'drive' soundtrack review

I'm still addicted to the music from this movie.  Check out my music review for the Drive soundtrack on Frontier Psychiatrist.

And my review of the film is here.

the driver's threads

Costume designer Erin Benach on her choices for Ryan Gosling's beautiful, iconic look in Drive.

"I read the script and I knew we needed something iconic - something that people would never tire of watching throughout the film. Driver wasn't going to be changing his clothing very much - it's not one of those movies. The character is really more of a superhero than he is a person - although we wanted people to think he's a real person so that they would feel attached to him."

"I'm always facing the jacket question in films. There's something about men and style and how the jacket is such a piece that they love, because it's easy and they can wear it with everything. Ryan was really inspired by these Korean souvenir jackets from the Fifties. We got to this idea of a white quilted satin jacket with a scorpion on the back. The scorpion came a little later - that was inspired by this Kenneth Anger video "Scorpio". We built the jacket from scratch. We used a tailor in Los Angeles: Richard Lim of High Society. He was really wonderful - he was able to work with the satin, and used real wool for the cuffs and the collar. We had maybe ten different styles tested: we had a baseball cut for the shoulders, then we had a regular sleeve cut. We tried so many styles to nail the one that fitted and looked the best. Then there was the whole issue of the colour. A white satin jacket set the alarm bells off for the director of photography. It's a really hard thing to light, because it can blow out every scene. So we went through many iterations of the tone to get the actual colour we used, which is almost more like silver. At one point we just thought, 'Let's go back and make it olive green or red' - but in the end we all fought for saving the white jacket because we loved so much."

"The denim jacket was a vintage Levi's that we tailored a little bit for Ryan."

"The boots are by Stacy Adams - I think you can buy them for $60. They are these really unfashionable, non-expensive boots, but they've got this great, low-profile shape to them. They don't have a big heel, they're not chunky, and what we did to them - and why they don't look anything like what you would go and buy - is we really broke them in. We took special acetones and dyes and sandblasters to break them in so that they started to peel."

"A specialty glove-maker in LA made the gloves for us. We made only a couple of styles, because I always knew what we wanted. I was very inspired by Steve McQueen."


Check out the full article from GQ UK.

drive

The title and marketing campaign for Drive as a rousing action flick may be misleading.  I hardly remember the car chases (for those looking for that, Bullitt or Fast and the Furious might be a better watch) but the mesmerizing, gloomy throb of director Nicolas Winding Refn's film is unforgettable.  Perhaps because I'm gay I relished all the idiosyncratic details: Ryan Gosling's shiny satin synthetic coat is emblazoned with a scorpion and like Tippi Hedren's mint green suit skirt in The Birds, it becomes more and more encrusted with gore as the film wears on. I related too to that shimmery soundtrack of French electropop. And I felt a sort of joy looking at that Risky Business-inspired hot pink cursive font in the main titles, backed by Kavinsky's pulsing "Nightcall" (appropriate to the storyline: the male voice in the song has a machine-like vocoder in a minor key, the female voice is softly reverbed in the major).

Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed character (dubbed in many reviews as The Driver), a stunt driver for Hollywood action flicks who also moonlights as a getaway driver.  Carey Mulligan plays his neighbor and sudden love interest.  Her husband (Oscar Isaac) is about to get out of jail and reunite with her and their young son (non-annoying child actor Kaden Leos).  Gosling soon gets embroiled into a botched heist and an East Coast mob.

Handsome, stoic, deep-voiced Gosling usually oozes with sympathy and charm even when he's playing empty losers.  This is a perfect role for him and his laconic sensuality. His glum-eyed machoness is both physical (those big biceps and shoulders) and also emotional.  I love the way he is able to display nervousness--the way he sweetly breaks when he accepts a glass of water from Mulligan and the way he sweats and shakes with both fear and menacing determination wielding a hammer above a victim's head.  Besides Gosling, Refn provides a sort of memorable ragtag cast. Albert Brooks, a much missed presence in film, is an unlikely slimeball who flourishes with persuasion and sharp objects.  Ron Perlman's Jewish mobster is a blatant caricature made somewhat sad (he notes at one point that his family still treats him like a child).  The scenes with Mad Men's busty Christina Hendricks are so tensely directed, I wasn't too distracted by the fact that she's a de-glammed Joan (though her casting seems to be a little bit of a part of the film's kitsch).  Only Mulligan seems a little out of sorts--too sweet and pretty for her Denny's uniform (she still hasn't been cast right since her glowing performance in An Education) but she's able to believably carry the emotions of her character.

Refn's work is often stunningly tense (and gory... violence seems so sanitized by CGI in American films these days that the comic gore here is often shocking).  The gore and suspense saves it from being slick retro cheese.  Refn's Drive has a myriad of influences from the wandering, impotent male action pictures of the 70s to the dirges of John Carpenter and Michael Mann to Steven Soderbergh (Soderbergh's music collaborator Cliff Martinez provides the eerie score). And often Refn defies expectations (a final showdown is not as climatic as one would think... an operatic murder of a more minor character on a beach under the sweep of a lighthouse is more arresting).  The script by Iranian scribe Hossein Amini (who penned the 1997 adaptation of The Wings of the Dove) is pretty spare, never Tarantino chatty.  Before those divine main titles, the film opens in a stunner of a nighttime getaway sequence that doesn't have much dialogue at all except for background chatter (the clashing voices of a police scanner and a radio broadcast of a Dodgers game).  The dialogue may be a bit bland for those who favor mouthier vigilante pictures like Taxi Driver.  Yet Refn's play with gloss, substance, silence and sound is some of what makes Drive so controlled and so seductive.


-Jeffery Berg