re: Drive

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It didnt have any of the usual flourishes I was expecting from Refn

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This is what surprised me the most. It was very "clean" for a Refn crime film.

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Everyone saying "style over substance" is wrong. For the type of movie this is, it's got a ton of substance.

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Agreed. The substance was very subtle and relied a lot on the facial expressions of Gosling

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If you had the intelligence or talents to be critical of my thoughts, you would have done it a long time ago.

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I don't spend time being critical of your thoughts, but I'll bet my opinion is just as valued as yours on here...which is to say, not at all. At least I type a lot less while I bore people.

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While it can stir the imagination, I came out wanting to know more about his childhood, and felt the movie's near complete avoidance of his past came across not so much as a religious mystery, which, by definition we can never know, but more the director and writer's inability to create a suitable and explicable history for a man so, well, mysterious. While the movie is adapted from a book, I think the audience deserved a hint to his past.

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Seriously though, it's a movie. I don't care about Gosling's character's past. He is who he is and however he got there is of no importance to me or the plot of the movie. If you assume that then it makes it a much more enjoyable movie.

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the movie's plot is boring

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I found it a little too slow in the first 1/3rd of the movie. The second and third acts were very good, I thought.

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the ending predictable

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99% of movies I watch are predictable. Nothing new here.

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the use of violence cloys

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That's an element of film noir and neo-nior films. That's like saying I didn't like a comedy because it had some jokes in it.

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I don't care about Gosling's character's past.

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Exactly, it doesn't matter. He's like Eastwood's "A Man with No Name."

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Lotsa cooler than thou music

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Why is out of period music that would have been right at home in Scarface "holier than thou?"

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Drive was like a student filmmaker's idea of what a Micheal Mann flick from the Eighties would be like. IF this were a student project, they get a "C".

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Most film students/geeks come on themselves for how Refn directs his movies.

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Ryan Gosling seems totally overrated here.

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A guy brought his family to this movie? Even five years ago, the movie probably would have gotten an NC-17 rating due to its graphic violence.

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Clearly you've never seen Saw.

You are correct. I don't like horror movies, though, I did like The Ring and several of Stephen King's novels, which were made into movies, even though they have been labeled as horror. I quite liked King's essay, copied below, on the positive use of horror movies, yet, I have a belief that virtue does more than just repress evil; virtue destroys evil. So for those able to be virtuous, the horror genre has no use. But for those struggling with virtue, I suppose redirecting evil into entertainment is better than expressing evil in action.



Stephen King's essay on the use of the horror genre:

I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better, after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted. We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.

And we go to have fun.

Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced –sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.

It is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.

The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.

When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow – angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.

But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?” (You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down
there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

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NC-17 rating due to its graphic violence

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In the US? No way. You lack a basic understanding of the MPAA if you think violence like that gets films NC-17 ratings. Watch "This Film is Not Yet Rated."

That quote is so vague. Gritty filmmaking, what exactly is that? I would love to see the shotgun wounds defended as art, so go ahead. I could see the scene where Gosling looks down at his bloody hands as artful, but that was the only violent scene I thought had any meaning. The rest was a pornographic use of violence that Mel Gibson would applaud.

ETA: I would be interested in hearing someone's interpretation of the blood splatter on the hotel room's wallpaper. As I wrote in my review, the repeated background of wallpaper must have some meaning to the director. I wander if the director was trying to show Gosling's soul as wall paper. In the early scenes, the wall paper is clean and crisp, the Spring of life. Violence ruins the wall paper. This is only a beginning interpretation, and since I only saw the movie once and several days ago, I can't say that this is a good interpretation. However, wallpaper plays a role, IMO, in this movie that few, if any, have yet recognized.