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

Yeah this isn't Tarantino-style geek violence.

i totally fucking enjoyed this.

also dr morbius i know this probably won't and shouldn't prompt any public self-reflection but your whole highbrow tsk-tsk schtick is embarrassing and too revealing -- it demonstrates exactly the opposite of what i expect you want it to demonstrate (that you're a cynical sophisticate).

anyway this film is by no means perfect. but i'm deeply skeptical of the usual "style over substance" complaint. style _is_ substance. and this had a lot of style. i didn't like the use of slo-mo, though paradoxically (?) i wish that refn pushed the boundaries of taste (not in terms of violence but in terms of film language) a bit more. on that score i liked the brooding superimpositions.

anyway on the level of "would you recommend that other people see this" i'd say HELL YES.

also LOL at people who have well-formed opinions on MOVIES THAT THEY HAVEN'T SEEN.

also some reviews seem to complain about gosling + mulligan being "unconvincing." what wold convince them? that they have INTERESTS IN COMMON? or A DEEP INTELLECTUAL CONNECTION? i mean, it's not that kind of movie. their characters are axioms. there's one brief but spellbinding sequence where gosling is about to leave her apartment and there are a few silent close-ups where they lock eyes and it's like THIS IS ON. that's all we need, really.

also nice that the italo revival now has a feature film to its credit. :)

i mean this movie could have been smarter, more intricate. it could have been better. but taken at face value it was super-entertaining to watch.

haha refn is so plastered here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/may/22/cannes-film-festival-ryan-gosling

if i was hanging out in cannes with an expense account i'd be sloshed too

also danish accents are fascinating because they basically learn better english than we americans do.

I wasn't looking for "intellectual connections," whateever that means -- I wanted Mulligan convincing as a person, and she wasn't.

alfred otm

dont get me wrong, i liked the movie, but

one guy i really liked in this was oscar isaac. he was literally the only good thing about ridley scott's Robin Hood too

Haven't seen this yet, but I'm rather personally offended that Mulligan's character was Latina in the book. Refn cast Mulligan because apparently he none of the actually Latina actresses who tried out clicked with him and Mulligan was the first actress he felt "protective" towards. Kind of gross, tbh. Par for the course though, I guess. I still want to see it, but it's kind of put me off seeing it in the theatre.

Like I wrote on Saturday, the movie's racial politics are weird.

Gosling as a goy Galahad.

For what it's worth, I also read that they were attempting to cast someone who actually had been in adult films for the part Christina Hendricks played, but they didn't get the results they wanted by going that direction, either. I thought that both seemed authentic to the film, in that the film does not really seem authentic to reality.

Amateurist all kinds of OTM

I thought that by keeping most things simple, the film succeeded by doing the few things it did reasonably well. Fleshing out anything would have been a risk. The most expository dialogue we get is from Brooks/Perlman and even then, it's still pretty general. I thought that was an interesting reflection of the lyrics of the songs used somewhat thematically -- in a more complex film, they'd have seemed trite but there was a simplicity to the plot depth that made it work.

My highbrow tsk-tsk schtick extends to being a Jackass and Spielberg fan, you may notice now n' then when I am flayed about the latter. (The former is fine bcz, u know, body fluids & sublimated homoism)

I have no well-formed opinions on this film; call them deep and well-grounded suspicions.

What I "wish to project" on this board is nothing, cuz I really don't give a fuck.

so gtfotm

I loved the polite, smarmy way in which Brooks dispatches a certain character.

style _is_ substance

never heard that before, soooooooo deep

Mulligan underwritten - and she couldn't bring anything more to it through her skills, sadly - but I think that works for that creepy, "protective" comment reason.

havent seen this yet, want to but wont have the cash til its on netflix prolly, but 3D characters in a movie about a face-stompin super-driver strike me as something that might be a bonus, not the draw.

sure - but the problem is when you spend an excessive amount of time with those cardboard characters

sometimes blank flatness can be really engrossing (can't think of an example tho, heh). sometimes you have to take it as a given that the people you are watching are true in their non-3d-ness.

speaking a little too generally i guess, and no i haven't seen this movie either.

imo stock characters are sometimes best utilized when not fleshed-out too heavily

carey mulligan is awful and I do not understand her appeal. What a dud.

In this film or in general? I thought she did a decent enough job of awkwardly smiling.

she was v pretty in this yeah

Just in general, she seems kind of BLAND

Mulligan was great on Doctor Who as Sally Sparrow

most people are bland, but most actors are all about effusing PERSONALITY

thank you carey mulligan for seeming real

hey when does this come out in britain?

Friday

gettin' down on Friday

style _is_ substance

never heard that before, soooooooo deep

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, September 21, 2011 10:23 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

i don't intend to be deep -- it's how i feel. it's what i think. i mean think about, say, jacques tati. his (v great) films make total hash of the style/substance dichotomy. they are patently the same thing.

btw a few folx (e.g. glenn "never met a film-crit inside-baseball argument i didn't like" kenny) are comparing this unfavorably to walter hill's the driver, an obvious (even overweening?) influence. that's fine. but the terms on which the comparison is made are often fishy. well-rounded characters? psychologically realistic? the driver is one of the most (gloriously, on occasion) stylized and pretentious films to come out of new hollywood -- the characters there are even blanker and more axiomatic than the ones in drive. there is nothing resembling character psychology in that film. there is also a fuckton of stuff in hill's film that is dubious, even risible. that doesn't diminish its orginality. but like drive it is a formal exercise--and i feel like people are donning their rose-colored glasses in claiming its inevitable superiority to this new film.

also someone kinda mentioned this upthread but i thought the way some of the songs' lyrics were on-the-nose was itself part of the retro vibe.

but honestly i don't think there are many folx (except maybe those allergic to graphic violence, fair enough) who wouldn't find this really exciting/ entertaining.

morbs btw i am not claiming your tastes are universally highbrow, just that your persona seems characterized by this sort of aching condescension toward everything -- highbrows like "lowbrow" fare, in fact it's part of the job description since sontag et al. we probably share a lot of tastes, in fact, it's just the "pithy" way that you put down everything that irks.

often when people criticize a film for "style over substance," when i watch the film what i find are actually failures of style. trying to think of an example. a lot of neo-noirs, maybe. just not really this one.

amateurist I think you're maybe right for ilx but the moviegoing public in my theater seemed to be going nuts at the long shots of landscapes and facial expressions with no dialogue

I was going nuts because the middle-aged dude down the row from me couldn't figure out how to text message without his phone beeping or realize he could move his ass out of the theater

come on amateurist, everyone knows the 'point' of criticism is to voice only opinions that have never been spoken before

i.e.:

that a movie is made for nerds who fetishize 'hypermasculine' slick violence is usu reason enough

I feel sorry for the folks that show up late and miss the opening chase, because it settles the action jones for awhile.

amateurist I think you're maybe right for ilx but the moviegoing public in my theater seemed to be going nuts at the long shots of landscapes and facial expressions with no dialogue

― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Wednesday, September 21, 2011 2:53 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i suppose it's a little arty for some audiences, i suspect folks on ILX would love it though.

Johnny Jewel wrote a score that wasn't used

The opening job is up there with some of the better movie opening set pieces I've seen. And the first couple minutes of it are on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE1tqMUd4R8

(Note that this is also somewhat of a misleading opening, as the movie is not car-action heavy)

ryan gosling is beautiful amirite?

Some publications having a laugh at internet folk/critics for always saying Gosling is "The Next Big Thing" and then the totals for this movie came in. Really snarky shit. Which annoys the hell out of me. Gosling could probably be a big star if he really wanted to, but he seems to have very little interest in fronting the kind of projects that would crossover.

Also the whole "stars can carry a movie" thing seems to be largely over anyway.

he's been in some (moderately) succesful movies! it's probably to his credit that he's doing more drives and blue valentines than the sub-notebook bullshit he probably coulda been sleepwalking thru since.

.. Gosling appears to be in every movie coming out this year so, regardless of what the publications are saying, it seems that Hollywood definitely considers him to be The Next Big Thing