News for
The Driver (1978) More at IMDbPro »

ad feedback

6 items from 2012

15 May 2012 12:05 PM, PDT | The Film Stage | See recent The Film Stage news »

Following up his box office and critical hit The Descendants, Alexander Payne won’t be taking as long of a break since his previous film Sideways. Things are already moving on his $13 million, black-and-white drama Nebraska and he’s been scouring Hollywood for a cast. We’ve heard Jack Nicholson, Robert Forster and Robert Duvall were all circling roles and Payne wanted Gene Hackman most of all, but according to a new report from Deadline, even the director couldn’t get him to come out of retirement.

His most desired choices for the Paramount project are now iconic actor Bruce Dern and MacGruber himself, Will Forte. The Robert Nelson-scripted drama follows a father and son who take a road trip from Montana to Nebraska so the father can “claim his million-dollar sweepstakes prize” with Publisher’s Clearing House. Along the way, the estranged parent and child attempt to bond once more. »

- jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)

13 March 2012 6:35 AM, PDT | Obsessed with Film | See recent Obsessed with Film news »

Jean-Pierre Melville (October 20, 1917 – August 2, 1973), was a French film director often looked upon as the ‘king crime-noir films’. His body of work and mise-en-scene style heavily influenced Scorsese, John Woo and Tarantino to name but a few. Under-stated and minimalist, he managed the difficult process of making an artistic film also commercially viable. Melville would control everything from set design, writing the script, and running the camera, mixing obsessive gangster pastiches with restrained, precise and sensitive symbolism.

Described as the ‘Poet of the underworld’ and the ‘garlic gangster’, he was considered to be the “father of the nouvelle vague”, a major influence on the French New Wave movement. But it was the American gangster films of the ’30s and ’40s starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart that really caught his imagination. Melville recreated the genre for a new wave audience using weapons, trench coats and fedora hats, to shape a characteristic look in his movies. »

- Matthew Gunn

13 February 2012 8:04 AM, PST | FilmJunk | See recent FilmJunk news »

The Movie Club Podcast is an irregular roundtable podcast where we select two movies to dissect, analyze and discuss with a group of fellow movie bloggers and film fans. Three months have passed since the previous episode of The Movie Club Podcast, and I am happy to report that a new episode is now locked, loaded and ready to be heard! This time around the crew tackles another maligned film in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, pairing it with a much more respected Palme d'Or winner, Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. There are passionate arguments on both sides, but in the end I think we can all agree that the future is indeed far more futuristic than originally predicted. Jay was once again in attendance representing Film Junk, along with Kurt from Row Three and Jim and Patrick from The Director's Club Podcast. Head over to movieclubpodcast.blogspot.com to »

- Sean

31 January 2012 10:00 PM, PST | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »

Albert Brooks’ chilling against-type performance as a vicious gangster in Drive (Sony) failed to earn him an expected Best Supporting Actor nomination, but then violent genre fare like Nicolas Winding Refn’s minimalist thriller rarely gets the recognition it deserves. Operating in the stripped-down yet stylish aesthetic of films like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, Walter Hill’s The Driver, and William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A., Refn and a first-rate cast deliver a mood piece spiked with instances of shocking violence… Mary Elizabeth Winstead fights a nigh-endless series of CGI special effects in The Thing »

27 January 2012 4:07 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Drive

Director Nicholas Wending Refn's film is more defined by what it doesn't do than by what it does. The plot – wafer thin and corny as hell – is the sort of thing normally dressed up by one-liners, explosions and rapid-cut editing to disguise just how laughably trite it is.

On paper, this could be yet another Hollywood action movie, but Refn is slow and serious where others are fast and furious. The minimal story of a stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver and becomes a hero to the woman he loves is pared down even more into something that aims for the stark simplicity of Michael Mann's debut movie, Thief, and Walter Hill's The Driver, two classics which make up the bulk of Drive's DNA. Ryan Gosling tersely plays the driver (and that's how he's credited, not with a name but with a profession) as a black hole. »

- Phelim O'Neill

13 January 2012 8:14 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

In the burnt-rubber wake of Drive, I finally caught up with Walter Hill’s 1978 gem The Driver on DVD this week, a film I was woefully unaware of until Nicolas Winding Refn paid homage to it (or ripped it off, depending on your predisposition to Refn; the opening cat and mouse car chase is a direct homage/steal but after that the films significantly diverge). Seeing it in the midst of the Bresson retrospective currently going on in New York was also very instructive (Ryan O’Neal’s ascetic, taciturn getaway driver could be the American cousin to Pickpocket's Michel), although Hill’s avowed debt was more to Jean-Pierre Melville. The original American poster for the film is a beauty. Illustrated by one “M. Daily” about whom I can find no other information, it has a little bit of the look of the deco-inflected 70s posters of Richard Amsel. After »

6 items from 2012