February 1, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES I, II, III & IV • Page 19 ‘Drive’ concerns Hollywood by day, crime by night by Dennis Seuling “Drive” (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) is an action flick about an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who doubles as a getaway driver for hire by night. He works with Shannon (Bryan Cranston), a mechanic who fixes him up with day jobs and equips him for the dirty work. Though a loner by nature, the driver can’t help falling in love with his beautiful neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother dragged into a dangerous underworld by the return of her ex-convict husband. After a heist goes wrong, the driver finds himself defending her while being sought by a syndicate of deadly serious criminals (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman). “Drive” is far more than a car chase flick. It is strong on characterization and portrays the unnamed lead as intelligent, cunning, and daring. It’s not all mad races. He is shown to be smarter than his pursuers as he slips under an overpass to elude a hovering helicopter. Gosling’s driver doesn’t say much, and is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in his early Western roles as the Man with No Name. Action comes unexpectedly and is often brutally violent. The film references many others, and is thus very much a movie about movies and an action thriller. Its uniqueness can be attributed to Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who infuses an almost art-house feel into a standard sub-genre of the action flick. Brooks and Perlman are especially memorable as colorful, multi-faceted crime figures who, under a less imaginative director, might have been mere clichés. Special features on the Blu-ray release include four featurettes and an interview with the director. The French director Jean Rollin made a series of horror movies in the 1970s and 1980s. Redemption Films has just issued five of them in glorious, hi-def Blu-ray. Rollin’s films are low-budget, feature mostly young and inexperienced actors, and combine eroticism and violence. However, they have a haunting quality, with surreal images and a creepy atmosphere. Think of Rollin as the French Ed Wood. “Fascination” (1979), containing the most natural performances of the lot, is set in rural France early in the last century. Two stories unfold simultaneously. A gang of criminals travels the countryside robbing innocent travelers. At a nearby castle, a group of women regularly drink blood to stay young and have planned a nocturnal gathering. When gang leader Mark decides to double-cross his fellow thieves, he is set upon and escapes to the castle. There, he encounters two beautiful women whom he initially holds as hostages. He lowers his guard when he comes to know them on a personal level, and eventually joins the Ryan Gosling is a stuntman who moonlights as a getaway car driver in ‘Drive.’ mysterious gathering of beauties in ways he couldn’t foresee. Meddling producers often forced Rollin to add ill-fitting sex scenes to his pictures, but here the erotic sequences feel true to the story. The appeal of the Rollin films is not the plots (which rehash often-used storylines) or the pedestrian acting, but the imagery. Lovers are sealed in a coffin that drifts out (continued on page 22)