My Weekend Plus A Short Review of Drive

Deceptively bad poster of the best movie I've seen in a long, long time

The Fast & Furious movies are terrible.  They're fun to watch with a group of people, but they are just plain bad.  That's the main reason I never saw Drive.  Other reasons included that I've never seen Ryan Gosling in anything except The Notebook, and that was terrible, too.  Then I saw the poster and the font that the title is written in makes it seem like a naughty film.

However, the good folks over at RedLetterMedia reviewed this in their Half in the Bag movie reviews and I figured I'd give it a go.  But I just never got around to it, that is, until this weekend.  My fiance was sick so I went to her place and we watched movies all day, starting with what might possibly be the worst movie ever which was an Indian movie called Fast (my fiance is Indian; otherwise I wouldn't have bothered).  I think we watched about ten minutes and even she thought it was terrible, and she has bad taste in movies.

After gouging out my eyes because Fast was such a terrible movie, we headed over to 7-11 to that wonder of wonders, The Red Box.  We picked up Paranormal Activity 3, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (in 2D), and Drive.  The first two were exactly what you'd expect.

But Drive was absolutely amazing.  From a purely technical perspective, Drive was the first film in a very long time that I noticed how carefully every scene was shot to include the right composition, lighting, and timing.  Ryan Gosling did a fantastic job as did the entire cast which includes Ron Pearlman and Albert Brooks as the antagonists, and Carey Mulligan and Walter White made up the supporting cast of good guys.

This is not a Fast & Furious type of movie.  I wouldn't call it slow, although it might seem that way.  Instead, I would say it's well thought out.  Everything happens in the proper time, it doesn't rush anything.  But when action happens it happens in full force.  This is not a movie to watch with the kiddies.  It's brutally violent and very realistic in how it plays out.  

In fact, everything about this movie is very realistic, especially the relationship between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan.  He's not some badass who just picks up on women because he's a badass.  He's a quiet, shy badass and he does what needs to be done and doesn't talk about how awesome he is.

If there was one fault in this movie, I'd say it's the selection of songs.  They aren't horrible, and they fit really well with everything in the movie, I just don't like the songs.

So bottom line, check this movie out.  It's amazing and you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't watch it.