Oscars in Black and White

The Nominations:

• Sound Editing: Lon Bender and Victor Ray Ennis

The Black-and-White:

A review by spacedcowboy

Drive is a great movie that almost was. Save for dollars, and some somber post-production, this could have been the movie of the year.

IMDB plot summary:

A mysterious man who has multiple jobs as a garage mechanic, a Hollywood stuntman and a getaway driver seems to be trying to escape his shady past as he falls for his neighbor – whose husband is in prison and who’s looking after her child alone. Meanwhile, his garage mechanic boss is trying to set up a race team using gangland money, which implicates our driver as he is to be used as the race team’s main driver. Our hero gets more than he bargained for when he meets the man who is married to the woman he loves. Written by shin

Almost.

This movie is somewhat of an enigma. On one hand, it has outstanding talent  (Ryan Gosling, Caery Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, not to mention flavors-of-the-day Christina Hendricks and Bryan Cranston.) This level of talent must have saw something in the script; something in the possibilities.

That the movie only received a solo Oscar nomination – very much deserved for Sound Editing – is not so much a testament to the failure of the film, but rather the employment of the resources available. With a budget of (only?!) $15M, it is an ambitious goal to deliver such a nuanced and multilayered piece with such enormous talent. That so many of Hollywood’s leading talent contributed to this piece is a tribute to the vision of the movie.

However: it fell short.

It was cheesy. It was over-violent. It never fully developed the characters.Why did the Driver do what he did? Where did he come from? Where was he going? It was like movie popcorn without butter: filling, but not satisfying.

If ever there is a movie that needs to be remade, redone and re-released, this is it. Just don’t change the cast – they were perfect. Increase the budget and think hard about your choices behind the lens.

For the nomination for Sound Editing: very well deserved. The sound was the the beating heart of this film.