“Drive” Trailer
Liked parts if not the whole(s) of Refn’s Bronson and Valhalla Rising but this looks and sounds like his best work yet.
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SATYAMSHOT 
August 10, 2011 at 9:14 AM
Looks interesting..
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September 16, 2011 at 11:05 PM
Saw this. It’s really a terrific, very unusual genre film and definitely worth seeing on the big screen. It feels like a classic.
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September 16, 2011 at 11:18 PM
thanks… hopefully will check it out tomorrow or by Sun at the latest.. Can’t wait!
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September 17, 2011 at 3:31 PM
saw this today and agree completely. In addition to everything else Gosling was fantastically good here as performer and in terms of his physicality (I suppose this amounts to the same!).
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September 17, 2011 at 5:33 PM
It’s really been a pleasure seeing Gosling develop in the last ten years since The Believer through Half Nelson, Blue Valentine and now what is probably his most “starry” character.
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September 17, 2011 at 9:07 PM
He even does a Will ‘Hitch’ Smith of sorts in Crazy Stupid Love
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September 18, 2011 at 7:31 PM
productive weekend for me.. watched Circumstance today which was also very good.. of course all else being equal I prefer the Drive sort of subject!
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September 18, 2011 at 10:42 PM
The reviews seem generally positive on Circumstance. Can’t say I’m terribly interested in catching it in the theater. In addition to Drive, I saw Warrior which I probably preferred to The Fighter. Not that I was a great fan of the latter but Warrior really felt like the kind of classic “domestic” American epic that David O. Russell’s film was attempting to be and overall it felt (especially in Tom Hardy’s superb “Terry Malloy” deal) to be channeling a specific genre history here. Ultimately to me it felt less “ashamed” to be within that mold than maybe The Fighter was. It’s also got three splendid performances by the two male leads and Nick Nolte at his grimy, grumbling best.
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September 19, 2011 at 6:57 AM
yes I must admit that though Circumstance is definitely a worthwhile film it’s not as extraordinary as some of the critics have made it out to be.
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September 19, 2011 at 8:11 AM
September 14, 2011
A Heartthrob Finds His Tough-Guy Side
By DENNIS LIM
THE not uncommon view that Ryan Gosling is among the most disarming of young actors took on another meaning last month with the emergence of a viral video of a New York City street fight. In a scene that could be out of Laurel and Hardy, two men are going at it in an East Village crosswalk while bystanders, to no avail, try to pull them apart. A young man in a tank top and a baseball cap strolls into the melee. In the time it takes for the excited voices behind the cellphone camera to realize that this movie starlike good Samaritan is in fact “the guy from the movie — ‘The Notebook’ ” he has somehow orchestrated a cease-fire.
“That’s what Ryan does,” the filmmaker Derek Cianfrance, Mr. Gosling’s director in “Blue Valentine,” said with a laugh. “He walks around, and he brings magic. He makes everything better.”
There is about Mr. Gosling an almost preternatural air of ease. Meeting for an interview in June at the High Line, he shrugged off a suggestion to have the conversation in a more private spot. Instead he offered the reporter some of his iced coffee, suggested a walk and talk (“I like pacing”) and eventually parked himself on a bench in full view of ambling passers-by.
Mr. Gosling said he doesn’t get recognized that much: “You just have to hang out in places that are more interesting than you are.” Besides, he appreciates the surreal disorientation of the celebrity encounter. “It has a weird effect on people,” he said. “The experience of recognizing you puts them into some kind of trance where they think they know you but they don’t. They start sharing with you, and it gives you this intimacy that’s very rare.”
On that warm summer morning Mr. Gosling, wearing (as he was in that video and in countless paparazzi shots in recent months) a striped tank top, turned his share of heads, mostly young and female. But the only photograph seekers were two teenage girls, one of whom was with an older brother, who approached on their behalf. Their parting words — “You’re great in ‘Blue Valentine’ ” — amused Mr. Gosling, who had assumed they were “Notebook” fans.
Ryan Gosling completists have not had a hard time keeping up so far. He averaged only a movie a year in the decade after his breakthrough role as a neo-Nazi in “The Believer” (2001). By those standards he suddenly seems like a workhorse. He appeared in the summer comedy “Crazy, Stupid, Love” opposite Steve Carell and Emma Stone, modeling designer suits and six-pack abs. He anchors an ensemble of heavyweight actors (George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Evan Rachel Wood) in “The Ides of March,” a campaign-trail drama directed by Mr. Clooney (set to open Oct. 7). And he’s the stoic, enigmatic hero of Nicolas Winding Refn’s sleek action reverie “Drive” (now in theaters), a hit this year at Cannes, where Mr. Refn won the best director prize.
“Do you think it’s too much?” Mr. Gosling said. “It would be nice to have time in between for people to forget one character and accept another.”
His batch of new films — a goofy sex farce, an earnest morality tale and a bloody crime thriller — suggest an eagerness not just to keep busy but also to stretch. Acting with Mr. Carell had been a longtime ambition; they both appeared in a television pilot years ago but never shared any scenes. “I would come to set just to watch him work,” Mr. Gosling recalled. Though there have been subtle comic elements in his earlier films — like “Lars and the Real Girl,” in which he played a loner in love with a blow-up doll — Mr. Gosling said he was nervous about acting in “an overt comedy.” Mr. Carell helped put him at ease, and they discussed the nuances of situational humor. “You become the most boring guys in the room once you start analyzing what’s funny,” Mr. Gosling said. “But slapping Steve Carell is always funny.”
“The Ides of March” was an opportunity to work with “a lot of actors that are really at the top of their game,” Mr. Gosling said, as well as to observe at close range the process of an actor turned director like Mr. Clooney. “I want to direct some day,” Mr. Gosling said. “Watching George is really interesting. He’s sort of possessed by the film while he’s making it.”
“Drive,” based on a pulp novel by James Sallis, was in development at Universal as a big-budget potential franchise for years. (Hugh Jackman was briefly attached to the project.) After it was scaled back, Mr. Gosling signed on to play the lead role of a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver — and made perhaps the most important creative decision of all in recommending Mr. Refn, the cult Danish director known for stylized, violent genre films like “Bronson.”
Mr. Gosling and Mr. Refn appear to have hit it off so well that their Cannes appearances turned into very public displays of mutual affection. At his news conference Mr. Refn jokingly described his collaboration with Mr. Gosling as a mental copulation (he used a more explicit term), and the pair walked the red carpet arm in arm. “It was like going to prom,” Mr. Gosling said. (He wore a striking blue tuxedo.)
But the partnership did not begin auspiciously. During a joint beachfront interview in Cannes in May, Mr. Gosling and Mr. Refn likened their first meeting to a disastrous blind date. “I was very ill, and we were sitting there not really able to communicate,” Mr. Refn said. Mr. Gosling picked up the story. Driving Mr. Refn across town after an awkward dinner, he turned on the car radio and on came REO Speedwagon’s ’80s soft-rock staple “Can’t Fight This Feeling.” Mr. Gosling said that Mr. Refn’s surprising reaction was the moment that “Drive” snapped into focus for both of them: “He looks at me with tears in his eyes, and he starts singing at the top of his lungs and hitting his knees, and he says, ‘I know what this movie is, it’s a movie about a guy who drives around listening to pop music because it’s the only way he can feel.’ ”
Along with other collaborators, including the screenwriter Hossein Amini and the co-star Carey Mulligan, Mr. Gosling and Mr. Refn lived together during the Los Angeles shoot, and the trancelike rituals of their communal existence mirrored the dream state of the film. “We would shoot then come home and edit, and then when that got tired, we would watch movies or go for a drive and listen to music,” Mr. Gosling said. “The movie became the essence of the experience making it.”
In New York Mr. Gosling spoke of the sense of a new beginning. “I do feel like that was then and this is now,” he said. He turned 30 last year and moved from Los Angeles recently. That morning he had ridden his new motorcycle over from his East Village apartment; the bike and the muscled physique are both for his role as a stunt rider in Mr. Cianfrance’s “Place Beyond the Pines.”
And in some ways, Mr. Gosling suggested, he has closed the chapter on a stage of his career that dates to “The Believer” — itself a drastic reinvention for a onetime child actor from Cornwall, Ontario, whose career began when he impulsively auditioned for “The Mickey Mouse Club.” At 19, with a stint as television’s “Young Hercules” behind him, he decided to focus on what he called “serious film,” only to be dropped by his agents. “It’s very hard coming from kids’ television to break the stigma,” he said. “All you have is a VHS tape of you humping stuff on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ and wearing fake tanner and fighting imaginary sphinxes.”
The success of “The Believer,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, set him on a particular course. “I wanted to stay in independent film,” Mr. Gosling said. “I’d been given a freedom there and had a voice there.” And he wanted to be selective: “I don’t feel like one of those guys that can be in anything and still do good work.” Although hardly one dimensional, he cultivated a definite type, creating a whole gallery of sensitive, intelligent, anguished young men, often with hipster tendencies or dark sides, in films that ranged from the blockbuster weepie “The Notebook” (with Rachel McAdams, whom he dated for several years) to underdog indies like “Half Nelson” (which earned him an Oscar nomination) and “The Slaughter Rule,” and shading into bleaker territory with “All Good Things” and “Blue Valentine.”
Mr. Cianfrance said that Mr. Gosling’s method, no matter the role, is one of total immersion. “When Ryan gets to live these other lives, he lives them fully and doesn’t leave anything behind,” he said.
Mr. Gosling has just finished shooting “The Place Beyond the Pines,” which was filmed in upstate New York. (Recent tabloid reports have romantically linked him to his co-star Eva Mendes.) He’s back in Los Angeles for “Gangster Squad,” a story of 1940s cops and mobsters directed by Ruben Fleischer ( “Zombieland”), and then reunites with Mr. Refn for “Only God Forgives,” a crime drama set in Thailand, and an update of the ’70s sci-fi parable “Logan’s Run.”
His coming roles suggest that the vengeance-fueled “Drive” is just the beginning of a new tough-guy phase. Mr. Gosling described “Place Beyond the Pines” as “very aggressive” and said of “Only God Forgives,” in which he plays an expat who runs a Thai boxing club in Bangkok, “The first line of the film is ‘I love violence,’ which should give you some indication.” Apart from a childhood fascination with Sylvester Stallone movies — “First Blood” compelled him to attack classmates with steak knives (he was suspended), and “Rocky” inspired a parking-lot brawl — he said he has never been drawn to brutality. But now “something’s changed,” he added. “I’m just compelled to make very violent films right now. I don’t really know why.”
One clear upside of this apparent testosterone surge is greater productivity. “I’ve never had more energy,” Mr. Gosling said. “I’m more excited to make films than I used to be. I used to kind of dread it. It was so emotional and taxing. But I’ve found a way to have fun while doing it. And I think that translates into the films.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 16, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated Mr. Gosling’s nationality at one point. He is Canadian, not American.
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June 18, 2012 at 7:37 PM
First look pics from Ryan Gosling and his Drive director Nicolas Refn’s ‘kick-boxing revenge drama’ “ONLY GOD FORGIVES”-also star Kristin Scott Thomas-Gosling runs a Muay-Thai club in Bangkok as a front for a drugs operation. when his brother is murdered for killing a prostitute,his mother (Kristin Thomas) comes to Bangkok and tells him to avenge his death http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/only_god_forgives.png and http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/ryan-gosling-only-god-forgives.jpg
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