My fat hath been cracked!
Winding Refn listed both The Transporter and Halloween as influences for Drive.
I like the Sonic3 stuff he posted.
The style of Drive reminds me a lot of many of Tarantino's movies, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction...
Here's a quote from Drive's Wikipedia page that describes it:
"It combines comic gore, film noir and B-movie aesthetics, and Hollywood spectacle, resulting in "a bizarre concoction...reminiscent of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive...Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction""
Thank you, I appreciate that! It's called Rubber Bandito and we're expecting to ship in April on the App Store and Android Market.
The internet has confirmed how up our own asses we really all are.
Thanks for the info, I'll check out Bicycle Thieves. I've seen a lot of indie and contemporary European and Asian films lately, but not a lot of the older stuff. I would typically have enjoyed something like Drive, but it didn't work for me.
I agree about Memento. On IMDB, there are a lot of folks saying that if you didn't like Inception, or you thought there were problems with it, that you "didn't get it". That seems to be the stock recourse for not thinking it was his "master work" (seriously, go read the reviews). But one would have to be blind to think Inception was that good, or even the Dark Knight, which I like but is far from perfect.
So as far as my 'not getting' Drive, that's possible, but considering the tastes of many of those who 'do get it' and the number of films I've seen, foreign and domestic, my impression is that many were drawn to the cinematography, atmosphere, and pacing of the movie (which I agree are good), and ignored the places where the movie was less than brilliant. And as I mentioned in my first post, I DID want to like it, but I feel like it was a hodgepodge of stock pulp and crime tropes (stunt driver antihero, the mob as an evil entity, typical grimy LA) and plot devices (the ending, the backstabbing 'twists', the dead friend [Cranston]). The whole time I was thinking about True Romance.
Winding Refn has stated that Taxi Driver was an influence, but I think there is no comparison between the two.
Have you seen The Driver (1978)?
Let me ask you this, was Inception Chris Nolan's best work?
EDIT: Back to Drive, I think it's the script and the director, not the supporting cast. I would have liked to see them being used more. I like plenty of movies with sparse dialogue, Drive is just not one of them.
Desert Sessions!
What are some examples of those movies?
Those opening 10 minutes!
That's an interesting take on it. The scene at the Diner was the only place that really came through to me. If that's what Refn was going for, then it wasn't consistent enough or I wasn't paying attention.
Children of Men did that to me. Black Hawk Down also.
I was excited about Drive, but sad to say that it let me down. It was a mashup of things I'd seen before, done with less vision. And with a supporting cast like that, you'd expect more than those flat characters, even from a pulp thriller. I don't think that 'subtext' is what Drive is doing, it's just leaving out substance and substituting with style.
I did appreciate the escalation of violence and the pace that created.
Before the flaming begins, I loved Valhalla Rising. I think these deliver what Drive had promised: The Driver, No Country, Taxi Driver, Repo Man, Tarantino in general, even Collateral.
Oh, God, first party...
Doing a platformer that's not a runner (Run Roo Run is a nice, distilled one) or without virtual buttons is quite a challenge. There are a few that use a sling mechanic (Blobster, ToFu), which I think is probably the correct way to handle it, although those two aren't 'there yet'.
At the risk of being banned for self promotion (although I think it's relevant here), I've been working on an iOS and Android project that has done the sling mechanic one better, and I really look forward to seeing how it's received when we release in a couple months.
We should probably trade places to be with "our own kind"?
So what is that, 5 people for 6 months according to the 10K rule?
EDIT: thanks for the article, also.
