if there was any reminder of how much better radial tyres are it's this
I thought that was going to be to Live & Die In LA for a minute, but it's actually far more sensible.
there's a fun page that uses google maps to show how the car teleports locations between cuts
The mistakes absolutely make these old car chases. Like when the Charger hits the parked car or when McQueen overcooks the corner and has to slam it into reverse. These guys we're driving right on the edge and sometimes past it and you see it on screen.
On the one hand I'm glad that we have unionised crews and far far more stringent safety requirements. Directors like William Freidkin were legitimate sociopaths to shoot shit like this often without permits and on open public roads. But I also can't deny that rawness of it all lights up my stupid lizard brain in a way very little stylised, CGI and very stage managed modern stuff does.
And the drivers like Bill Hickman who did Bullitt as well as these classic chase scenes from The Seven-Ups and The French Connection and kept these things from being tragedies even as directors pushed them to do more and more extreme stuff are admirable.
jesus christ these streets look so narrow and sometimes there's street parking and it looks like there's only room for one fucking car how the hell do people navigate this nightmare city
If you look at the car shadows they must have been filming this at noon. How they hell did they clear the streets for all these shots?
not gonna lie, I had always heard big boomer talk about this incredible chase scene, but I've never seen the movie.
and like that first minute or so where they are just driving around, I was like, "surely, they were not talking about this."
Honestly I think that's why it's one of the best. That slow, deliberate tension. It's also very much the style of a lot of the rest of the movie - McQueen following leads on the street gumshoe style, surveillance from rooftops etc. All the quiet before the shit goes down. That and it makes the buckling of the seatbelt and absolute :chefs-kiss: moment.
speaking of deliberate tension before a car chase, there's a moment during the robbery scene in Refn's Drive , specifically around 1:15 of this clip, where the chrysler enters the scene and pulls this little slow, circular turn that ends exactly perpendicular from where it started, perfectly parked within a parking space without slowing or correcting the turn.
obviously it's already ominous because its entering the parking lot of a quiet robbery in progress and our protagonist is looking at it, but the slow precision of that parking job to casually parallel the getaway vehicle tightens the tension so hard for me and is one of the standout details in the movie. like the way a hired killer might do a small flick or flourish with a weapon while holstering it.
also, in trivia, i remember reading somewhere that Refn had never driven a car before making the movie, lol.
That clip won't play for me but I've seen that movie enough that I know exactly the moment you mean. The calm of the charger pulling into the lot is exactly why you know it's a serious threat. Even aside from the purposefully parallel parking job you mention, it mimics everything Ryan Gosling says about his own process. A car that's powerful but not too obvious (the slight difference is deliberate), black, doesn't make a scene until he has to, waits subtly in the way he did several times in the opening etc.
I don't know if that factoid is true for Refn, I think I remember him talking about driving places on the commentaries for the Pusher filmsfilms and on Drive he definitely talks about Gosling driving him around playing the radio at night while they talked about the movie.
Have you ever seen The Driver? Great in its own right and a big influence on lots of things including very obviously Drive. It's a lot slower and more tense and muted like Drive but the modernised trailer gives a real good sell of it.
the buckling of the seatbelt and absolute moment.
I went like "Aww shit now it's on".
From what I understand about film history this is the car chase that established what a car chase could contribute to a movie.
Absolutely. I love how everyone is focusing incredibly intensely on this insanely dangerous, high-concentration task they're doing. Even the passenger hitman just looks quietly nervous until he decides to load the shotgun and take his chance.
LOL look at all those heavy junk American cars with the engines that burn leaded gasoline. Surprised none of them broke down during the shot. Did you know working on car engines used to be a common characteristic of American people, just because their cars were such shit and they could rely on being stranded by the roadside often?
Working on your car used to be common everywhere, it wasn't just a US thing.
And I fail to see how being able to maintain and repair things yourself is somehow bad?
No, they're right. The stereotype of American's knowing how to work on their car is largely due to how unreliable and prone to break down cars were up until like the mid 80s.
Because cars shouldn't break all the time. But American cars sure did. They were shit.
