My nigga got to see a rough cut last night and said it was solid as fuck.

It's having it's world premiere at SXSW in March. Drops August 11th. Be there.

Baby Driver - Simon & Garfunkel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeqUUNHwAl8

I hope there's not a techno version of the song in the movie.

https://youtu.be/UfoWyZvDCEc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2z857RSfhk

Off the soundtrack. This soundtrack is gonna be fire:
https://youtu.be/9pi7UJHXtzs

Full review soon, but it's disgusting that this might flop.

It's an indictment on the shitty marketing for the movie. The US trailers for it have sucked, the international ones have been much better. Not sure why that seems to bother you. This movie will tank and that is solely on executives not Wright.

Every time I've seen the first released trailer in theatres, it gets a positive reaction. It plays just as well as the Thor: Ragnarok trailer.

trailer gets crickets.

and the title is probably the thing that will sink it more than anything. one of the worst titles in a while.

Worse than A Dog's Purpose, Snatched, Fifty Shades Darker or Fate of the Furious? Shit Everything, Everything is pretty bad.

also agree the name is not conducive to moving units.

fully expect it to be a good ass movie tho.

That Mummy trailer played hard as well. And that shit bricked.

.

Music is a vital part of life. Music can lift spirits or move you to tears. The perfect song can express just how much your true love means to you. And sometimes the perfect track gives you the motivation to be the best. And that’s exactly what Edgar Wright uses the music in Baby Driver for. A soundtrack to keep our titular character moving and to express himself. As always, one of the best writer/directors working today has crafted something wholly unique and rip-roaring that it could’ve only come from Edgar himself.

Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a getaway driver who reluctantly works for the mysterious crime kingpin Doc (Kevin Spacey). Paying his debt off one getaway at a time, Baby suffers from tinnitus which he acquired during a car crash involving his parents. Baby uses the perfect soundtrack to drown out the ringing in his ears as well as to fuel focus to heightened levels making him the best getaway driver ever. Once he meets the beautiful waitress Debora (Lily James), he makes plans to ride off into the sunset with her. That is until one last heist goes wrong and Baby must save Debora and Joseph (CJ Jones), his deaf foster dad, from the shady people he’s been working with.

The all-star cast is incredible in this. The robbers Baby must work with rotate throughout this film and they all have very different personalities. Jamie Foxx is Bats, the loose cannon who can single-handedly destroy everything just because. Jon Hamm and Eiza González are the star-crossed criminal lovers Buddy and Darling. These two are inseparable, and if anyone looks at Darling funny, Buddy takes care of it immediately. Jon Bernthal has a small but effective role as Griff. CJ Jones as Joseph provides a lot of heart to the proceedings. Even though he can’t hear, the vibrations from the speakers in their apartment lets him know what he’s listening to and how he’s feeling.

The editing has always been one of the things that make Edgar’s movies standout and here, it’s his best-edited film yet. The quick and jump cuts are numerous only to be enhanced to how it’s timed to the music. Edgar has had to have every single song picked out as he was writing this thing. Almost every shot is edited to a specific note in a specific song. This is how to use many songs in a film without it feeling overcrowded like Baywatch and Kong: Skull Island. Or too on the nose like Suicide Squad with its numerous needle drops, that upon re-visitation it felt like a feature length music video.

The tone of this is perfect as well. While a lot of this is free-wheeling and fun, there’s still stakes and danger to the proceedings. I was genuinely afraid for Baby the entire film as it’s made clear that the gang of bank robbers, as well as Doc, could turn on him at any moment. Even though Baby himself is a criminal, it’s made clear he doesn’t want innocent people killed nor does he want to participate in any of the heists. Baby is a good person through and through who’s made bad mistakes that he’s paying for. Baby in some ways is like Ryan Gosling’s Driver from Nicolas Winding Refn’s excellent 2011 film Drive. He doesn’t speak much and if Ansel Elgort wasn’t so good at emoting Baby’s state of mind, the character would’ve landed with a thud. In addition to Ansel anchoring the film, the jokes work and fit when they come making my full house rapturous with laughter.

I’m glad Edgar’s version of Ant-Man didn’t get made because we got this absolute joy of a film instead. This also convinced me that Ansel Elgort would’ve made a GREAT Han Solo (even though we all know Alden Ehrenreich is going to kill it as Han), still when an Edgar Wright film has a heavyweight supporting cast like this one does, and the lead comes away with the film, you know you’ve got a star in the making. As we’re more than halfway through 2017 already, there’s only really a handful of films I absolutely love. Baby Driver is one of them. As we get more and more lifeless studio projects, it’s Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, and his best film yet, that reminds me of why I fell in love movies in the first place.

until I bumped into him coming out of my hotel after the premiere

I'll have to peep it

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

fair warning

https://youtu.be/vHShmiCxL8s

Song should be in the film.

to when music videos had movie clips in them. I enjoyed.

i'm gonna try my best to see it in the theatre tho

Good pacing, action, style, good characters (mostly). Tries a little too hard in the "coolness" department.

The way the music is integrated with the editing was actually more subtle than I was expecting.

Definitely a fun time, but I think tempering expectations a bit will help you enjoy it more.

this goes down easy, marked by a few excellent set pieces, but in the end it's also very forgettable.

.

the final confrontation and resolution is just...off....

"13 Tweets on BABY DRIVER. 1: A long, long time ago (my generation’s youth) a maverick filmmaker named Walter Hill made two promises. One: he made a great action flick called THE DRIVER. Two: he promised us, in “A Rock N’Roll Fable”. Both movies gave our generation a shot of adrenaline. Now, decades later, Edgar Wright fulfills both promises with the breathtaking BABY DRIVER. The key to understanding it fully- at least for me- is in the fact that it is a fable, complete with its very own Disney prince and princess, but it is also rock n’ roll. Meaning- the magic exists in a dirty, genre-tainted world. The film is incredibly precise. Flawlessly executed to its smallest detail: breathtaking Russian arm shots, real-world car mount and foot chases executed with the vigour and bravado of a Gene Kelly musical.This is An American In Paris on wheels and crack smoke. Its a movie in love with cinema – the high of cinema and motion. In love with color and light and lenses and film. But, unlike Edgar’s previous films (all of which I love) this stakes new, unironic territory. This is earnest and unprotected . It wears Edgar’s heart on its sleeve. It’s a riff- a beautiful riff and in many ways send his career in a new direction. It shows us tricks and tunes he hadn’t played before. The cast is in a state of grace and so is the entire crew. Imagine that as a carpenter you encounter a precious, precise, exquisite piece of cabinetry. This is how I feel. I’ve always liked Edgar. But this moved me. It moved me to see a fellow filmmaker come out of a debacle with a movie that declares his credo again. I hope & pray you go and see it on a big screen. I wish you all the joy I felt: I just saw a good pal get the gold. By God – go check it out."

fits

It was cool but needed more Bernthal less Debora

thoroughly enjoyed the use of music throughout the movie too

fun and creative. didn't think about it too much afterwards though, could've waited
for RedBox or Netflix and been fine.

I don't even know what to say.
Other than Jaime Foxx not a single thing in this movie worked for me outside of the opening car chase most of which was featured in the trailers.
It jumps between boring filmmaking and bad filmmaking and is completely devoid of any and everything I've enjoyed about Wright's previous films.

Fuck every single iota of fawning praise this movie has gotten.

Some great driving sequences. I loved the twist in the final chase. The characters could have been a bit more meatier (besides Jamie Foxx, he killed). I really dug Baby's connection with his foster dad. I gave it a solid B+ The plus is for the great music.

Probably Wright's worst movie to date, but that's not saying much, as I'd call roughly three of his four movies stone cold classics and the fourth very good as well.

It's incredibly agreeable and earnest, with plenty of style and music and screeching tires and a few terrific jokes. The bad guys all chew the scenery beautifully. A few sequences had me grinning in the theater. It's also a movie that grows on you the more you think about it, largely because Wright's construction, especially in regards to music and editing, is so dynamite. In an era where the shaggy dog Apatow style flick is en vogue, this guy's trying to be meticulous about every line, image, and sound.

Even if the movie isn't as good as his others, it's still a hell of a good time and highly recommended. This will make its money back easily, which gives me great hope that Wright can continue to get these 30-40 million budgets to play with to make original fare for years to come.

Between this and Drive, I really wish we could get a movie about a dope driver with a cool premise that stuck to the driving.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

wow

especially the end. what a piece of dumb ass shit

and Jamie Foxx, please don't take roles like this ever again

and get some women writers in the room

good grief

I was all about this up to the end of the second heist

one smooth one. one with some issues. one that goes terribly wrong but they still pull it off. I didn't need backstories for any of the robbers, I didn't need Baby to ever get out of the car to be honest. After the first hour I was getting excited that this movie was going to be the movie I wanted Drive to be - three heists and some music geek shit - but then it tried to be a movie, and not just a movie but a movie with a fight at the end where people just clumsily ram cars into cars. Not even a good street chase!


My girlfriend said "well yea, you have to have characters and plot and back story and reasons to root for and against these people, it wouldn't even be a movie if it was just a bunch of heists and people in cars, you can't develop characters in cars."


But I think they could've, through the set up scenes and the pre-heist scenes and the post-heist scenes. Cut all the fat and zombie stuff.


Can't remember if I said this in my first post but I really hated that all the characters disliked each other so much, as well. One of my least favorite tropes in movies is when all the teammates absolutely hate each other for different reasons; anti-Ocean's type shit. I was getting worried early on when Punisher was so adamant that Baby was bad at his job but the humor around the sunglasses let me set it aside for that scene, but I just couldn't buy that Doc uses different squads for every heist with the same driver and yet for whatever reason this specific team is put together, have seen what the kid is capable of and STILL want to drill into him and learn his back story and fuck up their shot at $250K. Ugggggggggh.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

its a car chase movie

>and Jamie Foxx, please don't take roles like this ever again

which goes to show what a great acting job he was doing, cause the character was supposed to be a pain....BUT.... WHY did they write him to be such an insufferable jerk?? there was no rationale for it, given his character seemed at his core like the couple, do the job and don't get caught with minimal risk... Everywhere he went he took a risk and jeopardized everything...it was annoying

Wasn't that the basic pretext of everyone in those crews except for Baby, that they were all coked out of their minds?

but since they made a point of making Hamm and his girl just as "scary" as Bats was they wound up all falling equally flat, and Bats just looked like more of a try-hard than the other criminals we met.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

i agree that bats was a try-hard but that was what made him menacing
he was unpredictable

like at all

they seemed like they were just there to do the job then party all night. Superficial motives for superficial characters that are obviously not built for it

i mean the underlying thread was how unprofessional the 'bad guys' on the team were. Baby seemed the most competent

Hamm is actually somewhat sympathetic until Baby gets his wife killed, and then he loses his fucking mind. He's the only one before that who understands what Baby does and accepts his role in all of this. He even encourages Baby to try to get out a couple of times before the final heist, if memory serves.

is what I'm referring to. it was at that point in the movie I thought "man, none of these people are likable at all" and I don't think the movie earned all of them being UNlikable.


like I said earlier this is totally a me thing, but I HATE when a team is assembled and they spend the entire time talking shit to each other and there's no friendship or camaraderie behind it at all. I just couldn't buy that these career criminals were that stupid they'd risk their score to prove how crooked they were to each other or whatever.


Bernthal's scene worked for me because Baby was able to play off of it and keep the scene light and fun, it felt like they were just goofing on each other. the movie kept trying to shake that feeling for the rest of its runtime.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

its set up so they're unlikable on purpose. We're looking at everyone through Baby's eyes

the whole diner scene was great. Bats was already set up to be a loose cannon, but it shows how perceptive he is and how long he's likely been in the game. He's an actual criminal and also crazy

Hamm's character is clearly just living out a fantasy and gets his card pulled. Thats probably why he was not a super dick to Baby; he's pretty normal in relative terms.

Because they listen to fun music and make a lot of money fast every time this dude calls and this kid drives. take job, take cash, ride in car, go home. fun!


Again, if Doc never uses the same crew twice, yet Hamm/GF and Bats show back up right away, Doc clearly has hitters he goes back to the well for, so I just don't buy all the mistrust and attempts to one up each other. Or Doc is secretly an idiot.


I feel like I want to reiterate all my problems with this movie are with the last...45 minutes? I'd watch the first hour right now.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

>Because they listen to fun music and make a lot of money fast
>every time this dude calls and this kid drives. take job, take
>cash, ride in car, go home. fun!

I can go to work and make a lot of money and not like anybody, and thats a legal job. Liking or trusting anybody doing an illegal heist job in a movie is ridiculous. If this was a war movie, then yes, trust and camaraderie is believable. In this, its a bit of a stretch to suddenly trust a complete stranger whose name you don't even know and will probably never see again hopefully. Just using codenames is a signal to not catch feelings.

>
>Again, if Doc never uses the same crew twice, yet Hamm/GF and
>Bats show back up right away, Doc clearly has hitters he goes
>back to the well for, so I just don't buy all the mistrust and
>attempts to one up each other. Or Doc is secretly an idiot.
>

If he says he doesn't use the same people twice, its obvious this is a special case which ends up supporting why he doesn't use the same people twice. Yes, it was clearly a bad idea.

>
>I feel like I want to reiterate all my problems with this
>movie are with the last...45 minutes? I'd watch the first hour
>right now.
>
>

i had some problems with the last like 3 minutes. I just wasn't expecting anything more than nuanced car stunt editing tho so i got more than my money's worth

>>Because they listen to fun music and make a lot of money
>fast
>>every time this dude calls and this kid drives. take job,
>take
>>cash, ride in car, go home. fun!
>
>I can go to work and make a lot of money and not like anybody,
>and thats a legal job. Liking or trusting anybody doing an
>illegal heist job in a movie is ridiculous. If this was a war
>movie, then yes, trust and camaraderie is believable. In this,
>its a bit of a stretch to suddenly trust a complete stranger
>whose name you don't even know and will probably never see
>again hopefully. Just using codenames is a signal to not catch
>feelings.


Ocean's series, Gone in 60 Seconds, either Italian Job, every other 15 minutes of Three Kings, hell two of the guys in Ronin liked each other, The Usual Suspects guys wanted to get the job done and go home. Maybe like is the wrong word; what I'm getting at is that almost every line of dialogue between these criminals is antagonistic and feels like they want everyone else to fail. Compare this diner scene to the one from Reservoir Dogs; they're somewhat similar in construction, except there's a human factor to Reservoir Dogs that makes it relatable. The diner scene here is just "time to give Baby a reason to really not like these guys" and feels shoehorned in.

It REALLY bothers me, and I can't name another movie off top where this is the case but it's certainly something that comes up in video games a lot. It strikes me as yearning for an "edgy" feel with blunt instruments. Like I said earlier, even something as simple as the glasses gag during Bernthal's scene went a long way toward making that scene bearable for me. Something to make it seem like these characters are having fun in this fun movie.


>>Again, if Doc never uses the same crew twice, yet Hamm/GF
>and
>>Bats show back up right away, Doc clearly has hitters he
>goes
>>back to the well for, so I just don't buy all the mistrust
>and
>>attempts to one up each other. Or Doc is secretly an idiot.
>>
>
>If he says he doesn't use the same people twice, its obvious
>this is a special case which ends up supporting why he doesn't
>use the same people twice. Yes, it was clearly a bad idea.

I'd have to see the movie again but I got the impression everyone is familiar with Doc from past experience when we first meet them. I found the basic logic of Doc's syndicate easy to follow but in practice the film made it a little murky for me.

>>I feel like I want to reiterate all my problems with this
>>movie are with the last...45 minutes? I'd watch the first
>hour
>>right now.
>>
>>
>
>i had some problems with the last like 3 minutes. I just
>wasn't expecting anything more than nuanced car stunt editing
>tho so i got more than my money's worth


Me too, I guess I just feel like I got a movie that tried to have some nuance by giving us backstories for all the characters, sneaking their real names in when possible and giving the film a bad guy that never dies. Like I said, three heists, Baby completes his contract and hits the road with his girl. It's a simpler movie, and it's the simpler movie I expected to get. Less dialogue, less character moments, less plot, more cars, more music, more style. That first hour was almost perfect for me; the more it became a regular revenge/one last job movie with a villain the less interested I was.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

i'm not intending that to sound as shitty as its probably coming off i just don't know how to put it. lol.

Most modern movies give the antagonists depth. Having the hero AND villain be an everyman just makes the drama and the stakes more interesting (and realistic). I don't find it to be a cheap trick, but a maturation of blockbuster storytelling. One note baddies can be good, but charismatic villains are great. Without these developed characters, it may as well just be Transporter 4. (and i LIKE the Transporter movies)

THAT SAID

i don't really feel like there WAS a villain which i find to be one of the better developments in modern films.

see, I think Spacey should've been the only antagonist (other than the police), he shouldn't have died, and the final obstacle should've just been a car chase even doper than the beginning chase then Elgort and Hamm race each other to the champagne at the end Days of Thunder style.

Several people I've talked to agree with me that it was disappointing each car chase actually got progressively less interesting and shorter; it was cool seeing Elgort running around and stuff but his skill behind the wheel became almost irrelevant by the end when he's just ramming cars into other cars.


>
>i don't really feel like there WAS a villain which i find to
>be one of the better developments in modern films.

Whereas I agree with the post below that compares Hamm to T-1000, I don't think the movie earned his indestructible vibe or needed his 100% heel turn.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

He made good characters then couldn't figure out how to wrap them appropriately OR he just didn't make the turn of Hamm being the baddest of the bad appropriate. Him going nuts after is lady died just seemed like a clunky transition after he spent so much time underlining how unlikable Bats was. Again, he made a great world and a handful of really good characters and then just didn't know how to sort them all out, it seems, and in what order/to what end. But enjoyable, especially for the driving and choreography.



As an until-recently Atlantan, there were some really homesick inducing bits but also some distractions. I went to GSU so seeing the GCB and whatever that arts building is turned into a post office was distracting and all of the downtown driving took place in the space of about 8 square blocks of the city, like they kept driving around the same 1/2 mile over and over again accept when they were on 85.
Then when the ATL Twins showed up...give me a damn break.

lol you too?

That was a like a 5 block radius of that car chase and the foot chase scenes. That didn't make sense.

Reminds me how The Walking Dead was using the CDC as a plot line or where they had them watching the city in season one. Shit didn't add up but if I didn't live here it wouldn't have mattered.

Hamm's turn made sense to me

i mean, the remaining part of his fake life got killed

>Hamm's turn made sense to me
>
>i mean, the remaining part of his fake life got killed

They also set up that he'd killed/fucked dudes up in the past just for *looking* at homegirl sideways.

So when Baby gets her killed? Shit.

the set-up is there....but Hamm went more than ham....he basically became T-1000 at the end. He survives three brushes with certain death that are so crazy that they go unexplained. His backstory didn't really give me the sense that he was on that level.
---------------------------------------


---------------------------------------

.

overt as well as subtle ribs on millennials as a whole throughout the film

buried in earbuds and bumping into the older guy on the sidewalk and not apologizing being one of them.

great editing (or non-editing) on the stunts
nice turn at the end with a nice evil car choice

plus points for not letting the candy purple paint get a scratch

Thoroughly enjoyable, enjoyed the hell out of it. The pacing, the music, all the performances, the overall style...loved it.

Which I figured it wouldn't but there wasn't anything else to watch last night so I bought it rather than wait for it to land on free tv.

Like it has been said here, the last half just didn't do anything for me. Hamm as the final baddie just didn't make sense.

Baby throwing the last job didn't make any sense (I guess that Foxx was suppose to kill that Teller to throw baby over the edge but realized how gratuitous it would be at that point).

Kevin Spacey doing a noble thing at the end didn't even make sense before Kevin Spacey turned out to be the worst person in Hollywood.

At some point I was no longer rooting for baby.


Small issue but no way so many cops get murdered and the driver only does 5 years (white privelege be damned).



The beginning of the film was awesome. I was there for so much of the movie.



Someone should write an article about how much story is becoming less and less important Hollywood.



**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

added nothing to the story and also seemed to create this implausible scenario where they would trust him even after finding out he was recording convos. Why was that part of the story?


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

Baby Driver was really disappointing. Some of the use of music was okay.

But for Edgar Wright? This seems more like the sort of material that he spoofs in his other movies.

I expected way more from Wright.