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Baby Driver (SPOILERS)

MusicEd921

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Just saw this last night and wow, what a cool and different movie.  The use of music creates a 70's esque vibe in a modern flick. 

My only complaint was the shift in tone for Act 3, while needed, felt a little off or went on too long.  The final protagonist (which you aren't sure who it will be as you go in), almost had a horror movie bad guy quality in that it just seemed like you couldn't kill him. I also though the ending felt a little bit of a cop-out given what had occurred during the climax. 

Definitely some future fan edit work to be done, but quite a different experience!
 

DigModiFicaTion

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Hello musiced921,
Just wondering if this thread needs one of these.
b9dcbc832d34d1e0eb53df04a850c1cf.jpg
 

MusicEd921

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DigModiFicaTion said:
Hello musiced921,
Just wondering if this thread needs one of these.
b9dcbc832d34d1e0eb53df04a850c1cf.jpg

Just wondering what was said that was a spoiler?
 

DigModiFicaTion

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It was more a question about the thread, not your post. Do you intend this thread to have spoilers? If you do we'd just want to makes sure it said so in the title.
 

revel911

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I would say the movie is bout 3 minutes too long .... which should be cropped off.
 

Problem Eliminator

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I liked Baby Driver, but I didn't love it. I'm a big fan of Edgar Wright, and this was easily my least favourite of his films (excluding Fistful of Fingers, which I haven't seen).

revel911 said:
I would say the movie is bout 3 minutes too long .... which should be cropped off.

Do you mean...
the final scene showing Baby's release from prison? Or everything after he's arrested?

The only ideas I can think of right now:

1. The first flashback to Baby's childhood car accident is repeated later, so the first one could be cut. It's redundant and it felt cliche.

2. I also found the couple scenes of Baby dancing around his apartment to be redundant. Perhaps one of them could be trimmed so the idea isn't repeated.
 

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The ending goes on for faaaar too long. Also, the story is really meh - Baby Driver is 100% style and 0% substance. Easily the least of all Edgar Wright films.
 

beezo

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Cactus said:
The ending goes on for faaaar too long. Also, the story is really meh - Baby Driver is 100% style and 0% substance. Easily the least of all Edgar Wright films.

I think this movie is great and in very little need of tampering.  With that said, it was a mistake to portray Baby as if there were no significant lasting effects to his hearing on account of the gun shots.  He should have been completely deaf.  Playing it up that this his tinnitus may have been only a little bit worse was an attempt to end the movie to much on a high note.  Moreover, it undermines the villain's "plan", if you can call it that.
 

Problem Eliminator

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I think my main problem with this movie is that it never got quite dark enough. There was no "twist of the knife" moment like
Shaun having to kill his mom in Shaun of the Dead or the reveal of Gary King's wrist bandages in The World's End.
I would have liked to see something happen with Baby's music - he seemed so dependent on it. Could have had a scene where he's driving and his music is interfered with, out of sync, or outright taken away. (He did have to rewind a song to start over... once. Wasn't that big of a deal.) Then maybe the soundscape could shift into highlighting the violence around him, without the sugar coating of music to comfort him. Or he could have gone deaf, as @"beezo" mentioned.

Cactus said:
The ending goes on for faaaar too long.

Where did you think it should have ended? What should have been cut/trimmed?
 

Cactus

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Problem Eliminator said:
Cactus said:
The ending goes on for faaaar too long.

Where did you think it should have ended? What should have been cut/trimmed?

Well, as mentioned before
the bad guy keeps coming back like a monster in a horror movie
and the epilogue
with the prison
almost seems superfluous. I understand the point of it, and the final resolution wouldn't be sweet enough if it would just be a quickcut or text card instead. But the momentum has stopped and we're basically just waiting for it to end.
 

MusicEd921

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Here's what I wish the ending was more like:

Baby suffers the loss of his hearing from the gunshots and then is arrested at the end and that's that.  No trial where we see all of the past people that claim he's a good hearted crook.  We could end with him getting a postcard from Debra (which would be great if there was a shot of Lily James driving in a convertible alone which we could dub in the "Debra" song by T. Rex to imply she's listening to it).  I usually like a crime film to end with showing that crime doesn't pay, no matter how good hearted the crooks are.  That's where you get that gut punch feeling where you want them to getaway, but in the end it catches up to them.
 

beezo

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musiced921 said:
Here's what I wish the ending was more like:

Baby suffers the loss of his hearing from the gunshots and then is arrested at the end and that's that.  No trial where we see all of the past people that claim he's a good hearted crook.  We could end with him getting a postcard from Debra (which would be great if there was a shot of Lily James driving in a convertible alone which we could dub in the "Debra" song by T. Rex to imply she's listening to it).  I usually like a crime film to end with showing that crime doesn't pay, no matter how good hearted the crooks are.  That's where you get that gut punch feeling where you want them to getaway, but in the end it catches up to them.

The real punishment for Baby isn't the jail sentence, it's the loss of hearing.  This is why the ending is a misstep.  Moreover, when he gets out of jail, it's as if he never went in at all.  He has the same look, the same haircut, the same everything.  So, that was not a punishment in the slightest.  So, when the film went further and made him not deaf, it negated all consequences.  If a fanedit can fix this, that would be amazing.
 

MusicEd921

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@"beezo"  I've already been thinking of ways to edit this.  There's a really cool movie hidden other some of the additional substance.

There doesn't seem to be much discussion going on with people who haven't seen it, so I'm going to change this thread to include SPOILERS so we can all talk freely.

That being said.....

The soundtrack to this film is really awesome and a nice mix of eras that makes for a good driving experience.  After getting the album and listening to it frequently, I wanted to listen to more songs that could be part of a Baby Driver iPod playlist.

Here's a couple I came across that would be nice to add to, to make our own Baby Driver playlist (criteria is that it has to be something you could picture yourself driving with in the background)  Any other additions and suggestions?




 

TM2YC

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Gaith

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A thunderously average movie. I'm afraid that the reportedly highly choreographed car chases left me entirely unimpressed; if I hadn't heard the hype, I would never have guessed that they were made in any kind of special way. Maybe the cuts were too quick, maybe the complete and total lack of established characters in pursuing cars scuttled any interest, I dunno.

Further, a personal pet peeve of mine is when The Movies give us a staggeringly gorgeous heroine who falls in love with the hero because he... makes her a bashful smile? A shared interest in old funk/soul songs and two five-minute conversations, and this goddess is pretty much ready to pledge her eternal love to him, Shakespearean-comedy style? Sure, he's cute, but come on. The movie would have been considerably stronger if the part had been played by someone who wasn't a literal human Disney princess.

DHko_ffUQAAvebr.jpg

Pictured: a person who would definitely melt at a cute boy smiling at her,
probably because no one ever bothered to do so before.

Also, I guess there was a story about banks and crime and shit. Whatever. I'm more glad than ever that Wright left Ant-Man, a movie that definitely isn't the quirkiest, but is one I genuinely love. The wonders lame, ordinary stuff like interesting and sympathetic characters, a charismatic villain, and legitimately inventive action sequences can produce...

C+
 

Problem Eliminator

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As a huge Edgar Wright fan who found Baby Driver quite average, I thought this review by Adam Nayman pretty much nailed it:

At once the most overworked and underrated of Wright’s “Cornetto” trilogy, The World’s End is also its director’s most conceptually complex movie, acknowledging the lure and danger of wanting to not grow old—arrested adolescence as paradise and apocalypse in one. It’s also a great showcase for Pegg, a wonderfully elastic comic actor who never quite stretches his characters thin. His remarkably crisp and proficient performance in that film (and Shaun and Hot Fuzz) owe in part to the fact that he has a co-writing credit on each title: one reason that he inhabits these roles so fully is that he helped to create them. While it might be too simplistic to say that Wright generates the technical pyrotechnics and Pegg supplies the soul, the flaws of Baby Driver hint that this equation roughly adds up. Not only is Wright’s American studio debut weakened by the work of its star, Ansel Elgort—a performer so gormless that by comparison he makes Michael Cera look like Robert Ryan—but its greatest liability is its screenplay: the filmmaker’s first-ever fully solo effort in this area. Baby Driver is so poorly written on levels of plot, characterization and (especially) dialogue that Wright’s typically first-rate craftsmanship fails to save it—and, in context, even becomes its own source of annoyance. This gifted director’s relationship to his own style, which is usually so multifaceted and fascinating in its way, has become blithely untroubled, and similar to the same malignant narcissism that mars the work of his pal and sometime collaborator Quentin Tarantino. The difference is that where QT now eagerly imposes his obsessions and fetishes on material that exists well beyond his previously circumscribed, postmodern frame of reference—an exploitation that produces sometimes revelatory discontinuities of intent and effect—Wright seems content to stay cozily inside his wheelhouse, risking next to nothing and achieving roughly the same.

[...]

That the only person to really coax [Baby] out of his shell is pretty diner waitress Deborah (Lily James) is in keeping with the story’s adolescent fairy-tale arc, but it also means that Wright is swapping out one wish-fulfillment scenario for another. Baby’s dawning realization that he’s not only being exploited but also actively participating in terrible, violent crimes cues us for an ambivalence that never quite arrives. Instead, the film buys fully into the teenage-male fantasy of an outcast inspired and finally redeemed by the unconditional love of a cute, steadfast girl whose defining trait is her interest and patience in his traumatic backstory.
 
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