Baby Driver ~ The lastest masterpiece from Edgar Wright

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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I just saw Baby Driver this Friday and it lived up to expectations. The soundtrack is by far the best of the year easily topping Guardians. The way the film incorporates and basically runs on the soundtrack is awesome. There's even a shootout in which the guns fire to the beat of the song. The movie opens with a great chase scene and then about a 4-minute long take for the opening credits. One minor nitpick I had was I was expecting one more car chase.

To anyone else that saw it, I feel like the movie was set during the 90s specifically 95 because Kevin Spacey's character mentions that Baby was the guy in the papers/news called "something" '85 (I forget the name) and that happened 10 years ago assuming the '85 part referred to the year obviously. I'm not a car expert but I'm pretty sure the car models used were not 20 years old. Did I mishear the Kevin Spacey line or perhaps misinterpret it?
 

Dazzle Novak

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I saw it Wednesday and it didn't come close to meeting expectations for me.

Never mind that we just saw "hip protagonist is obsessed with dope tracks from his mommy" a couple months ago (yes, I know Wright conceived this decades before Guardians), clever PR has managed to convince people that a soundtrack is groundbreaking because it's diegetic. Like, wow, never before has image and sound been coordinated by editing. Hopefully, this audiovisual entertainment takes off. Imagine if sad scenes had sad music accompanying them and action scenes had energetic music. Crazy!

The characters are flat as anything you'd see in Fast & Furious, except those movies have seven movies of shared history to develop them. There's a character 180 toward the end that's indefensible, police appear and disappear based on convenience, and the romance is stock "Wild at Heart" boy-meets-girl minus all the development in the middle: Ansel Elgort curls his lip like Elvis trying to make a dorky character "cool" and Lily James could have been switched out with a mop with a smiley face drawn on.

This is a "big, dumb car flick" and textbook "style over substance" aimed for people embarrassed about liking that sort of thing. Ergo, they'll take a lesser version and hype up its hipster-approved soundtrack as "masterfully-integrated", when someone like Tarantino can make a static conversation focused on the back of a character's head sing to the point I don't even associate Al Green with his own song anymore. Imagine Tarantino's excess/indulgence not bolstered by stellar character writing and you've got Baby Driver.






Wright made a multi-million dollar movie to brag about his musical taste when he could have simply released a Spotify playlist to the same effect. Good thing no one listens to nor cares about my opinions, though. Enjoy the movie.
 

09philj

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It's my least favourite film of his, but I still enjoyed it. It's like if Fast and Furious wasn't shit. A 3 star action flick, but a superior 3 star action flick.
 

tippy2k2

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I haven't seen it yet but I am very intrigued by it. It looks very similar to Drive [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780504/?ref_=nv_sr_2], a movie I enjoyed as well.

Probably not quite intrigued enough to go to the theater and see it but it is 100% on my "Redbox/Rent" list when it does pop out on BluRay.
 

Cowabungaa

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tippy2k2 said:
It looks very similar to Drive [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780504/?ref_=nv_sr_2], a movie I enjoyed as well.
I haven't even seen Baby Driver yet but from everything I've seen about it; don't expect Drive. Like, at all. Not as in quality, but that it's a vastly different movie. Like, vastly. I mean Baby Driver is almost a musical for starters. It's also very high-energy where Drive is a slow, aesthetic brood of a movie.
 

Natemans

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Its my favorite film of the year. I don't think its his best movie since that honor goes to Hot Fuzz, but this film still rocks.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Dazzle Novak said:
Baby Driver is not a musical. It has a soundtrack.
It's very much a musical and goes to far far greater lengths to incorporate the music than say Tarantino just playing a song over such and such scene (not that there's anything wrong with that). Many reviewers and Wright himself have referred to the film as a musical. What other movie that's not a straight-up musical has ever been referred to as a musical before? Guardians isn't referred to as a musical nor has Wright's prior films ever been called such even with Shaun's classic 'Don't Stop Me Now' scene along with Scott Pilgrim's much fuller use of music. I very much doubt any movie has gone to the lengths Baby Driver has gone to choreograph the music with its scenes from the actors to the editing to even actual rigs that's not a traditional musical.
 

Dazzle Novak

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Phoenixmgs said:
Dazzle Novak said:
Baby Driver is not a musical. It has a soundtrack.
It's very much a musical and goes to far far greater lengths to incorporate the music than say Tarantino just playing a song over such and such scene (not that there's anything wrong with that). Many reviewers and Wright himself have referred to the film as a musical. What other movie that's not a straight-up musical has ever been referred to as a musical before? Guardians isn't referred to as a musical nor has Wright's prior films ever been called such even with Shaun's classic 'Don't Stop Me Now' scene along with Scott Pilgrim's much fuller use of music. I very much doubt any movie has gone to the lengths Baby Driver has gone to choreograph the music with its scenes from the actors to the editing to even actual rigs that's not a traditional musical.
Yeah, and The Martian was nominated for an Academy Award as a comedy. People can and will mislabel and I'm not denying someone in marketing earned their paycheck while some reviewers bought into hype as much as I may be accused of being a contrarian ass.

Honestly, I'm more willing to accept Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim adaptation being designated a "musical with fight numbers" than calling this film a musical because I disagree that the music is more fundamentally incorporated than any other film which puts effort into its soundtrack. For example, much as I enjoyed the scenes featuring "Intermission" and "Hocus Pocus", those songs' function wouldn't change a single iota if they didn't find their diegetic source in Baby's iPod, but were simply soundtracked. Is the club scene in John Wick a musical number because the music and movements flow together? Is Cowboy Bebop a musical because some of its scenes were written with Yoko Kanno's music in mind? Syncing music with picture is what editors do and have done for ages.

Edit: And the reason I brought up Tarantino is because I think there's a distinction between choosing good music and using it particularly well. I can imagine the way a dozen other movies might have played Al Green over a talking scene that wouldn't have left nearly an impression like the Marsellus Wallace speech. By comparison, I can't imagine an action scene not being elevated by Focus' "Hocus Pocus". That killer guitar riff would turn brushing my teeth into a joy ride.
 

Guffe

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Dazzle Novak said:
By comparison, I can't imagine an action scene not being elevated by Focus' "Hocus Pocus". That killer guitar riff would turn brushing my teeth into a joy ride.
I need to try this!

On topic:
I'll probably watch it sometime when it comes out on BluRay/Netflix, unless some friend wants me to go to the movies with them, then I might join in if I have nothing better to do.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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I watched, thought it was fine but it wasn't great.

The car chases were fantastic, but there wasn't enough of them. Everything was very stylishly filmed, loved the shootout with the gunfire incorporated as a beat for the music.

Mostly though, I really didn't care of the writing. It's like Edgar Wright was trying really hard to emulate Tarantino and Guy Ritche and it just wasn't working. He was trying way too hard to make every criminal sound edgy and cool.

I also just hated the main character, Baby. Either he's just sitting around blank faced and not emoting at all, or his dancing like an idiot. His acting is just two extremes both of which I can't stand.

So yeah, Edgar Wright is great at composing an action sequence in this movie, and not so great at everything else. It's a real shame considering how much I loved the writing in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Dazzle Novak said:
I disagree that the music is more fundamentally incorporated than any other film which puts effort into its soundtrack. For example, much as I enjoyed the scenes featuring "Intermission" and "Hocus Pocus", those songs' function wouldn't change a single iota if they didn't find their diegetic source in Baby's iPod, but were simply soundtracked. Is the club scene in John Wick a musical number because the music and movements flow together? Is Cowboy Bebop a musical because some of its scenes were written with Yoko Kanno's music in mind? Syncing music with picture is what editors do and have done for ages.
Baby Driver literally went to greater lengths to incorporate music than any of film that's not a traditional musical. The fact that the music was in the movie was from a diegetic source doesn't even factor in much IMO, it's not why it's been called a musical. Whether you think it worked or not is of course up to your own opinion.
 

Silvanus

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Dazzle Novak said:
Yeah, and The Martian was nominated for an Academy Award as a comedy.
It was nominated for best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes, not the Academy Awards. Point stands, though.
 

Saelune

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Just saw it. Ultimately I liked it. I liked that it toyed with some expectations. It was no revolutionary movie or anything, but if you want to see a movie, its worth seeing.

I really liked Kevin Spacey's character, and have now forgiven him for that..."Im a cat now" movie...

It took a bit too long to end though. Maybe cause I was pressed for time to get home, but it felt like credits would roll at like, 5 different moments.

Also Flea from RHCP was in it for a time.

Oh, and what was the deal with the guy who fought back at the second heist? Bats kept saying "military dude" or something, but was he just a ex-Soldier who was trying to play hero, or what? Wasnt exactly made clear.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Saelune said:

Just saw it. Ultimately I liked it. I liked that it toyed with some expectations. It was no revolutionary movie or anything, but if you want to see a movie, its worth seeing.

I really liked Kevin Spacey's character, and have now forgiven him for that..."Im a cat now" movie...

It took a bit too long to end though. Maybe cause I was pressed for time to get home, but it felt like credits would roll at like, 5 different moments.

Also Flea from RHCP was in it for a time.

Oh, and what was the deal with the guy who fought back at the second heist? Bats kept saying "military dude" or something, but was he just a ex-Soldier who was trying to play hero, or what? Wasnt exactly made clear.
He's an ex-soldier who was trying to play hero, just like you said.

Why did he have a fully automatic submachine gun in his glove box? Because British man doesn't understand American gun culture.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Phoenixmgs said:
How is Baby Driver not a musical?

"The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing."

No one is singing the songs, therefore not a musical.

Why do you want to categorize it as a musical anyway? What does it matter what genre it belongs to?