"Drive" Starts Off Too Slow...Then Crashes Violently

As you all know, my latest review was for Contagion, which I had very mixed feelings about.  What you may not know, however, is that while waiting for that movie to begin, all I wanted to do was see Drive.  It was one of the previews before Contagion and I had been dying to see it.  So a few days ago I went to check it out feeling pretty pumped about it, but man was I disappointed.

The film starts out very quiet with no more than a few words spoken.  We follow the "hero," Ryan Gosling, who is simply called "Driver," carry out one of his missions.  And I'm not going to lie, he's a badass.  However, towards the latter half of the film, I wasn't expecting him to turn out to be a genuine psycho rather than a James Bond-like protagonist.  But I'll get to that later.  

So Gosling is helping some guys rob a place and uses his unique driving skills to avoid the cops as they flee the scene of the crime.  With this downright cool sequence, I really thought I was in for something incredible.  Then the '80s style credits roll, followed by about an hour of Gosling falling for Carey Mulligan and hanging out with her kid while the father is in prison.  These 60 minutes feature about twenty full sentences, with so few words from Gosling I could count them on one hand, one short scene giving evidence to the fact that Gosling is a stunt driver for the movies, a couple of parts featuring Gosling working as a mechanic for Bryan Cranston, and two *t0t@l1y hiP* songs.  

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, throws in a little thing about Albert Brooks, head honcho of the mob, asking Gosling to be a stock car driver, but the main focus so far is the love story.  This begins to fall apart when the husband, played by Oscar Isaac, comes home from prison.  He is in a lot of trouble and the bad guys say they will hurt his family.  Gosling will have none of this.  He goes on a mission to steal a million bucks from a pawn shop with the husband to pay for his protection.  Things go terribly wrong and here comes the violence.  I remember reading that this movie may be too violent for some and for the first hour I was thinking, "What the hell are these people talking about?"  I shut up the second someone got their head blown to smithereens.  Now the film changes from super indy/artsy to unnecessarily violent.  I mean, the kills are pretty cool, but it was just too drastic of a change.  The gangsters, including Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman (who looks like Johnny Drama's cartoon character, Johnny Bananas on Entourage) want to kill everyone who stole the money and keep the million for themselves.  Ryan Gosling goes f***ing nuts.  As I watched him beat people to a pulp (he never uses a gun), I thought, "How could this quiet, calm man be so crazy?"  Then I realized, most of the quiet ones are.  I was completely caught off guard and didn't know how to react.  Anyway he tries to hunt them all down, a ton of people die, there are about five way over the top kills, and it ends all symbolically.

Now I'll admit that the film is very stylishly directed, explaining why Refn won Best Director at Cannes.  However, I think the abundance of fancy mise-en-scene (yeah, just learned that in my communications class, look it up) makes it seem as if the actors are performing amazingly.  Is it really so hard to not say anything and just look cool?  Maybe, but I don't think so.  I can see why some would consider this a masterpiece, but it didn't really dazzle me.  The more I think about it, the more I imagine how completely wrong I could be.  I've never seen A Clockwork Orange, but I believe I feel the same way about Drive as people who have seen Clockwork feel about that.  A masterpiece, but kind of slow and gross?  I'm not too sure.  I just feel that a lot more could have been done.  He barely even drives in the movie.  I'm not exactly saying I wanted it to be a studio film, but if there were more missions showing him being the getaway guy, more peeks into the life of a Hollywood stunt driver, more dialogue and appropriate action, it could have been awesome.  The film is still well done in a sense, but I think the concept was wasted.

I thought I'd leave wanting to get into a car chase, but I just left bewildered.  I thought Ryan Gosling was the s*** after Crazy, Stupid, Love but after his performance in Drive I'm just hoping I can appreciate his future projects, such as The Ides of March without playing this one scene over and over in my head.  Let's just say, if you see Drive you'll understand when I claim that I can never ride in an elevator the same way again.

"Contagion" Spreads like the Flu with Minimal Effects

Let me start off by saying that I've had issues with Contagion before it even hit theaters.  A few months ago, way before any preview had been released for the movie, I had a dream about a disease wiping out the population.  It played out like a film in my head, and the second I woke up, I wrote down what happened because I figured it could be a good idea for a screenplay (hopefully one day I'll have time to write my own movie and not just a few paragraphs every now and then reviewing one written by someone famous...we'll see).  So yeah, I was pretty upset when I finally did see the trailer.  I had to check it out though to see just how similar it was compared to my tentative script.

The movie starts off with sequences of people simply touching things.  And since it's clear that this is a movie about germs and a fatal disease that spreads across the globe, I was immediately grossed out.  However, the cringing just about ends there apart from one scene involving Gwyneth Paltrow's autopsy.  If you've seen the trailer, you know that's not a spoiler.  She's the first one dead.  The studio certainly could've saved some money casting a nobody for her role, but Contagion is all about the ensemble cast.

So thanks to whatever Gwyneth did (you'll find out), the world is suffering from bird flu times 1,000.  This leaves her husband, Matt Damon, who is immune to the disease, alone with his daughter from a previous marriage.  He deals with the loss of his wife, and the anxiety of whether or not his daughter is immune, thus turning him into an overprotective father, but reasonably so.

Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet do the best they can to figure out how exactly this disease originated, and what elements make it up so they can come up with a cure.  Bryan Cranston is thrown into the mix and aids in the CDC's efforts.  Marion Cotillard works with the World Health Organization and is kidnapped in Hong Kong and held there until her captors receive the vaccine.  Jude Law is a blogger who gets rich and famous for his conspiracy stating that the government started this disease with the pharmaceutical companies for a profit.  I think that covers most of the ensemble cast.  It was kind of hard to keep up.

Now Contagion is actually a pretty good film, but there's too much, yet too little going on for it to be great.  With regards to the story, most of the movie is like an actual newscast or even a documentary making the whole thing very believable.  However, this involves simply showing people doing research while playing dark and ominous music.  There's not enough action or enough scenes depicting what is happening to everyone.  But I guess a bunch of seizures on screen would get old.  That's where there is too little.  The number of story lines and characters bring too much in a sense, which then results in minimal character development.  Don't get me wrong, the acting is great.  It truly felt like watching real people react to an epidemic, but there was so much I wanted to see happen for each character, particularly Cotillard who connects with the children she is surrounded by while held captive.  We learn that and see that develop in about 10 seconds.  At the end, however, we see Matt Damon crying over his wife's death, but seeing hope in his daughter who is going to prom that night.  They tried to make us feel really sorry for him, but it's not like he was the only person we followed throughout.

The final scene shows how the disease started.  It's actually a very cool sequence, but we were already told what happened, so this was literally just seeing it.  I'm really going back and forth with how I feel about Contagion.  The movie is very well directed by Steven Soderbergh and the performances are great, but it just wasn't as thrilling as I had hoped.  I did like it as an example of how crazy our society can get when given tragic news that will affect everyone's lives.  This is where the tagline "Nothing spreads like fear" comes in.  It was also cool as a metaphor for how quickly information can spread on the internet and how something like what Jude Law's character says, which is false, can result in an insane amount of people following one random person with a blog (should be me).  It's really disgusting to see people view him as a "prophet" only his posters say "profit" because of what he thinks the government is doing.  Think Glenn Beck, but not as bad.
Anyway, I washed my hands immediately after the movie, but then when I got on the subway to go home, I held the rail without hesitation.  I think that about sums up my uncertain reactions to Contagion.  Maybe if I ever get to writing a screenplay based on my dream, the audience will walk away satisfied and not on the fence.

"Crazy, Stupid, Love" is Hilarious, Smart, Delightful

Being a huge fan of The Office, I was quite skeptical of Steve Carell leaving the show in order to pursue a career solely in film.  My doubtfulness in future success for the actor grew when I first saw a trailer for Crazy, Stupid, Love during a commercial break that took place around the time of Carell's final episode.  However, after the buzz about such a terrific cast and a good story-line, I figured I would check it out even though it has been out for over a month (my apologies).  

The movie has everything the title suggests.  The characters get a little crazy.  They make stupid decisions, even though, overall, it is a smart movie.  And, obviously, love flourishes.  Crazy, Stupid, Love starts off with Julianne Moore's character, Emily Weaver, stating that she wants a divorce from her husband, Cal, played by, who I guess now has proven he can remain hilarious, Steve Carell.  Cal must now get an apartment on his own, which is quite embarrassing for him to show his children.  He is left with no friends because they all side with Emily, and he finds himself alone at a bar quite frequently.  In comes the man who steals the movie: Ryan Gosling.  He plays the rich, well-dressed, ladies' man known as Jacob Palmer who offers to change Cal's entire image so he can get over Emily and quit discussing the man she cheated on him with, David Lindhagen (a tolerable Kevin Bacon after the dreadful X-Men: First Class).  Cue the hysterics!

The process of Cal's transformation is hilarious and watching him and Jacob interact with women in the bar is downright cool.  Obviously, as the title suggests, it's all about love and Cal doesn't get love from the random chicks he meets out on a Friday night.  So, the story of him trying to win back his wife becomes the focal point.  However, Jacob falling for Emma Stone's character, Hannah, may in fact trump the true main characters' love story.  Emma Stone is as lovely as ever, by the way.  Even the kids in the movie, Cal's teenage son, Robbie, played by Jonah Bobo who will certainly get a few phone calls after his performance, and the babysitter he is in love with, Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), are highly entertaining to watch.

It may seem as if Crazy, Stupid, Love is just your average love story, but unlike the typical romantic comedies, this film truly has heart and a wonderful message.  There is also a huge twist that I didn't see coming at all.  I like to say that I normally notice one from a mile away, but I surely wasn't expecting one in a rom-com.  The characters, nevertheless, are the best part about the film.  Since it has been out for a pretty long period of time, if you haven't seen Crazy, Stupid, Love go see it now.  You'd be crazy and stupid not to.