jdbrecords: drive

Showing posts with label drive. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

art by jordan bolton

Loving these cassette tape / CD graphic designs of film creds by Jordan Bolton!

They are available to buy on Etsy.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

10 perfect cinematic moments

So Fisti laid down his perfect cinematic moments. Here are 10 off the top of my head.

ANOTHER YEAR

Mary

Lesley Manville's painful, lost expression in the closing shot of the film slays me and leaves a lump in my throat. It also upends so much of the story.

THE BIRDS

Schoolhouse flock

Melanie has a tense smoke by the schoolhouse. The kids inside are singing "The Wee Copper of Fife." And quietly crows start landing on the jungle gym.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Shirts on a wire

The emotional accumulation in the slow pacing of Ennis's and Jack's first trysts at Brokeback and the fleeting passing of years thereafter makes this a devastating ending.

CARRIE

Bucket o'blood

Spacek's performance, the camera work, the lighting, the colors, Donaggio's eerie score, the editing all part of an operatic, iconic moment of splatter.

CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

Ballet

So much longing and beauty as the Gill Man swims beneath his white-suited unrequited love.

DRIVE

Opening Credits

In 2011 I went to see Drive half-heartedly thinking it was a typical race car flick. But then the opening credits began with that pink cursive font and "Nightcall" thumping and I was awestruck.

FRANCES HA

Modern Love

A spirited moment of exhilaration for hapless Frances set to Bowie.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Hairbrush & Dinner

The jig is up. And Annette Bening's expression is EVERYTHING.

PSYCHO

Mrs. Bates?

There's too many perfect moments in this movie to pick one. But the final reveal along with Herrmann's score still gives me the chills, no matter how many times I've seen it.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

The wrong house

In a masterful trickery of editing and Tak Fujimoto's dynamic camerawork, we watch the FBI descend on a house and then a door opens and we learn Clarice is all alone, face to face, with a killer.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

fear of dawn

Aussie front Fear of Dawn delivers a decent (& free!) remix of Drake.

& here's some more...

Blurred lines...

Coma cat...

Get lucky...

A real hero...

Saturday, July 20, 2013

take it off!

Intentional or not, the marketing of Drive made those hungering for another Fast & the Furious walk out of theaters. But some, including myself, ended up being genuinely surprised how fun, riveting and stylish it was. Just when I thought 1980s-nostalgia was played out, Drive created a world that was dark, violent, moody but blended with richly detailed, contrasting L.A. settings, and that hot pink title font and that catchy electropop soundscape. Knowing in its humor, Drive embraced its tropes while purposefully being irrelevant compared to talky and loud action pics of the day. Director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Ryan Gosling's follow-up Only God Forgives is a tepid and rather uninteresting neo-noir journey into a stylized version of Bangkok's criminal underworld. This time the joke is on the Drive fans. Those hoping for similar atmosphere, great music, and another quietly electric performance from Gosling, will likely find little here to get lost in.

Julian (Gosling) runs a boxing club that's a drug smuggling front. His brother Billy (Tom Burke, in a dreadful, albeit thankfully brief turn) rapes and kills a young prostitute. Billy is arrested and killed. Frosty mother (an icy, unrecognizable and largely squandered Kristin Scott Thomas) comes to pay respects and see revenge on Billy's killers.

Only God Forgives is a melding of Western and Far Eastern revenge flicks, filmed quite nicely by Larry Smith. Smith was the lighting cameraman on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which is what this movie sometimes reminded me of, with its stoic, nightmarish fairy tale quality. Shooting in Bangkok (chronologically) gives the film a dingy, neon allure. Cliff Martinez returns with another good score--the centerpiece being a spooling electro riff in the "Wanna fight?" sequence--one of the rare moments when the pic jolts to life. Thomas is a compelling presence and a weird one, especially for movie buffs, since it's unlike anything she's done before. Her scenes are the most arresting in the movie: her testy hotel arrival, moments between her and Julian with some Oedipal and Lady Macbethian shades, and when she gets to describe violent Julian's past (is she trustworthy or literally, with her long skinny cigarettes, just blowing smoke?).

Lacking in tension, this "Angel of Vengeance" tale seems to "try" to be offbeat though it ends up feeling a bit preciously-plotted and watered down. Gone is a wide array of quirky, engaging characters (which is what we found in Drive and what is usually found in the movie's influences: film noir and Westerns) so there isn't much to be invested in except the style. I'm an unabashed fan of Gosling as both an actor and a sex symbol but his dispassionate staring did little for me (maybe Refn's intention?). Gosling called the script (by Refn) the "strangest thing" he's read. And it's also probably one of the easiest for him to remember, since he barely has any lines or emotional cues. The high point for him is when he wails "take it off!" to his "woman" (Yayaying Ratha Phongam), which is what I was hoping she'd yell back at him. **

- Jeffery Berg