Drive

A friend of mine worked on the new film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. He said the whole time he couldn't tell if the director, Nicholas Winding Refn, was a complete genius, or whether the movie was going direct to video. After seeing the film, I think it's still up in the air.

Drive is beautiful and wonderful and terrible all at the same time. It's an art-action film, if such a thing is possible. The script is atrocious, but the direction is kind of magnificent, and it makes sense that Refn won the Best Director award at Cannes this year for this movie. In some ways his achievement is made even more amazing because he took a crappy, direct-to-video script (A Hollywood stunt driver by day and getaway driver by night gets ensnared in a heist-gone-wrong) and made it into something special. It's not nearly as difficult to make a great script into a great movie, but to take a polish a turd into a masterpiece is worthy of our applause.

This is the quietest, and yet, most intense film I think I've seen in the last ten years.

Don't get me wrong, there's no character development or anything like that. And the violence, when it does come, is gory and excessive, cartoony almost. And Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as bonehead goombas, well, who cares, really.

Refn has made an homage to 80s LA movies like To Live and Die in LA . There's a heavy synth score, and a pink neon title sequence, and even a terrible happy montage in the middle. But it's all a bit off, through a Danish point of view. It's the John Woo problem, but in a good way -- when foreign directors make American films and vice versa. It's all a little bit off.

Drive was made for $14 million. A tiny amount, really, compared to most films. Yet is doing something new, at least, within a tired old genre. It's uneven, but that is what happens when you set out to try something different instead of dialing in the same old garbage. I can tolerate the failures because at least it's trying to do something, dammit!

I expect Refn will get more like $80 million for his next effort. Let us hope he maintains his crazy vision of the world instead of getting steamrolled by the suits.