Rental of the Day: DRIVE

TITLE: Drive

STARRING: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston

ONE LINE SYNOPSIS: After helping his beautiful neighbor, a getaway driver finds himself in trouble with the mob.

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT: Recently, critic Roger Ebert tweeted this about the film:

Despite not being nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, Drive has become a darling of the blogosphere. Most love it, some love to hate it, but we just can’t seem to stop talking about it.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has crafted a thriller unlike anything you’ve seen in wide release in recent years. Ryan Gosling stars as a mysterious Hollywood stuntman and mechanic who moonlights as a getaway driver, offering petty criminals his impeccable skills behind the wheel. Things spiral out of control when he falls for his neighbor, played by Carey Mulligan, and agrees to help her convict husband settle a debt with a mob.

While it’s billed a thriller, the pacing of the film (with the exception of the frenetic opening sequence and a few other scenes) is often slow. Many scenes have sparse or no dialogue and are some are shot in slow-motion, but the pace is kept by a booming 80s style soundtrack and a talented cast whose expressions say more than any dialogue could.

But when the action does come, it is the kind of ultra-violence* that exhilarates and unsettles the audience. The elevator scene, and you’ll know exactly which one I’m referring to when you see it, is all at once the most romantic and disturbing bit of cinema I’ve encountered, possibly ever.

The supporting cast has some heavy-hitters in Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, who is the only “Oscar snub” I agreed with this year**.

WHO WILL LIKE IT:
-Open-minded fans of art house films, character dramas or slower-paced crime thrillers like “Taxi Driver”
-Ryan Gosling fans who enjoy looking at him for extended periods of time regardless of anything else happening on-screen

WHERE YOU CAN FIND IT: Redbox, Netflix DVD-only, Blockbuster in-store/online/select kiosks

* FUN FACT: Anthony Burgess coined the term "ultraviolence" in his classic novel A Clockwork Orange.
** How the Academy believes Jonah Hill's performance in the dreadfully boring Moneyball comes close to Albert Brooks in this film defies everything I believed to be true and good about cinema.