The Expressiveness of Ryan Gosling's Knuckles: DRIVE

Yes, DRIVE is as good as you've been hearing it is.

In its finest moments, it evokes the sublime perfection of films like HEAT or RESERVOIR DOGS or THE GODFATHER, and I don't think those comparisons are (too) hyperbolic. There's a mastery of filmmaking on display here that is genuinely thrilling to watch. Or perhaps I should say hear.

Because while the photography of DRIVE is undeniably gorgeous, in turns washed out by an uncaring L.A. sun and then plunged into fluorescent-tinged darkness, it's the film's soundtrack that is particularly noteworthy to me. When I say soundtrack, I don't just mean the film's score and use of pop music, although those are incredible, but rather the entire auditory experience of DRIVE.

This is a patient movie, one that takes time to express its point and revels in silence. Gosling's performance is made up of long stares and slow burns, and every word he speaks seems to have more emphasis because of it. His knuckles do more emoting in this film than Ashton Kutcher has done in his entire cinematic career.

There are at least four shots where Gosling's knuckles express emotions like anger, tension, and fear, while his face betrays none of those things. It's a neat trick of contextual meaning that a sound like scrunching leather driving gloves can express all of these things, and it's a small example of DRIVE's audio mastery.

I've seen DRIVE twice in the five days it's been out for, and I'll undoubtedly catch it at least once more before it leaves theatres. You should, too.

The End Of My First Date With COLOMBIANA

COLOMBIANA, I've been watching you for two hours now, and let's get real: who the hell do you think you are?

Let me back up for a second. I don't think you're a terrible movie, over all. You've got a sort of charming, old-school approach to action scenes, with a few notable set pieces worth seeing, and you've got a bona-fide hottie in Zoe Saldana prancing around all over the place, which makes you at least watchable for long sections where nothing appears to be happening.

But you don't end your movie with Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt". You don't deserve it.

Now, to be honest, I don't know if any movie deserves to end with that song. It's a masterpiece, maybe the best cover of all time (music nerds can feel free to mock this uninformed statement, ideally with links). But coming after two hours of weak character scenes and half-baked Biggest Brother paranoid surveillance fantasies, ending with this song is like biting into a chocolate only to find it filled with liqueur. Or orange filling. Or that weird spongy toffee-that-isn't-toffee. You get the idea.

This sudden reversal of what I was expecting doesn't only leave me with a bad taste in my mouth; it makes me want to throw the whole thing out. I'm seeing you from a whole different perspective, like finding out you dated one of my old high school friends. You lured me in (and scored cheap points) with your overtly Tony Scott-influenced cinematography and Luc Besson's name, but you only aspire to those things. This movie is like a copy of a copy of a copy, with only the faintest lines of the original showing up: you're mostly negative space.

Also, your editing is some of the worst I've seen in a major motion picture for quite some time.

I think we're through. I guess I'll cover the bill.

My One-Sentence Review of TRANSFORMERS 3

Saying TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON is better than TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN is like saying Hitler was better than Stalin.

Why SUPER 8 Is Like Minutes 8-14 Of Heaven

I've had a very hard time trying to figure out how to write about SUPER 8, J.J. Abrams' Spielbergian tribute-band-but-we-do-our-own-stuff-too of a movie.

The difficulty doesn't lie in discussing the subtle Abrams reworking of Spielbergian thematic content, or the strong character work turned in by both the child and adult actors, or even a retroactive look at CLOVERFIELD as a sort of proof-of-concept and/or companion piece for this film. No, those things would all sort of write themselves, and by throwing them out there this early, I'm kind of hoping to get credit for writing four articles at once. The problem, for me, is how to talk about this film the way I want to talk about it. Because, to me, SUPER 8 really reminded me of one of the seminal moments in a movie adolescence: seven minutes in heaven.

I feel like this might be controversial, but it really shouldn't be. I mean, the argument could be made that the film is predominantly about children, and no one wants to bring sexuality anywhere near there. For example, no one wants to read (or write) about the homosexual undertones between Eliot and E.T. It would muddy the purity of that film, and our relationship to it. That's why we'll never see E.T.'s junk, even though that little freak's naked the whole movie. However, I would argue that SUPER 8 is far more about adolescence than it is about childhood. So let's just accept that as true, not leave me any angry comments about how I'm a pedophile, and move on.

You may have sensed that I have mixed feelings about SUPER 8, and this leads me to why it reminds me of seven minutes in heaven. Not any seven minutes in heaven, though. Specifically the second seven minutes you spend there.

Now, full disclosure: I feel like the whole idea of "seven minutes in heaven" may be a media creation that I'm feeding into here, and God knows I've never been to a party where such shenanigans took place. Maybe the kids have redefined the term and are doing unspeakable acts in those seven minutes, and this whole thing will come off like the Al Gore Internet-as-tubes speech of youthful sexual activity (wow, look at all the inappropriate word choices there). But in my day, and for the purposes of this article, we're talking about a straight-up makeout session.

The first makeout is a seminal moment. You never forget it. It's exhilarating, dangerous, and terrifying. You're not sure what's going on, you don't know what you're feeling, and suddenly the world seems a much larger, much more complicated place. But the second time you go in there? There's an eagerness to get back to that strange feeling, to be sure, but after a while, you kind of feel like you're going through the motions. Regardless of what happens in that room, though, you're still expected to come out of there grinning, shaking your head at the awesomeness that just transpired.

Metaphor over. There's a lot to like, and even love, about SUPER 8. But it never really seems to become more than the sum of its parts, to transcend its influences and become its own creation. It comes closest when the film is about the joy of running around shooting movies with your friends, an experience so profoundly drawn on screen that I have trouble recalling it without smiling. But the alien drama quickly overshadows that, and the film has trouble reconciling those two stories. In fact, Abrams has talked in several places about how the film originated out of these two distinct ideas, and the script still bears some of those scars from joining them. It's a bit of a Frankenstein of a movie, a cut-and-paste collage of the things we loved as kids. There is one moment, the emotional climax of the film, that attempts to link the arcs of the protagonists of the film, that just can't quite pull it off.

But if that one moment had worked for me, I think that SUPER 8 would be an instant classic. How's that for a mixed review?

Don't We, As A Society, Have A Moral Obligation To Not See THE HANGOVER PART II?

I've had invitations to go see THE HANGOVER PART II every night of this weekend, including last night's 10pm "(Try Not To Feel Ridiculous When You Say) Wolfpack" screenings (you know, the ones that made $10.4 million). Unfortunately, I was (and will be) unavoidably busy doing laundry every single one of those nights.

This poster makes me wonder if

a) I would think The Hangover was "delightfully Italian" if I saw a foreign subtitled print of it and

b) where the fuck is Tea Leoni?

It's not that I live in piles of dirty laundry, my floor littered with socks doomed to never again be matched, or that I have as few outfits as Bradley Cooper has varied acting roles (potentially fun drinking game: for every scene in a Bradley Cooper movie, decide if he is playing "charming", "asshole", or "charming asshole". Then drink whatever you feel is an appropriate measure to get you through the rest of the movie.)

No, I'm not boycotting THE HANGOVER PART II because of these once-true nightmare laundry scenarios. It's because, seriously, we have to start making a stand.

My greatest fear following the success of THE HANGOVER was that it would unleash a wave of imitators that would plunge the "stupid men" comedy genre into the type of creative stagnancy and according derision normally reserved for Katherine Heigl flicks. If I want to see a decade of comedies based on unrepentant asshole men-children, I'll just look back at the last ten years of my life, thank you very much. However, I fear that the success of THE HANGOVER has engendered something far more sinister than a bunch of movies about uninteresting, unsympathetic men who learn nothing.

I'd like to say that it just didn't speak to my sophisticated, mature tastes, but if you've ever read this blog before, you know how silly that would sound. It's tempting to say that this was a movie for bros, with the excessive drinking, hooking up, and wink-wink nudge-nudge bachelor party shenanigans. But this wasn't a movie for bros; it was for bros-to-be, 13 year-olds who were still working up the courage to steal their dad's liquor and who looked to Channing Tatum with admiring eyes.

Somehow, though, these prepubescent fucks scared up hundreds of millions of dollars and made a sequel to THE HANGOVER a bygone conclusion. How did they get this kind of money? In my day, an allowance was $1 a week, which you promptly went out and wasted on slushees and comic books. Have allowance rates gone up like the proverbial 1923 German deutschmark? Or am I just a bitter and angry old man who doesn't understand why the kids are wearing the baggy pants and thinks the iPad is some sort of woman's sanitary product?

Let's not get into that. Let's put aside my problems with the underlying concepts and ideology of THE HANGOVER franchise, and try to ignore the taste of ash in my mouth when I say the phrase "THE HANGOVER franchise". What's my real problem with THE HANGOVER PART II? It's the fact that it's called THE HANGOVER PART II.

Really, Todd Phillips? PART II? With the numerals and everything? I don't know you or anything, but who the hell do you think you are?

You know which films deserve a "Part II"? THE GODFATHER PART II. BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD - PART II (if only for the sheer ridiculousness of having the word "first" right next to the words "part two", and for steadfastly ignoring the potential of an equally-ridiculous title like RAMBO: SECOND BLOOD).

So maybe you're not the first hack to try to class up his popcorn entertainment by adding some Roman numerals to his title (hell, even Tony Scott did it). But Part II indicates that your film is the next chapter in an ongoing story, and THE HANGOVER PART II is no such thing. You are, if I may, an impliar, sir.

At least have the decency to come up with a subtitle, like last week's blatant cash grab PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES, so we can all ignore your movie in a few years and pretend like it didn't blemish whatever we might have enjoyed of the first film (thanks for that, Brothers Wachowski).

Your movie, Mr. Phillips, is a return to the cynicism of the movie business of the '80s, where the rules of the game were to franchise any movie that showed any kind of financial return. This is the reason we have such revered classics as PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY, CANNONBALL RUN II, and MEATBALLS PART II (a title so bad it somehow manages to make the word "meatballs" sound disgusting). Some day, your new movie will join this hall of legends, and when it does, I hope the money men who bribed you to make this movie laugh you all the way to the creative poorhouse. You don't have a larger story you want to tell, so why are you pretending you do? I guarantee you no one went into the first HANGOVER pitching it as a trilogy, and I cannot wait for the day when one of you gets in front of an EPK crew for THE HANGOVER PART III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (with a hilarious cameo from Leonard Nimoy!) and tries to tell me that it was always meant to be a trilogy and a series of anime shorts (fuck you for that, Brothers Wachowski).

I could go on, but I can't spend all this time whining about this movie. I've got to head to the laundromat.