Drive (2011)

DRIVE (2011)

Drive. I want to say this movie is oozing with style and awesomeness. Or rather I think the film wants me to say that. The score and the opening credits have a real eighties feel to them, the hot pink text and the sexy synth make you feel like your Tommy Vercetti rollin' through Vice City in a Diablo, machine-gunning Cubans. 

Then you notice it. I think a coked up colour grading technician's deadline snuck up behind him, causing him to scream 'OH FUCK TEN MINUTES TO GO, JUST MAKE EVERYTHING BLUE AND ORANGE'. Blue and orange is the go to for so many films nowadays, because your average actor's skin tone is in the orange spectrum, and at the other end of the colour wheel is a bluey teal colour. And putting opposite colours against each other make the colour at the front really 'pop'. So the actors be popping without too much effort. More about this here. 

Despite the orange and blue over saturation, Drive is pretty sexy. Nothing is overdone. For a car movie, the car porn is pretty minimal. There is an awesome Bullitt/French Connection style car chase, with the music score replaced by engines roaring, that works real good. The violent scenes are never overdone, the camera lingers just long enough to tell the audience what has happened, but also lets your imagination do most of the work. The dialogue is minimal, there's no cheesy one liners or verbal genre crutches. And of course Ryan Gosling is sexy and cool as fuck in a totally straight way. He is possibly the only mainstream actor who's band is actually pretty awesome. Listen.  

Drive can sometimes be a bit too subtle, predictable, and the characters don't really make the connection. But I think the style, the action and the mis-en-scene make Drive absolutely worth seeing.