This week sees the DVD/Blu-ray release of one of my favorite movies of last year: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. It’s admittedly an exercise of style over substance, but Winding Refn and his actors—chief among them Ryan Gosling—are able to elevate the material into one of the most thrilling genre exercises in recent memory. Drive is a hypnotic and occasionally brutal experience that lets the tension slowly build until an ultimate breaking point; and from there on out it gets even weirder. Drive was made for heavy consumers of film, and as a result the more casual fan may not get what all the fuss was about. It’s a beautiful and ugly film at the same time, and Winding Refn directs the film like a conductor in full command of his orchestra. If I were to hold my own personal Oscars (the Slanties, perhaps?) then Drive may well win Best Director. Something that will win no awards in my mind, however, is the DVD cover art, which is atrocious. You will find it below.
Other releases this week include the much-hated remake of Arthur, the bird-watching comedy The Big Year, the ignored political thriller The Double, and the new prequel to The Thing. I bring all those up because I have not seen them. Of the movies I have seen, there is the ludicrous but perfectly okay psychological thriller Dream House, which I would have actively liked had it not been for the horrible, horrible ending. Daniel Craig is an engaging presence as always, but it’s all incredibly predictable and silly. Though I maintain it is not nearly as bad as most critics made it out to be. One movie that is terrible is the science fiction thriller In Time, which takes a promising premise and ruins it by making every bad decision it possibly could. Justin Timberlake is out of place, and the universe that writer/director Andrew Niccol creates is never even kind of convincing. It wound up topping my list of the worst films of 2011. (Of course, it narrowly avoided the inaugural Last Airbender Memorial Award, which went to Jack & Jill.)
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