Drive (2011)

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Genre: American Crime Drama
Starring: Ryan Gosling (The Kid/The unnamed Driver) and Carey Mulligan (Irene)
Budget: $15 million
Box Office: $77 million 
Adaption from 2005 novel by James Sallis of the same name

Notes:
Style and inspiration: 
- "Winding Refn's inspiration for Drive came partly from reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, and his goal was to make "a fairy tale that takes Los Angeles as the background"
- "The film's main character, The Driver, has been compared to the Man With No Name, a character Clint Eastwood portrayed in the Sergio Leone westerns, because he almost never speaks, communicating mostly non-verbally"
- His satin jacket was inspired by the band KISS and Kenneth Anger's 1964 experimental film Scorpio Rising
-What he lacks in dialogue makes up for his actions and 'stylish costuming'


- Only referred to as 'The Kid' which gives a sense of ambiguity and mysteriousness
- 'The Kid' appears as if he is the hero on a quest with typical good intentions that go horribly wrong
- Ending has a fairytale element - hypotextuality (Genette's theory of genre)
- Driver is unnamed and has little dialogue, leaving the audience to interpret most from his facial expression and the visuals of the film
- The Samurai - violence
- Soundtrack is quite oppressive/loud as if intentional. 
- Time period of the film is difficult to recognise... this may be due to the fact of several combinations of mise-en-scene and visuals that are reminiscent of different time periods. For example, the modern race cars in comparison to the retro cars we see in the garage
- Scene by river reminiscent of a Romance genre film - the golden hue of the lighting gives an idealistic, perhaps even Utopian modernist feeling which contradicts the rest of the postmodernist style to the film
- The Kid initiates no anger towards Stan which may come as a shock to audiences as the dominance of two males around one female (where we get the impression The Kid begins to like Irene also) is unconventional. This also breaks the boundaries of generic codes such as Barthes' binary opposites of exclusive male/female which may come as a surprise. 

Interesting quotes in Christopher Sharrett's article:

"He sits by himself in a dark room fixing a carburetor (the hero and his weapon)"

"The Kid’s face is seen in profile, his eyes unblinking during the prolonged take, conveying that he is dying or dead. But he blinks and reaches for his car key, starts the engine, and drives away into the polluted LA streets. This attempt to mythologize the Kid corresponds with the ending of Shane, where the wounded hero, slumped in his saddle, rides up the mountain into heaven. Whether Shane lives or dies is immaterial, since a kind of sainthood has been conferred upon him. The similar gesture at the end of Drive has nothing like this resonance. The Kid seems “undead,” his resurrection unjustified, since his function in relieving this decaying society has been less than salvific"

"When the Kid takes Irene and Benicio on a little excursion, one of the very few light moments, he drives them down the concrete surface of the Los Angeles River, a much-used movie location. This “river,” with its absolute human artifice—it is mostly a human construction—has only a stream of (filthy?) water in its center. The trio disembarks at a swatch of nature (the last fragment of Shane’s utopia) at one end of the aqueduct—even that has evidence of human debris. The postmodern industrial gallery installations that are the subject of bourgeois ruminations have indeed merged with the world they inadequately represent."