Drive

It’s the day before Valentine’s and my dinner consists of a Green Apple Gatorade and Dove chocolate. The Gatorade is to replenish my electrolytes after my time at the gym training for a Ragnar race that I’m beginning to regret signing up for, and the chocolate was given to me by my roommate who always uses me as a more charitable alternative to throwing away sugary treats because he knows I don’t make nearly as healthy choices as him. 2011’s Drive is playing on my laptop in front of me, and the only thing keeping me from being completely enraptured with this film are the little messages from my confectionary life coach, leaving me to instead be dwelling on how I can’t even share a movie with someone, let alone “Share a sunset”.

At exactly what point in my life did movies and sunsets become comparably intimate events in my mind? Can you honestly say that a sunset looks cooler than that scorpion? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

If you haven’t seen the film, then I’m assuming you’re here purely for some kind of recommendation as to whether you should watch it or not. If that’s the case, then you absolutely should watch this film. It’s easily one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. However, if you have seen the film, then I assume you’re here purely for my brilliant writing that continues to amaze audiences worldwide. And it’s for the latter group that the rest of this post is for.

Drive could be viewed as a superhero film of sorts. Being released amidst the Marvel takeover of Hollywood, Drive stands out as a lesson for what these filmed heroes should be striving for in terms of cinematic excellence. Ryan Gosling plays a getaway driver for hire who also does stunt driving for movies on the side. During the day he wears his denim shirt and tries to piece together some type of normal life, and at night he dons his white leather jacket with his golden scorpion symbol blazoned across the back. In a typical superhero film, the main character must choose between their normal life and their costumed one, usually choosing the latter and then struggling to make their normal life cope with that choice. Here we have a reversal, where Ryan Gosling constantly seeks to escape his costumed life, and even in the moment where he chooses his normal life by protecting the love interest, that choice leads to his downfall and buries him in his costumed hero role for good. The irony flies higher than Superman. And honestly, if we’re talking about Superman movies, so does the rest of this film.

And I’d like to see a piece of Dove chocolate write something as clever as that! 

I’m not crying, you’re crying