"Baby Driver"

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Stewball
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Re: "Baby Driver"

Post by Stewball »

djross wrote:On Baby Driver:

djross wrote:What's surprising is not that so much effort can be expended for so little result, but that all that effort can still come off as being so very lazy. All Wright's problems are present: mechanical scripts and characters designed to please a crowd while presenting the thinnest veneer of something different so as to garner critical approval. Increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion he's a climber who's desperate to be liked by everyone: in short, a fake and a conformist. Brody got it right.


Key passages from the Richard Brody review mentioned above include the following:

Richard Brody wrote:The action is, in short, thin yet heavy, burdened with a pointless complexity that serves, above all, to mask—with music and quick cuts—the insignificance, impersonality, and indistinctness of each of its elements. [...]

In “Baby Driver,” no one has anything to say about anything. The prevailing gentility of “Baby Driver” depends on its absence of substance. It has an admirably diverse cast, but its characters remain undefined, identity-free, generic. [...] The dialogue is almost entirely functional, advancing the plot without illuminating any ideas or subjects beside the characters’ missions and goals, and that dialogue is festooned with cheap verbal gaud that passes for wit and lands with sub-Catskills thuds [...].

Wright displays a strange sort of sincerity in “Baby Driver,” but it’s the sincerity of social striving; the movie feels as if it were directed by Zac Efron’s fallback comedic persona—smart, chirpy, personable, bounding with positive energy, creamy with charm, desperate to be liked, and hiding any stray threads of desire, obsession, or weirdness. The weirdness factor of “Baby Driver” is close to zero. [...]

“Baby Driver” seems, above all, like the film of a smart kid who has grown up and, having found popularity, has learned to dress his movies better and breeze through campus with a good word for everyone. [...]

Wright doesn’t let himself go, but his movie has still satisfied critics who are in love with the idea of Hollywood providing something that’s not based on a superhero franchise, providing something that, with its retro soundtrack and retro cleanness, reminds them of a Hollywood that no longer exists—even if some of its luminaries certainly do.


Brody's review can be found here:



The movie is an action musical, and it works. The reason directors (with a few exceptions) have been afraid to really use music and especially set the action to it, for the last 25 years (during which time 2001 would have been ridiculed), is because of reviews like this. If it's pedestrian, I'd be down for the gutter, but it isn't and I'm not.

martryn
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Re: "Baby Driver"

Post by martryn »

Have you listened to S&G's Baby Driver. The singing is some of their best and the lyrics, once you figure out it's solid sexual references, are a real hoot. "My daddy was a prominent frog man", "My mama was an engineer", "What's my number, I wonder how your engines feel."


Welp, I best find this song, then.

Is it wrong to make a movie that entertains?

Stewball
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Re: "Baby Driver"

Post by Stewball »

martryn wrote:Is it wrong to make a movie that entertains?


Not sure what that's about, but I'm certainly pro-entertainment, and Baby Driver is entertaining. I guess maybe the question is the issue of what's entertaining, and for me, it's almost always enhanced with music--exceptions being elevator music, but even that can be used for satire, like "The Girl From Ipanema" instrumental...in an elevator...in The Blues Brothers. :roll:

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