Drive

Am I on a Ryan Gosling spree?
Er, yeah? Yes? Obviously? Duh?

So this one. Well. Okay, so before we start, the first movie that I saw which had R Gosling in it was Only God Forgives and honestly, only God would have forgiven that what-the-eff of a movie, like what even WAS that? I'm not an art student or a film student, and the entire movie was just symbolism. I didn't even have the energy to think about what those things could have meant. I'm just a consumer, a commercial movie-go-er if that makes any sense, and to have watched THAT movie and to have actually paid to have watched it... I mean, I don't know if I'm ashamed I watched it or if I'm ashamed that I didn't understand what was going on. I would NEVER recommend that movie to anyone, not even as a ploy to stall them from dominating the world. Ugh.
But then I watched Crazy, Stupid, Love and then I began trusting Ryan Gosling's script choices again.
The one thing that I don't do, is read about the movie's directors and script-writers before watching the movie itself; I read the synopsis of the movie itself, obviously (well, sometimes) but I don't pay attention to who directed/produced/wrote it. Just putting it out there.

God Bless you

So I watched this move along with my friend, Nabeela because we were supposed to have had a Ryan Gosling Movies date which didn't work out.
First off, Ryan G looks dapper in this, again. He looks cool. Okay, so now that we have that already out of the way...

THE MOVIE WAS SO COOL LIKE WTF OMG OKAY I DON'T THINK ANYONE WOULD HAVE EXPECTED THAT GOING IN LIKE WHOA OMG

So Ryan Gosling is a part-time stuntman, part-time theif-aid (if that's a word). His biggest deal is that he can drive really well, so he makes money on the side as someone who helps thieves get away after they rob a place. Besides this, he's also a mechanic, who helps his mentor and friend, played by Bryan Cranston (Walter White from Breaking Bad, Hal from Malcolm in the Middle lol) around in his car garage where he makes cars for movie stunts. It all starts off slow and nice, with Driver (that's Ryan G's name in this movie. Don't ask) meeting a woman and her son, and liking them, and with then the father of that family coming back, so it gets a little sad and stuff.

 

Bryan C as the mechanic

Ryan G aka Driver and the family he meets/befriends

And then the shit hits the fan because it's basically like someone switched off (or is it 'on'?) a button and the entire setting changes into something STRAIGHT out of The Walking Dead because people are DYING EVERYWHERE and the Daryl Dixon of this whole show is DRIVER HIMSELF and dayyummnn as someone who enjoys stuff like this, it was AMAZING. So, yes, this is a warning for people who don't like gore and blood and, well, graphic violence in general.

Is he holding a hammer? Yes. Is he helping to nail some furniture together? Well, is a person's skull equivalent to furniture? Then yes, he's helping someone nail a piece of furniture to the floor.

The slow pace of the movie, even if it might have bored and annoyed some people, was a perfect compliment to the scenes where shit goes down.
The ending was quite sad actually, and it gave us (both my friend and I) no closure at all in terms of what happens to Driver afterward. It was a good representation of how it is when you meet someone, I guess--like we got to 'meet' Driver just when all this happened, and we get no back-story about this strange guy who knows how to kick ass without batting an eyelid and who knows how to drive so skillfully, and we don't get to know what happens later either, because you get to meet this person only for that moment in their present. Does that make sense?
The slow pace reminded me of Only God Forgives a LOT, and it was literally only a week or two later that I realized that it was the same director for both (Nicolas Winding Refn).

Since we've already established that I can be a critic, I would have given OGF a 'no rating' status (because like wtf was even going on?), but I'd give Drive a 3.5 on 5.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

It was the perfect blend of laugh-out-loud funny, and all THE FEELS. It was a little weird with the baby-sitter thing (you'll know it when you see it) and that made me cringe a bit, but other than that, it was actually pretty sweet. It was just REALLY good, like I can't remember the last time I had such a good time watching a rom-com! Well, maybe I should stop calling it a rom-com--it was a blemd of romance/drama and comedy, so yeah.
It has Steve Carrel, Julianne Moore, RYAN justkillmenow GOSLING, and someone who is fast becoming one of my favourite actresses, Emma freakin' Stone.

Ryan Gosling lookin' dapper

So needless to say, the acting was spot-on; there was a lot of talent on screen, and they all fit in to their respective roles like a well-flitting glove. Though it may not look like it, everything was well-thought out, I feel, form the clothes they wore, to the places they shot at.
The direction was perfect, because SO much could have gone wrong with this thing, but it didn't. It fell into place perfectly. The story-line was a mixture of all sorts of the usual tropes--which is what made it unusual and refreshing in a sense, I think. It had the 'gets a makeover' trope, and it had the 'kid who makes the lead realize what love is about' trope and it had the 'playboy falls for the sweet girl and talks about his feelings all night' trope as well. It was a blend of all these things, which is why it would have been SO easy to mess up or lose track of what's going on, but it wasn't.

Steve Carrel gets a makeover y'all

Each of the characters got their own little screen time, which is something I personally love because you get to see that they aren't just characters written in for the convenience of story-telling alone, and that they have their own roles and back-story too. This made them seem real enough to empathize with. Special shout-out to Julianne Moore here because she didn't make me hate her character even though it would have been easy enough to do so given the first impression we get of her. Maybe this was not just the actor, but because of the director and the person in charge of the script/screenplay as well (for showing all sides, and mildly, but justly, justifying all actions--as unreasonable as it may seem, they still made it seem...reasonable?), so I guess this is just a shout-out to all of them.

Congratulations, I don't hate your character which would have been hard to do, I think. But you played her like she were a person, and maybe that's why no one actually disliked her so much.

The story itself was warm, and the dialogues weren't cliched, and like I previously said, it was refreshing in a sense because there were so many tropes in one single film.
The movie was highly enjoyable, though!
And yes, though I can be a critic too, I'm going to go ahead and not criticize this movie much because I really enjoyed it.

4/5 stars.