Drive (2011)

sus

Well-known member
What more needs to be said. This is boys chat hour. Pull that pretentious stick outta your ass and confess how this movie made you feel as a young man.

Cliff Martinez soundtrack

The scorpion jacket

The elevator scene

The wave on the beach, the Hollywood mask

The opening robbery and chase culminating in Staples Center

Carey Mulligan to die for. Bryan Cranston supporting role
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I love it but if I were to describe it I don't think I'd start off by saying that it was unpretentious. I remember it being discussed on another forum and someone compared it unfavorably - in that respect - to Transporter saying "You wanna get yourself a film with a proper geezer in a proper motor".

I remember the elevator scene, I saw it in the cinema with a girlfriend and she started crying cos it was so brutal, violent and gory.

The other day Only God Forgives was on telly and I looked up something about it. I forget what that was but while doing so I was surprised to read Refn saying that he saw the invincible and silent Thai police chief as a reincarnation of or simply a continuation of the inscrutable and psychopathically violent driver in Drive - and that he was in turn an aspect of the monstrous fighting machine One-Eye from Valhalla Rising. I'm not sure if that was an off the cuff comment or reverse justification or that was something he had genuinely planned from the start.
 
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linebaugh

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follow from here and youll see woops and I pushing the only girl out of the forum in full throated defense of this classic
 

version

Well-known member
What more needs to be said. This is boys chat hour. Pull that pretentious stick outta your ass and confess how this movie made you feel as a young man.

Cliff Martinez soundtrack

The scorpion jacket

The elevator scene

The wave on the beach, the Hollywood mask

The opening robbery and chase culminating in Staples Center

Carey Mulligan to die for. Bryan Cranston supporting role

Don't forget sinister Albert Brooks.
 
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version

Well-known member
I mentioned this in the thread Linebaugh linked to and some of it came up in Luke's one on affectlessness, but whatever.

Friedkin said when he made Sorcerer he wanted to make a film that people who couldn't speak English could enjoy and understand because he'd been around the world and seen people watching his films without subtitles and in all sorts of conditions and felt they were missing out due to not having the tech and whatever else to watch them properly.

That's why, or at least partly why, there's not much dialogue in Sorcerer and it's mostly done through images. It's supposed to be an attempt at universal storytelling.

Refn's a big fan and did a long interview with him about the film. The influence is clear once you've heard that.



There's also the influence of Melville, particularly Le Samourai where Delon's this laconic hitman ghosting around breaking into cars and shooting people with the demeanor of a waxwork.

Le-Samourai-15.jpg
 

sus

Well-known member
Are they any good? Are they worth watching? The Driver trailer has shots incredibly similar to the Drive opening
 

version

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You can't overstate the cultural impact Drive and Gosling's performance in particular has had online. He's the avatar for a certain kind of guy.
 

version

Well-known member
Are they any good? Are they worth watching? The Driver trailer has shots incredibly similar to the Drive opening

Thief's brilliant, but I haven't seen all of The Driver. What I've seen is great though.
 
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sus

Well-known member
I actually disagree with HannahB's comment about the Driver having "nothing there," being blank. Linebaugh took this claim and rolled, fair enough, but I contest the premise.

I think many men are like this. I have known men who are like this. There is a normal amount of person there. It is just masked. There is a reason masks keep coming back in this movie.

 

version

Well-known member
You can't overstate the cultural impact Drive and Gosling's performance in particular has had online. He's the avatar for a certain kind of guy.

You can trace permutations of the character back through lots of films - Eastwood's Man With No Name, Delon's samurai, Schrader's various anti-heroes, Mann's Thief. A stylised strong, silent type. There are elements of him in DeLillo's 'lonely man in a room' archetype too.

Of course, fact and fiction inevitably bleed into one another and 'characters' like Oswald and Mishima appear in the real world as though sprung from a film or novel.

Hinckley's another.

[Schrader] ... was in a cab in New Orleans when he heard on the radio that Reagan had been shot.
“I told the driver, ‘It’s one of the Taxi Driver kids! Oh my God!’ I just felt it in my bones. And then I got back to the hotel, and the FBI was waiting.


‘Taxi Driver’ Screenwriter Paul Schrader Says John Hinckley Jr. Wrote to Him Before Shooting Reagan
 

sus

Well-known member
The male myth that unites the Refn trilogy Drive participate in—it's the watcher at the wall, the man who keeps the wolf from the door. He must become a monster to fight monsters. There is not much empathy for the lives taken in this film, or in Valhalla Rising, because the men killed are themselves brutal. Only the young boy of VR, or Carey Mulligan and her son in Drive, have moral value.
 

version

Well-known member
The male myth that unites the Refn trilogy Drive participate in—it's the watcher at the wall, the man who keeps the wolf from the door. He must become a monster to fight monsters. There is not much empathy for the lives taken in this film, or in Valhalla Rising, because the men killed are themselves brutal. Only the young boy of VR, or Carey Mulligan and her son in Drive, have moral value.

He's an avenging angel. That's why the Thai police officer in Only God Forgives is the next incarnation of The Driver and Gosling is really the villain, or one of them. It's the former who's going around cutting down the monsters. We're just seeing it from the perspective of one of the lesser monsters.
 
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version

Well-known member
I actually disagree with HannahB's comment about the Driver having "nothing there," being blank. Linebaugh took this claim and rolled, fair enough, but I contest the premise.

I think many men are like this. I have known men who are like this. There is a normal amount of person there. It is just masked. There is a reason masks keep coming back in this movie.


I recognise the blankness and why people get fed up with it, but yeah, I think it's quite a moving film. The scenes where they're just driving around and the bit outside the party when her husband comes back and they just look at each other in the hallway.
 
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sus

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He's an avenging angel. That's why the Thai police officer in Only God Forgives is the next incarnation of The Driver and Gosling is really the villain, or one of them. It's the former who's going around cutting down the monsters. We're just seeing it from the perspective of one of the lesser monsters.
Yes. Violence and force bind our society together, but civilized people prefer to forget or ignore or even contest this (see police abolition)
 
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