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

the violence in this was great. love ott shit like that. more!

I'd also argue that the movie is so much from the Driver's perspective and his clearly adolescent views on love that Mulligan's character would never really have been allowed to be fully fleshed out because he sees things so simplistically -i.e. in terms of pop songs. It's more of the feeling of love than actual love. Although obviously there's a point at which I'm probably just making excuses because I found it quite beautiful stylistically.

no, i think that's a good point. my friend compared him to Pinocchio, which i also think makes a measure of sense. refn was inspired by fairy tales and thinks of driver as a knight stranded in the real world, which explains the character's purity and deployment of brutal, 'chivalric' violence

i don't buy the subjective argument at all. but then i rarely do. i don't think the film is inside his head at all. i don't think you need to motivate it that way. the character is blank because that's the sort of film it is: he's like ryan o'neal's driver mixed with all the other stoic taciturn macho action movie stars you can name. i think it's really beside the point to speculate on his psychology, because he doesn't have any.

kind of agree with the post above mine, though.

also think the contrast between the 'chivalry' of the character and the unnecessary brutal violence (i mean, sheesh, you can stop kicking the guy's head in now) is supposed to be kind of distancing. a way of measuring distance between this film & its time & its models & their time. i don't mean that to be deep nor does the movie i think. it's just kind of there.

in that sense i guess it's like every other contemporary reprehensible genre rehash but this one has more style so

btw when i step back from discussions about screen violence i realize how i've gotten sucked into this world where you have to justify it. which i don't really believe.

Don't be sorry, Am. Morbs hasn't once posted here without some level of condescension, pithy or otherwise.

I mean, it is Morbs. That's kind of what he does on movie and politics threads!

Just remembered: the shotgun blast interrupting what was a nearly silent scene that was building tension was good!

the rest of that scene was kind of eh

This was shared by the people who do the FB page for the film:

A tweet from Bret Easton Ellis: “After seeing Drive today was told: ‘Sorry, babe, but I'd leave you for Ryan Gosling...’ My response: ‘Um, babe, I'd leave you for him, too.’”

Salon dissects the "dreadful word of mouth":

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/drive/2011/09/23/drive_convo

Eric, I sometimes wish E.G. was here to provide higher-quality pith and condescension, but that's life:

For Salon, Thomas Rogers and Andrew O'Hehir discuss why audiences are rejecting Nicolas Winding Refn's pretentious, feels-like-it-was-made-by-a-Pitchfork-loving-hipster Drive.

lol

I am not sure what this "dreadful word of mouth" thing is about, since I saw it after a friend had recommended it and I told several others to do the same.

C- Cinemascore

and smug writers laughing at internet/critic hyped 'failure' blowing it out of proportion

it's a very deliberately paced movie - lots of quiet scenes that make normie audiences uncomfortable. one of my friends who hates anything artsy thought it was super boring.

^^^The backlash, if anything, is due to that more than the extremeness of the violence or the lack of obvious sex.

kids today. smh

What do you mean kids? It was mostly people in their 30s and 40s yawning and looking pissed off in my theater.

just joking there

mh acts bewildered about negative word of mouth, then admits entire theater hated movie

I meant that characterizing the word of mouth effect for this movie as completely negative is wrong. Don't get me wrong, most people in that theater told their friends not to go!

they told the friends they were with not to go? but they'd already gone

I don't think matters were helped by the fact that in the theatre I saw it in, most of the trailers were for more straight-forward action flicks (Killer Elite, Haywire, that J-G Levitt bike messenger movie), which really hammered home how different the feature presentation would be.

i fully anticipate that killer elite will be way better than this neon eurofart of a movie

What about the J-G Levitt has cancer movie?

Morbs, EG's condescension comes on a far more unpredictable timetable. Wd call you and him a draw on precision, tho.

I came close to tearing up once during JLG cancer movie.

I'd like to see it. Probably for the same reason I'd like to see Moneyball.

I'm starting to get legitimately angry with Bryce Dallas Howard's agent at this point.

I thought this film was remarkable.

Deeply stylized, 1980s now, so much style that the style became a substance.

Music that was cornily pastiche, and moving.

Immense use of silence, waiting, non-responses, non-communication, like a proper art film (which I don't generally like that much).

I have managed (maybe by avoiding reviews etc so far) not to see anyone yet compare it to GRAND THEFT AUTO so I will say it was the film of that.

The compelling things above were somewhat complicated by the ultraviolence, though, which was pretty shocking, disturbing and maybe oddly made the film seem more mainstream than it otherwise did?

i still really want to see this, but the violence is going to make it a hard sell to my gf (and to myself, for anything eye-related).

there are only a few violent moments and the violence is v momentary but quite shocking

It's almost all concentrated in the last half of the film as well.

so she can come in for the first half and meet her in the foyer after

Yeah, or she can take an extended powder-room break, or go play Dance Dance Revoolution in the lobby, or sneak into another movie, or...

:)

ialso 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.

amateurist otm, here -- i feel like what was effective about gosling, especially, but mulligan too was, it was almost like refn was provocatively stripping down the leads to being as generic & typical as possible - so laconic or brooding gosling who protects & drives & is inscrutable, & potentially redemptive, offers-a-chance-at-a-new-life CM who occasionally infects RG with happiness, family etc. these are the products that we were probably going to get out of a more developed relationship between the two (i don't think a slightly more fleshed out script was going to take it in other directions aside from the driving), but what refn was doing was relying on our schema & expectation of that with the minimum expenditure of effort/additional story. the first few shots in which they met, smiled, were silent were v effective, i thought.

i think because i'd heard so before seeing this, i went in thinking that the film's ""sound design"" was meant to be some lauded & exemplary thing, in the way that its enjoyable soundtrack is; perhaps that isn't something the film's been credited with (it's only mentioned here once), but just wanted to rebut it. the song picks work well but the ''design'' is totally standard & maybe sorta uninventive considering the possibilities of music-in-cars (struggling to recall the specifics of radio on here but think it's better, even when non-diegetic.

i kinda liked this for its streamlined thing. i liked the lighting a lot, throughout, in a lot of different ways.

Salon dissects the "dreadful word of mouth"

dunno about this, saw it tonight (ie second week it's been open) and the theater was packed, like close to sold out

thought this was ok - wasn't expecting that level of violence/gore. thought it was interesting that they exaggerated the stereotypical heroic stoicness/silence/singlemindedness to the point where the main character seemed borderline retarded. like he exhibited literally no signs of intelligent thought/planning, his only asset is being able to drive. also it was a totally vapid, superficial movie, which isn't a criticism - at least the vapidity seemed like a conscious decision, unlike most movies.

feel like chris penn definitely would have been in this movie if he could, rip

A John Doe cameo would have been welcome.

i suppose it depends on who is doing the word of mouthing. i certainly encouraged people to go. maybe they opened it too wide?

i guess i don't have my finger on the pulse of america, since i thought this movie would be an audience-pleaser.

what if america was like dick cheney and had no pulse, i wonder.

i can't imagine this movie had a budget much over $30-40 mil, so i don't know why everybody was expecting blockbuster numbers to justify its existence.

i think maybe it was more like $15 million. and yeah--i think it'll do just fine.

I havent seen this yet (and now uncertain if i will because of the violence) but i wonder if critics don't misunderstand what audiences want. it's not so much tons of coolness and action, but gobs and gobs of obvious sentimental cliches. even in the "action" movies.

i was quite surprised they were able to open it as wide as they did. i dont really understand distribution, etc enough to know how it happened but id be interested to read something on it. late summer seems to be a really good time to put a movie like this out imo

The weekend estimates are out.

Drive falls to #7, with $5,771,000, which is also about a million or so more than it did between the weekends. The current gross estimate thus far is $21,425,000, and the budget has been released at the tune of 15 million.

Things to Chew On:

• Last week's #2 & #3 (Contagion & Drive) got pushed to #6 & #7 with 4 new openings separating them from reigning champ Lion King 3D.

• Of these 4 new films, two of them (Abduction & Killer Elite) can easily be considered more straight-forward action flicks than Drive. However, according to these estimates, neither has grossed as much as Drive did opening weekend. (Although Abduction is pretty close.)

Drive really hasn't done bad at all. Compared to this week's Killer Elite or Straw Dogs and I Don't Know How She Does It, it's done very, very well.