hope

Now that I'm not going to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tonight, I guess I'll do some more blogging.

Does Drive lack hope? I have difficulty parsing this question depending on how I view the film. In one sense, it's a hopeful film because all the "bad" guys end up dead or on the run. Crime doesn't pay. Of course, this requires us to view the Driver as a "bad guy (full stop)" and not a "bad guy with a heart of gold."

In another sense - the sense with which most people probably view the film - Drive does lack hope. It ends on a sour note for everyone, just as Jason pointed out. I think this kind of gets at what bothers me about the film and it's characters. If the world is hopeless and everyone is silent and sadomasochistic and somewhat vapid, then stories and their characters can be lazy, one-dimensional and cliched without the audience caring much. A great actor and a good director will hide all the deficiencies. 

I need to be very careful in trying to talk about this. I'm still feeling my way around my problems with the film. I don't want to suggest that hopeless or dark films are bad. It is just that the really good ones find a way to be hopeless and dark while still illuminating a certain "humanness" that I felt was missing in Drive. 


Anyway, that's probably my last word on Drive for a while. Or, at least, until I can figure out my problems with the film a bit more and learn to articulate them clearly.

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Jason, the parts in Black Swan that Brandon found derivative were probably the parts that I chose to look at as homages. I guess it's probably a fine line.

Like Lisa, I thought the mirror stuff worked well. It added to that general sense of unease that builds throughout the film.

I watched Black Swan three times last year. You two are moving me closer and closer to my fourth viewing. But 2011 first...