didn't succumb, don't see it! Live an extraordinarily rich life without having done so.

P.S. Abduction was out at two different Redboxes.

See ALL those movies.

Just for clarification, I don't care if you didn't like Drive. I can understand hating The Iron Lady because there are political contexts at work. If your argument is that there is nothing to chew on in Drive, then that's fine too, but watch all of those films I listed and then we'll go through it shot by shot to decipher just why it is worse than all of those. If you don't find anything to chew on in a film, then you should rate it on technical ability surely. If you find it more offensively dumb than Abduction or I Am Number Four, we'll get into that too.

This "worst film of the year" crap just feels like hyperbole, so I want you to prove it.

Paypal me $100 American and the proof is yours.

And don't call me Shirley.

Just be reasonable in your statements is all I ask.

otm. this is ilx, after all.

this movie reminded me of David Lynch's worst qualities - airless, lifeless, jarring stunt cameos, immaculately shot and executed etc.... just this sense that the director has seldom been around human beings

i liked it well enough, but much of the praise for it has made me wonder if i was missing something.

Relevant to the interests of some of you:

http://ryangoslingvspuppy.tumblr.com/

http://i.imgur.com/suDIp.gif

Is that pac man barfing or is it some kind of frog?

The Missing Piece.

Angelenos or other, tell me about that concrete channel beloved of driving scenes in this and other movies. Is it just the course of the Los Angeles River? How come it's so empty of water? Can one normally drive along it? Would one need a lever action shotgun to blast through gates closing it off?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08DChU5qsg

But can you just get in there that easily? And not get in trouble with THE LAW? I wanna know!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_qxQztHRI

Numerous films and television programs have featured various sites along the Los Angeles River, many of which involve the river as a sinister plot location. Films involving the river include The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Chinatown, Them!, Blue Thunder, Escape from L.A., Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Last Action Hero, Stand and Deliver, Grease, Volcano, Point Blank, Freaky Friday, Roadblock, Hot Rod Girl, Southland, Blood in Blood Out, Boomtown, This Christmas, Rize, The Core, Repo Man, The Italian Job, One Eight Seven, Point Break, Gone in 60 Seconds, Transformers, 24, Emergency!, The Gumball Rally, To Live and Die in L.A., The First Power, Purple Rain, L.A. Zombie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Drive, and High School High.

A number of music videos have also been filmed at the Los Angeles River, including:
"Stay The Night" - Chicago
"Better Life" - Keith Urban
"Burnin' for You" - Blue Öyster Cult
"Youth Against Fascism" - Sonic Youth
"So Hard" - Voice of the Beehive
"It's Funky Enough" - The D.O.C. (1989)
"Life is.. Too Short" - Too Short
"The River" - Good Charlotte
"Down" - Blink 182
"Got the Life" - Korn
"Wake Up Call" - Maroon 5
"Under the Bridge" - Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Don't Cha" - Pussycat Dolls
"Say I" - Christina Milian feat. Young Jeezy
"Wherever You Will Go" - The Calling
"Get It Shawty" - Lloyd
"Live Your Life" - T.I. feat. Rihanna (2008)
"Straight Through My Heart" - Backstreet Boys
"Cricketz" - New Boyz
"Telephone" - Lady GaGa feat. Beyoncé (2010)
"Deuces" - Chris Brown feat. Tyga and Kevin McCall (2010)
"Gold Cobra" - Limp Bizkit (2011)
"Our Deal" - Best Coast (2011)

i cant believe no one has made a sweet ass youtube compilation of all the scenes ever shot in the l.a. river

Angelenos or other, tell me about that concrete channel beloved of driving scenes in this and other movies. Is it just the course of the Los Angeles River? How come it's so empty of water? Can one normally drive along it? Would one need a lever action shotgun to blast through gates closing it off?

― ledge, Monday, March 12, 2012 10:28 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

ha i asked these exact question when i was watching this movie

i cant believe no one has made a sweet ass youtube compilation of all the scenes ever shot in the l.a. river

― ⚓ (gr8080), Monday, March 12, 2012 11:52 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had this thought the other day when i finally saw this movie!

i thought it was pretty good, mostly because of the villains. and the robbery/driving scenes which were top-notch. i had a little fun pretending gosling was the same character from 'lars and the real girl'

thinking about it now, when the elevator doors close on carey mulligan, that's the last time she's seen, right?