Movie Musings: CRAZY STUPID LOVE

Romantic comedy don’t get a lot of play from me. And it’s not just the subject matter or the well-worn jokes and character clichés.

Rather it’s because the endings in romantic comedies are primarily a binary proposition.

a)      The more popular “They overcome life’s obstacles and get\stay together, reaffirming the power of love."

b)      Or the lesser used “They realize that they’re not right for each other and that true love’s kiss is stapled to the bottom of some other poor sap’s face.”

Admittedly LOVE does better than most, jamming several different types of rom-com (coming of age\mid-life crisis\opposites attract) into a single vehicle. The diversity of narrative plot lines handily papering over some of the overly familiar genre motifs.

And there’s a VERY well done surprise twist that is never alluded to at any point in the film’s buildup and pays off of a great deal of the very patient ground work LOVE laid down earlier in the movie.

But it’s still a rom-com and while LOVE is willing to play a little bit with its structure its never able to break free of the genre trap that birthed it.

Movie Musings: THE IDES OF MARCH

I love, Love, LOVE ‘inside baseball’ politics films.

It’s not a super-hot genre to begin with so the sample size of potential films to crow about is pretty weeny.

(THE CANDIDATE has been my go-to film for about ten years now when I need an example of what a movie about politics is really all about. But THE CANDIDATE is 40 years old and a wee bit dated, so we should probably give it a rest and search for a more contemporary entry.)

IDES perfectly captures the changing nature of modern politics, creating an incredible amount of suspense and tension from absolutely nothing. In this image oriented world of spin-doctoring it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what matters is how other people leverage the knowledge of your actions to further their own agendas.

It’s the bizarre and labyrinthian interpersonal dynamics of who knows what  (and when they knew it) that carries the work load of this film

You do have to mentally get over the fact that two people with a hell of a lot of political smarts can’t muster up enough brain power to overcome the needs of their throbbing genitals, but sex and politics seemingly go hand and in hand so it’s not too hard to give that little whoopsy a pass when you’re looking for nits to pick.

Too often writers and directors try to jazz up films about politics by unnecessarily ramping up the tension and turning it into a no holds barred thriller. IDES proves that people being people is rich enough source material for any film to hang its hat on.

Dispatches from TIFF: Film Review – DRIVE

I couldn’t have picked a better film to start off my 2011 TIFF programming than DRIVE.

Like the 60’s Clint Eastwood Westerns of yore Ryan Gosling plays a nameless stunt driver, who supplements his income working as a mechanic at Shannon’s garage. But when he’s not doing that Gosling hires himself out as a getaway driver to L.A.’s criminal underground.

Gosling’s driver is a taciturn and calculating individual. Practically a mute, it seems as if the more pressure he’s under the more focused he becomes. But his highly fabricated world begins to fray when he starts to show an interest the single mother Irene, played with an almost childlike innocence by British actress Carey Mulligan, who lives just down the hallway.

After opening with a bang, showing Gosling driving two would be thieves away from the scene of a robbery entirely from the POV of inside the car, the film settles into a slow burn to allow Gosling and Mulligan sometime to build their onscreen chemistry. It seems as if the two lovers have barely begun their courtship when Irene gets the news that her husband (Oscar Isaac) is getting released from jail. When Isaac is beat up in order to extract some protection money he owes from his previous incarceration, Gosling offers to drive the getaway car for a pawn shop heist that will allow to Isaac pay off all his outstanding debts.

Unfortunately the pawn shop is holding onto a million dollars worth of a local gangster’s money and Isaac is killed mere steps from freedom. In the blink of an eye Gosling goes from in charge to out of control as he must figure out a way to protect Irene and give the mobsters back their money, preferably without losing his life in the process.

DRIVE is a gritty, intense crime drama, shot through with rich streaks of tragic love story.

Gosling’s lead character is an unlikely leading man. Too repressed and closed off to be truly likable, but sporting the prerequisite Hollywood heart of gold, he seems like a throwback to an earlier cinematic tough guy stereotype. Sporting a vintage racing jacket and surgically implanted toothpick he really could be Eastwood’s ‘Man With No Name’ stepping into the 21st century.

Gosling delivers his performance in a stripped down, minimalist style, managing to convey more tension and danger through the rasp of a tightened leather driving glove than any clanging movie soundtrack could ever hope to achieve.

At times Gosling’s overly pretty looks seems at odds with his moody character, but in the hands of director Nicolas Winding Refn you soon forget that this is the star of THE NOTEBOOK and CRAZY STUPID LOVE.

I was a little concerned that giving Refn an A-list actor might dilute is his normally uncompromising filmic sensibilities, but except for a few token scenes I was relieved to find that my concerns were misplaced. Refn continues to delight in gleefully pushing the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

No character is ever safe. They hurt, they bleed, they die; frequently and often bloodily.

If Refn can’t physically maim his cast he resorts to torturing them psychologically. He rends friendships apart, betrays lovers and inserts the threat of betrayal into everything he puts onscreen.

And when Gosling’s perfectly constructed fantasy finally does fall apart, Refn makes sure that its shattered permanently, forever removing any chance of redeeming his leading man.

The film’s third act pushes DRIVE almost into a parody of a grindhouse revenge flick, with Gosling forced, in fits of gory ultra violence, to dispatch anyone who would threaten Irene.

Between Gosling and Refn DRIVE is elevated beyond a conventional crime drama into something quite different. It frequently switches film genres like some people switch underwear and the results are uniformly shocking. Supported by Bryan Cranston, Carey Mulligan and Albert Brooks (inhabiting a role as pragmatic gangster) DRIVE is a fascinating and compelling tale of the lengths one man will go to in order to the right thing.