Drive

Ryan Gosling has had, at first glance, a fairly privileged career. Rarely seeming to do any "paycheck" films, of which, I'm sure, he could get all that he wanted too, he seems to have spent his career carefully picking his roles and going with the things that interest him. I've found, in enjoying pretty much everything I've seen him in, that by trusting him, I'm trusting in his taste of films, as well. Starring in Nicolas Winding Refn's new film Drive, Gosling continues to make great choices and bring his talents to really well made, or, at the least, enjoyable films.

Gosling plays an anonymous stunt driver for Hollywood, who moonlights as a heist driver. One day, he meets his down the hall neighbor, Irene, played by Carrey Mulligan, and her little boy Benicio (Kaden Leos). He quickly seems to fall in love with Irene, who he spends some time with, very innocently, before learning that her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is being released from prison. When Standard is beaten by some people he owes money too, Gosling's driver offers to help Standard with a pawn shop heist that the thugs want him to pull to pay them back. When the robbery goes wrong, however, leaving Standard dead, it puts everyone in the driver's life in danger, while he seeks vengeance from those who set him up.

Refn's films (or the one's I've seen so far) seem to lean towards the stylized, and Drive is no different. It's obvious that Refn is drawing heavily from late 70's and, especially 80's cinema, with his anti-music video style editing and electro-pop soundtrack. Drive feels like it could have been made by Michael Mann, circa Miami Vice or Manhunter. Gosling is in top notch acting form. He barely say's anything throughout the entire film, yet manages to convey an endless array of emotions via his face, a trait, I think, is generally only shared by some of the best actors. For someone to carry a whole movie, and barely speak, that's talent. Carrey Mulligan is the same, though, like pretty much all of the other characters, she is in a relatively small amount of the film.

In fact, that was probably the most surprising thing about Drive was how all of the other characters come off as secondary, and their importance, at times, seems diminished because of lack of screen time, even though characters like Irene and Bernie Rose (a gangster played by Albert Brooks in a very interesting casting choice by Refn), are absolutely crucial to the film. Drive really is about Gosling's driver. The entire film is about this one moment in HIS life, and Refn seems to want to make sure that we are not cluttered with back story or parallel action. There are very few scenes without Gosling, and only enough to push the plot forward. A risk taken on Refn's part, I think, but one I think he succeeded at, because, as an audience member, I was with the driver all the way. I was the driver.

Thoughts on the season finale of Breaking Bad

Note - There are spoilers involved in this post. If you haven't watched the Season 2 finale of Breaking Bad, and you are planning on doing so, don't read this post.

So, a couple of days ago I watched the season finale of one of the coolest shows on TV - Breaking Bad. The season felt like it had really been building up to a boiling point, with the opening of the season starting with Tucco going insane and kidnapping Walt and Jesse, and has gotten progressively more intense. One of the things that I loved was how they had been setting up something at the beginning of almost every episode - a black and white mystery of visual puzzle pieces that you just knew was going to revealed in the final episode. 

So, needless to say, Sunday was a highly anticipated night for me, but... I was left disappointed. First of all, the show was only an hour long. I'm sorry, but you could have easily have had a two hour episode (a la Lost), and had plenty to say to keep it interesting. The whole episode felt very anti-climactic. Skylar didn't seem to care about any of the stuff that had happened during the last two seasons, until Walt, under pain medication responds to her question "Where's your cell phone?" by saying "Which one?". Really? After all she went through to try and figure out if he had a second phone in the first place, and had finally got to a point where she accepted the idea that he didn't, and then she just totally freaks out when, under mind altering conditions, he infers that one exists? Just seems like they're stretching it a little... 

It felt like Walt Jr. was, somehow, under used... I don't know, it just felt like he should have had more to do in that episode. I loved the fact that we saw more of John de Lancie's character Donald, but I wish we could have seen even MORE of him. Who is he, really? I mean, other than Jane's father. I loved, in the second to last episode, how Walt and Donald ended up in that bar together, talking, without ever understanding who the other one was. I wish there would have been another meeting like that, and then, maybe, in season 3, they find out who the other is (I don't know... maybe that's cheesy...). 

I did like everything with Jesse, though. For the first time, I felt like we really saw him as a 3D character. He was always, sort of, the same for the last two seasons, and now, we finally see him breaking apart when the one person, the only person, he cares about dies.

But what really pushed me over the edge - the fact that all of those puzzle pieces they had been setting up during the whole season amounted to almost nothing that really had to do with Walt or Jesse, or Walt's family, or anything really related to drugs. When you find out that its a mid-air collision, and all of the stuff you were counting on to be some crazy thing that goes wrong, turns out to be something horrible, mind you, but still not related to Walt.

So, it was disappointing. Not horrible, but disappointing. BUT, the whole season was pretty good, so, I guess we can forgive the finale for not being quite up to snuff. Just a quick note to Vince Gilligan, though - Vince, next season, let's end it with a bang!