Hearing Carry Over

Bring My Baby Back Home

Drive is violent/a movie about violence. Like every movie of which this is true, people are going around saying it’s empty/only about itself. Like every great one, it’s true absolutely.

All the classics with violence as their general gestalt, from Branded To Kill to Reservoir Dogs, have successfully got at how violence is always about itself by being exactly that. Actually hurting another person requires a certain amount of non-reflective surface, soul-deep in most cases. If you yourself are a breakable alembic, you don’t usually go around killing shit. If you’re even emptier than that, you may inflict certain harms. To get ahead? To go around? Just because? Murder itself requires no self-awareness other than how best to get away with it.

W/ or w/o all that, Drive is like walking into a hardware store and buying a Makita power tool simply because it looks cool. It’s got so much polish and so many ergonomic orgasms it feels good all over your body. All you have to do is touch it. Composed almost entirely of mood, it has a longer half-life than anything I’ve seen since Enter The Void, which itself had the longest since, I dunno, Children Of Men? Mysterious Skin? After that one I basically nailed myself to the couch for thirty-six hours. Drive, despite its melancholy, didn’t make me want to drink Drano; but if left to myself for longer than thirty seconds I start thinking in lavender font. I smell motor-oil, I start looking for toothpicks, I drive. (That last one, not really. I don’t do that anymore.)

I’ve made almost fun of the soundtrack for refiguring the French/Italo blog scene of 2008-9, but for a movie about a guy who drives around at night listening to pop music because it’s the only way he can feel things (TM), the picks are surreally perfect. The Kavinsky track alone, right as the lonely planet of LA explodes on the screen, numbers in the billions endorphinally. It’s all extra-diegetic except that one party scene, which, there’s no way those people were actually listening to a Desire track. But now that I mention it the mixing for that bit of song was exquisite; it’s probably the best a song has been diffused through a wall since Lost In Translation.

Nicholas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling are both geniuses, did you know? Refn shot the best/funniest dancefloor scene ever made for Bronson. From Drive, which of the following two images is the most iconic of the year, the bored stripper texting or the one where Gosling’s rubber mask is slightly more in focus than the Ross sign?

Incidentally there are things low angles can do to Albert Brooks’ face I didn’t even want to know existed. 

The fascinating centrifugal thing about Gosling’s image/persona is that he’s a movie star in a character actor’s body. He’s totally the Impala with a superengine inside. Which isn’t to say he’s not good-looking, cause y’know; lantern jaw and being too muscley notwithstanding, he’s got a pretty great stupid mansuit. Until now his charisma, the Monty Clift sex-panther kind, existed strictly below the title, although that scene in Murder By Numbers where he tries to get Agnes Bruckner in the car with him (“it’s fun in here”) recurs to me really often. Also, I did a knockoff of his character’s laugh in Fracture for like, the last half of 2007 anytime I got really drunk, so go ahead and hashtag all of this nohomo. 

But right now there is nobody better at being Bill Clinton on the big screen, except George Clooney. Which means The Ides Of March will be either From Here To Eternity, or the term mixed messages will mean everything to it.

There were douches in the theater when I saw Drive. There always are when the pop-art ecotone is this delicate, see also things like Black Swan and any buzzband show a day too late. The night before I saw Drive, Gosling was on Conan. He wore a suit straight off Mission Pizza and was being as cool as Cary Grant dining alone but there was a moment, in relating the Drive origin story, that makes me think he’s aware of what goes on, and that he thinks it’s lame. 

When he said that about what Refn said, that it’s a movie about a guy driving around at night listening to pop music because it’s the only way he can feel things, there was all this laughter. Not nervous laughter in the space after something uncomfortable, which it should have been; the laughter late-night guests get when they talk about awkward co-celebrity encounters. Which technically this was. But Conan instantly did that obnoxious host thing, bray a joke about the most obvious detail, in this case REO Speedwagon, and just like that he and the audience had administered right past some really strange and subtle mythology. Because everything has to be funny.

But this is why Ryan Gosling rules. He knew the response time to an anecdote like that, neutralized it—you could see his eyes do it—and then decided, okay I guess it’s okay to laugh at that. If you want to. It’s the “if you want to” that matters; in that microsecond Ryan Gosling was Kurt Cobain and everyone in the studio was Axl Rose. Which, if that’s not a real hero, we should never be so lucky.

8 really good dreamwave/post-Frenchtouch tracks INPO

Serato only, obv. On your own, play while spinning silently down Highland I guess. 

Van She, Changes (G.L.O.V.E.S.)

Human Life, To Forever

Keenhouse, Civic Transit (Anoraak LAX Remix)

College, Teenage Color

Mirrors, Look At Me

Sally Shapiro, Let It Show

Bag Raiders, Shooting Stars

Jupiter, Starlighter