re: Drive (2011)

Just bumping this again.

Finally got a copy of the soundtrack and damn, just makes me think of the movie. Moving up my list.

Seein as how you are bumpin I'll just put this here.

This perfectly sums up my beef with Drive:

Drive is the sort of artsy non-thriller that inspires many critics, largely male, to throw around words like “existential” and drop references to the film’s closest ancestors, Bullitt and The Driver, both of which actually thrilled. For a while, we take some pleasure, as always, in watching someone do something well. The first getaway is immaculately staged, depending less on speed than on sly circumvention. At the end of it, the driver stops in the car park of a sports arena, with the robbers still in the back seat, and gets out and vanishes into the night, walking nimbly around a cop or two. He doesn’t seem to care how the robbers are going to get home with the cops around, and neither does the movie; we assume it’s part of the plan, but the plan is never imparted to us. Later, the driver notices that a neighbor woman he has his eye on (Carey Mulligan) is having car trouble in a supermarket parking lot. We cut to the driver helping her and her young son carry her groceries into her apartment. Did he fix the car? Did he give them a lift home? Later we learn that the car, unfixed, winds up at the same garage he works at, but this sort of confusing transition is typical of this stoic movie.

Drive tries very hard to be cool, but undermines this goal regularly with songs on the soundtrack that seem to have escaped from some I Love the ’80s hell. One of them, at the end, repeats over and over, “A real hero, and a real human being. A real hero, and a real human being,” which is either ironic or a rather desperate way of telling us how to feel about the man we’ve spent 100 minutes staring at while he stares at everyone else. And they stare back. Occasionally a few words are said, and then disappear into the stylish L.A. malaise. A man is threatened with a hammer and bullet in a room full of strippers, who meet the spectacle with glazed, frozen expressions. Another man’s head is stomped to pulp on an elevator floor, to the natural shock and revulsion of nobody else in the elevator, not even an onlooker who isn’t all that conversant with brain-spattering violence. A young boy has little or no reaction to his father being beaten up.

Drive is full of this sort of hip emptiness, this void of emotion onto which many critics seem ready to project all manners of depth and meaning.

Don't have to.

Just stare at it

Seems like an appropriate action given the film in question.

I saw it today and liked it. It was slow at times but overall I thought it was a pretty good movie.

quote:

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one of my favorite scenes is when Albert Brooks's character kills Shannon. Right after he cuts him, he says, "shh shh shh it's over, it's over, it's done, relax..."

It's such an erie, calming kill. You really get that sense that it's stictly business and that he's not really taking any joy in it, he just knows it has to be done. But he's not remorseful either.

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Agreed...for a half a second i thought Brooks character wasn't going to kill Shannon and then when he reached out to shake his hand i knew it was over for shannon.


loved this movie


That opening scene with the chevy impala is so smooth.

Best film of 2011 hands down.