I need to see this movie again.

http://www.chud.com/community/t/138352/ ... st_3199054

Sad to hear about such shitty reactions... I don't see Drive as being THAT far out of the mainstream. But I'm stoked to see that others are agreeing with my sentiment that the film is lacking a truly great car chase!

I do like the idea that he just drove off until he died, rather than the ending actually being heaven.

but the ending doesn't need a car chase.

I agree with Magnus on the elevator scene. That was amazing. Same too on the fade outs and even how the scene would jump forward a bit to a resolution and then go back to before that resolution occurred.

Also I'm very lucky to have an audience that appreciated the film when I saw it. Though the guy right next to me at the end complained about the long shot of Gosling looking up at the ceiling in his car before driving off. I personally thought that was another beautiful scene.

I'm glad I didn't see this with a bunch of whiny bitches.

Eh, maybe it's just about perspective. Drive was the closing night film at a fantastic film festival where I had already seen a bunch of films that I found to deeper and more provocative, and yes even a few that were better directed (whatever that means). I don't think it's unfair to point out that this film, an exercise in high-class pulp, is lacking the really bravado car sequence that would put it on par with Bullitt. Then again, just because Ronin kicks the shit out of this movie in terms of car chases doesn't mean it's a better movie overall.

The film had enough car action to satisfy me. As Magnus said, the opening scene is terrific. And then there's the post-pawn shop chase sequence which, while relatively short, is very well-staged and culminates with the inspired shot of Christina Hendricks' terrified face with the car flipping behind her.

Add in all the other scenes of him driving--through L.A., on the track, with Mulligan's character--and the presence of cars is felt throughout the movie.

There's more car action in this than Bullitt.

No Country for Old Men should have ended with Tommy Lee Jones having a shootout with Anton Chigurgh on top of the Hoover Dam.

No. It's a very fun shot.

I saw this a second time today.

I've actually been listening to the soundtrack since last night and have changed my mind concerning the music. I actually like it a lot. Am glad it's doing well on iTunes.

How did you feel about the movie the second time around Gun?

chromatics: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=47589&p=1347129&hilit=chromatics#p1347129

desire: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=59958&p=1644559#p1644559

glass candy (all 3 are the same band, they just switch up vocalists) viewtopic.php?f=11&t=60528&p=1650033&hilit=glass+candy#p1650033

k last post was dick-ish so i guess i should at least elaborate

Refn wants to make a serious, cool, quiet guy movie with a protagonist something like Melville's ascetic Le Samourai along his own, 1980's-inspired pulpier terms, but overassumes his scope in assuming that these things imply mythological weight. Refn wants his driver to possess Melville's or Bresson's ascetic cool, but he throws out all psychological plausibility in order to heroicize his "driver"--his devotion to Mulligan's character and her son is foundation-less. The film further assumes he can get away with a lack of substantive character development by throwing in some lovelorn italo disco and a couple of empty cheese shots of Gosling and Mulligan (and her helpless, fatherless child!) here and there, invoking art film license for narrative absence. I'm not arguing that a film needs to demonstrate its characters' motivations, but this one makes a point to demonstrate them, and does it in almost laughably hollow fashion. Although, I might go as far as giving Refn the benefit of the doubt--he wants Gosling's character to be both an angel and a badass, and he may have realized the difficulty of actualizing these conflicting qualities. Refn, who exposes himself as a technician only, can't reconcile the film's sunny-day sentimentality and its insistent masculine cool, so instead he just throws in a careful-but-sloppy night drive soundtrack, makes a smart casting choice with Gosling and hopes we don't notice his film's crippling crux. It's a movie for the post-IFC, post-Cronenberg, post-Lynch era: somewhere after postmodern melding of "high' and 'low' art, cinephile audiences started confusing well-shot, neon-lit trash for the inspiringly gritty and grotesque termite-art that IFC built its reputation on. Basically, there's nothing seething beneath the surface of the characters or the city here. And don't bother arguing for it on purely aesthetic terms-- it's mostly a visual bore.

Gosling chose Refn, not the other way around.

This is a fantastic work, of course; snack's oppositions to it are mostly on hipster terms. I could elaborate, but I hardly feel like engaging in a debate with him.

Suffice it to say, I loved it.

That would imply snack and KJ were ever compatible, which has never been the case.

dismissing snack's review as "hipster" seems silly to me. not because i agree with the review, but because if anything drive has been embraced by the hipster culture in a way that the majority of 2000+ screen films never are - at least if my social circle here in portland is any indication.

i do think snack is being forcibly, ridiculously contrarian (this is a weird movie to do that with, btw), and the review is filled with missed points and hollow statements, but hipstery? nah.

also, this type of shit:



is just stupid.

drive has become a bit of a litmus test for seeing how far a collective, generally narrative/character-minded audience is willing to push themselves into abstract, aesthetic based storytelling. it would appear not very far. this clamoring for hidden subtext and heavy interpretation smacks of someone not comfortable with the type of movie drive is. they may have liked it - and even genuinely so - but either have no legitimate reason as to why (which is fine, drive works on this level) or just can't articulate it outside of the realm of typical hack movie critic/everyday movie goer terminology. i shudder whenever someone defends a movie because it has "great character development", or shuns it for a perceived lack thereof.

snack is so hipster he's anti-hipster.

But come on, stuff like this

is total hipster bullshit.

for an actually interesting and thoughtful AND somewhat mixed take on drive, check out jim emerson's piece on it - http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2011 ... ht_ye.html

is it though?

i mean, it's a nothing, completely subjective and made up critique that has zero to do with the movie, but it doesn't strike me as particularly hipster-ish, which is a pretty undefinable term to begin with.

i dunno, i just think it's a cheap way to dismiss someone's thoughts.

I would define hipster as someone who's forcibly, ridiculously contrarian, so yeah, I'd call snack (and his thoughts) hipsterish. Perhaps we just have different ideas about this undefinable term.

And you're right, it was a cheap way to dismiss him. But I'm not exactly worried about hurting his feelings.

my problem with the film is that it posits itself as something other than what it is. despite the director's superficial use of art film pretense, stylization and abstraction, it is the not an ambiguous, meditative work of pure cinema it claims to be. it cuts pieces out of the narrative to convince us that it is these things, but there is nothing interesting about these holes--we know exactly what happened in the space in between precisely because the film is secretly totally straightforward. it's a violent, humorless, and often boring conventional super hero movie.

the dressing room scene fancies itself One-Eyed Jacks when it's much closer to HBO sunday night programming. the driver also kinda reminded me of the mexican dude in Crash (Haggis, 2004)--yknow, a guardian angel complex (he's even doing it for a lil half mexikid!)

what it does have going for it is atmosphere, but after the pretty good opening minutes, that's mostly just the soundtrack.

Makeshift needs to knock on capitals door and say he's sorry and a changed man. If there was one person who's writing prose didn't need to be changed it was his, dude has magic fingers

What a cast. Woah.

It's really good, but I can't help but feel it was this close to being a classic, maybe with a slightly sharper screenplay, and didn't quite there. Wasn't a fan of the villains being caricatures. I just didn't think it was needed when they were doing such a good job with Mulligan, Cranston, the Standard character feeling real in the midst of visual dreaminess. In fact the whole gore bit felt like someone really wanted to break it out because he's seen similar effects to greatness in other films... but I wonder if they needed to go there or if it would've been strong enough with Gosling's arc, disconnect, etc.

I actually kind of agree with snack. Reminds me a bit of Gus Van Sant's complex where the director really wants to make a superior visual/thematic film and his success at that mostly stops at the pretty visuals. He ends up being succesful making a really good film(more succesful than any of GVS's), but at the same time, kind of a forgettable one past the surface.

I read the Gosling character a bit different than most of you btw. I don't see someone who wants to be a badass or a superhero. I see someone who doesn't feel like he's real or able to be a human like everyone else (and the soundtrack points this out)