I can’t explain it, but I like Ryan Gosling.
It’s strange because I can’t really name any movies that he’s been in that I love other than Lars and the Real Girl and I had to go to his IMDB page to remind myself of movies that he’s been in and even then I can’t authentically say that I’ve watched a lot of films starring him. Still, my inexplicable love for Ryan Gosling abides.
Furthermore, I’m not really a fan of car chase movies. I watched 2 Fast 2 Furious in theaters because I was working at the Bolivar Cinema Four at the time and had access to free movies and even though it was free, I hated it. I watched Tokyo Drift with Sam because we were in the mood to watch cars do cool things, but outside of those two movies, I don’t watch car chase movies because they don’t interest me.
So, when I saw Ryan Gosling (an actor who I like for no other reason than he was in Lars and the Real Girl) in the trailer for Drive (a genre film that I have no interest in), it puzzled me when I realized that I wanted to watch the movie.
How does it measure up?
Well, it’s a movie that’s as puzzling as my desire to watch it.
Going into the movie, I was prepared to turn my brain off and watch pretty cars do cool things. I went into the film simply wanting to be entertained and without any expectations for anything more.
And at first, I was sorely disappointed.
The first driving scene takes place almost entirely inside the car itself. The camera stays on Gosling’s face as he is determined to shake the cops. While most car chase movies rely upon heavily stylized muscle cars to get the viewer’s attention, Gosling is driving a Chevy Impala because it’s the most popular car in California which means it will be much easier for him to lose the cops than Vin Diesel in whatever car he drives that makes all the car nerds drool.
At the time, I felt a little cheated that the movie was devoid of fast-paced, exhilarating chase scenes, but in retrospect, I realize that the film is absolutely brilliant in the ways that it completely and totally subverts the genre.
Drive effortlessly is the opposite of The Fast and the Furious in absolutely every way possible:
Where F&F glamorizes crime, Drive shows that there are consequences for our actions.
While the violence in F&F is cartoonish, Drive portrays violent acts as frightening and horrific.
Vin Diesel drives to Ludacris and Limp Bizkit. Ryan Gosling drives to a stylish, 80′s synth-pop pastiche.
Eva Mendes is a sex goddess. Carey Mulligan is cute and seems to be a good mom. Sex doesn’t even enter the film’s vocabulary. Even television’s reigning queen of all things sexy, Christina Hendricks isn’t glamorized as being just a great body.
This film isn’t interested in Id. It’s interested in looking at all of the conventional ideas present in car chase films and noting their inherent flaws.
In a sense, one could make the argument that the film is a satire – a dark, brooding, black satire, but satire nonetheless.
It’s strange, but for some reason, this movie reminds me of my old friend, Jared Lee. When we were kids, Jared would take his old toys into his dad’s workshop and he would take them apart. Vice grips, pliers, axes – he would uses anything and everything to destroy his old toys and then he’d reconfigure the pieces into his own twisted creations.
This film is much the same way. It smashes the genre into teeny tiny pieces and reconstructs what is left into something dark and twisted until the audience looks back at what it was made of and either admires what is new or regrets the loss of the old. For my money, I’d take this film any day of the week.
Go see this movie. It starts slow, but it’s supposed to because it is the antithesis of the standard car chase movie without being self-aware or parody. This film is wonderful, perfect and absolutely worth checking out, so get out there and do it already!
Drive is horrid and revels in Vice Magazine-ish retro hipster chic that made me want to vomit.
It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure. I saw people going into the film that looked like a “Fast and Furious” crowd and as they left, I heard a few say that they wanted their money back.
But even if you don’t like the movie, you have to acknowledge it’s absolute sublime perfection. It is the antithesis of a driving movie in all aspects and that is an accomplishment in and of itself. Maybe you don’t like the message, but you can’t deny that it conveys its message perfectly.
Nothing Albert Brooks is in is ever not worth seeing, the man’s amazing, as is Cranston.
Hipsters can’ like Drive. It has concepts of True Love and it was hard core without being a let down….. it was “rhettro” and cool without being ironic.
I think at a certain point, anything cool is “rhettro.” But this film really just showed real life and had a synth beat and focused on peaples faces and moods. In short, it tried to be the big thing, and hipsters are all about sitting back and not buyin it. Thats what they do.
Everything is dead, all is ironic.
Also: I liked it, and would love to add a scene or a few lines. It keeps you thinking- yet it isn’t anything more then what it is.
I woulda liked the lead to go crazy nuts and do somthing like….. scratch his head, or have a smoke….. I would have written in a sceen where he and the girl have a milk shake. Some how that would have warmed him to me. I don’t know. I liked him, and even related to him. But I felt like just to know him a little better would have been good.
The girl was good. I liked her. I liked that i made the fast and the furious crowd mad. But still, this film is too cool for hipsters. It tries. More, it mostly suceeds. And- gasp- it has a struggling single mom falling in love and that’s just so not cool.
This movie is great. The director is very good. (Check out the director’s other buzz-worthy film BRONSON.)