An example of a film review I wrote on Facebook. I don't know if more than a few read it, though...:). I am now too tired to do Links so I figure if you don't know or want to know more about something, The Internet is right here for us all, at least until the Trump infested FCC completes its task of undermining Net Neutrality and putting up the gates Corporate America has long wanted. Anyway...
Edgar Wright is my new favorite director. He is a big part John Carney ("Once" and "Begin Again") where he intuitively understands soundtracks can be dialogue and even narrative. In Wright's newest film, "Baby Driver," the soundtrack is in the iPods and other electronic devices of a character named "Baby" who drives the getaway cars for Kevin Spacey's criminal mastermind boss. In this film, we experience the soundtrack with the characters in the characters' "real" time. For someone such as myself who lives in a soundtrack in my mind, this was exhilarating to experience in watching a film.
Wright is also part Quentin Tarantino, at least in this film, which has a higher serious violence quotient than previous Wright films I've seen. There is also a dry and cynical wit that makes the sometimes sparse dialogue sparkle. I have rarely encountered a film where the director did not make the mistake of adding dialogue to explain what is already seen on the screen, which may be owing to Wright's understanding of music as dialogue so that he knows the characters should not say something unless there is something to say. The car chases in this film are alone worth the price of the experience and ticket and should keep less eclectic minds occupied...The chase scenes are brilliant and creative from start to finish, but pay homages to car chase films going back to the original knock out car chase film, "The French Connection," in the early 1970s. The car chases, pun alert, drive the film as much as the music.
What saves Wright from the soullessness of Tarantino, however, is not only his John Carney sense of music as dialogue and narrative, but his sentimentality, something which owes itself to Frank Capra, even if Wright, a Brit, would likely not cite that influence. There is a kindness to the lead character, "Baby," that is not lost even when he is presented with only bad choices. The sentimentality throughout this film may even be as shocking to modern American hipster audiences who love Tarantino as anything else in the film. There is no full on happy ending that makes everything all right, as in a Capra film, but mostly there is. There is a "Good, Bad, and Ugly" narrative of a spaghetti western lurking beneath the pyrotechnics that define modern films.
Bill Pope was the cinematographer for "Baby Driver," as he was for Wright's brilliant cult classic film, "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World."* His stylized cinematographic work is a wonderful combination of gritty reality and almost technicolor-esq surreality. It worked beautifully in "Pilgrim" and it works as seamlessly as Wright's soundtrack that we and characters simultaneously experience.
For this film, writer-director Wright stepped away from his usual roster of actors. Some major names were here, including Spacey, but also Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm, the latter two deserving Oscar noms for best supporting actor for their performances. They are amazing and you really believe them despite their previous nice-guy personas in both film and off-set.
The Daughter is visiting the Land of Enchantment and took me to see this film last evening. She said, "You HAVE to see 'Baby Driver.'" And by the time Simon & Garfunkel showed up in the soundtrack, with the song being the title of this film (It was the B-side to "The Boxer" as I confirmed when I returned home to my box of 45s...), I turned to her and said, "Edgar Wright is a f-ing genius!" Oh, and no spoiler, but just see how Wright uses Focus' "Hocus Pocus" in this film. It is, well, genius.
This film may not get much attention from the Academy. If it does, I will be happily surprised. Otherwise, it goes into the bin as another exhibit for my thesis that there is a disconnect between the "adults" in Hollywood culture and the Millennials (and also intellectuals of all ages) which is as wide as when Hollywood produced films like "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" in the early to mid 1960s. It is the equivalent to the "Generation Gap" of that era. Hollywood elites have already missed the fact that Superhero films are this era's Westerns, and embarrass themselves with their continued "Get off my lawn" criticisms of Superhero films. These elites also do not understand or appreciate filmmakers like Carney and Wright who use soundtracks in beautifully creative ways that would leave Orson Welles would be sitting and clapping away.
Oh well, on to the "Lady Macbeth" film tonight, where The Daughter says The Wife can go with us. And in fairness, The Wife had previously seen "Baby Driver" when The Son took The Wife to see it shortly after its release, when we briefly returned to The Greatest State in the Union for a short weekend trip.
* If you have not seen "Pilgrim," rent, buy, download or whatever you have to do to see that one. "Pilgrim" is why Wright deserves a full on writer-director chair for a Marvel or DC film, even though his one stint in Marvel-land for "Ant-Man" did not work out (I am actually sorta glad because Adam McKay stepped into the screenplay duties and put together a marvelous film).
