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Great movie. Also probably some kind of personal record for Fastest Turnaround on a Protagonist. Took me about thirty seconds to go from "I don't know about this kid" to "my DUDE" with regards to Baby. It was smart for the marketing and trailers to only show Serious Baby and Lovebird Baby so that Fuckin NERD Baby could be a nice surprise. My favorite exchange from the whole movie paraphrased:  "Why the gently caress you recording us?" "Baby, you wanna explain yourself?" "...I record snippets of conversation and remix them into music." "...that's the stupidest loving thing I've ever heard." "It's too stupid NOT to be true."And then you get the intense waves of shame wafting off Kevin Spacey when they play the tapes, like "You are dead to me. I HAVE NO CRIME-SON." Spergatory fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jun 29, 2017 |
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Jun 29, 2017 19:57
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So I liked this movie when I saw it the first time. On a whim, I decided to watch it again, and... now I kinda love it. Like WAY more than before. Because once you've gotten the plot down and you don't have to worry about paying attention to what's happening, you can really take in how it's happening, aka how loving perfectly choreographed and edited this entire movie is from start to finish. Everything, everything, has a rhythm to it. The sheer amount of effort involved in perfectly aligning the layers and layers of music and sound effects--footsteps, gunshots, dialogue, all in time-- boggles the mind. And the visuals. The visuals align with the sound which aligns to the music; not just the actions of the actors in the scene, but the actual scenery, the cuts between shots, the scene transitions... I'm not exaggerating when I say the only way this movie could exist is because Edgar Wright went into filming with the completed product already in his head somehow. Some people find the movie when they're filming, or editing. Not this dude. This dude already found the movie. He found it like a decade ago, and he's been itching to make it this whole time, and it shows. The amount of love and care and sheer filmmaking craftsmanship that went into every loving frame of this movie is kind of jaw-dropping.
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Jul 2, 2017 03:14
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Wait, so is Goodfellas pizza also a real business?
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Jul 2, 2017 14:10
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Something I didn't quite get until I read something about it just now-- in the foot chase, after Baby's iPod gets shot and the tinnitus sound starts creeping back in, you can see Baby put his fingers to his neck as he runs. He's feeling his own pulse. Dude needs a rhythm to his life so bad that in the absence of everything else, he will use his own pounding heartbeat to drive away the noise.
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Jul 2, 2017 20:44
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Spacey demonstrated weird crime-dad feelings towards Baby throughout the movie, the biggest example of which being when he brought Baby home after the post-office. Baby feeds him the Monster Inc line, and he just goes with it and says "You'll be out of this shithole soon enough." He probably thought he was doing Baby a favor by keeping him in the game so he could finally make some real money. Sort of a tough love, 'you'll thank me for this later' kind of thing. And given that Baby was probably one of the only constants in his life for several years, and that he's had him in his employ since the kid was actually a kid and quite literally watched him grow up, it's not that hard to believe that he'd have some paternalistic feelings toward him that won out over his pragmatism when he realized Baby was in love. (It's one thing to have a fling with a waitress who doesn't know about your crime life, it's quite another to have a girl who'll go on the lam with you she finds out you're a career criminal, you hosed up a robbery, killed a dude, and are currently the target of a statewide manhunt. Also you shot a guy right in front of her.)
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Jul 3, 2017 17:39
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I'm pretty sure Baby's motivation for everything after the scene where Bats murders everyone is "scared of getting murdered by Bats." The movie goes out of its way to establish that Bats is a man for whom murder is the first resort. He murders guards, he murders fellow criminals, he murders randoms he's just met. Baby goes along with the heist because as long as he's valuable, Bats won't murder him. He then tries to escape while Bats is asleep. That doesn't work, so he renews his commitment to the heist with more fervor. Baby's a pretty internal character, so it's hard to say for sure, but I'm pretty sure his intentions in the final heist were just to gently caress up the job, get everyone else tied up with the cops, and escape in the confusion while they couldn't come after him. It's only when the opportunity and necessity presented themselves in tandem that he decided the best way to not get murdered by Bats was to murder the gently caress out of Bats. Everything after that was a side effect of his plan going spectacularly wrong.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:49
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Colonel Whitey posted:I can totally buy that in the moment Baby thinks the safest play is to just finish the job, keep his head down like he's always done, then escape later. You're absolutely right that his decision to kill Bats was spontaneous. Seeing the clerk on the street and having her life be threatened was the last straw. This is the part in the movie where his character has a turning point and actively puts himself in danger to save someone else. This works too. I like this better, actually. Baby is pretty clearly contemplating murder the entire time that scene is ongoing. Them constantly showing us the metal rod is the equivalent of him mentally narrating "I could do it. I could just loving kill this guy." And then all he needs is Bats to push him a little too hard. As for the moral arc of the movie, Jon Bernthal's character existed pretty much entirely to set that up. He's an rear end in a top hat and he's antagonizing Baby, so we're not inclined to believe him at the time, but ultimately, he's right; Baby can't just be "in crime" without being a criminal, and he ultimately does get blood on his hands. Baby is operating under the delusion that because he isn't there willingly, he's totally innocent, and that he will ultimately be able to walk away and wash his hands of all this. His arc is about him realizing that's not true; he is a criminal, and there's no escaping from that. At the beginning, Joe tells him "You don't belong in that world." He, like Baby, thinks that Baby is separate from and above the people he works with. By the end, after Baby has personally killed two people, been indirectly responsible for the deaths of several others, stolen multiple cars and caused God knows how much property damage... he knows better. "You don't belong in this world," he tells Debora. This world, meaning his world, the criminal world he is most definitely part and parcel to, and the place he doesn't want her to be dragged into along with him. The movie builds towards the getaway driver's decision to stop running.The playlist-driven escape artist turns the radio off and faces the music. There's a preacher in the opening dance montage (who Baby pointedly avoids) yelling about washing away your sins, and the movie reiterates that theme. Blood doesn't wash away in the sink, you only have to wash your hands once after counting it, I don't want your dirty money, etc. The subtle-as-a-baseball-bat color symbolism reinforces this; throughout the movie, Baby wears a grey and black jacket with a t-shirt underneath. At the beginning, the shirt is light grey, close to white but still a little off. By the time turns himself in, his shirt is dark grey and stained with blood. Only at the end, after he's served his time and paid for his crime, is he seen in true white. He's been washed clean. There's definitely a pretty clear morality at work here. It's pretty basic, and it may or may not work for you, but it's there.
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Jul 3, 2017 23:33
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Z. Autobahn posted:I like this read, but I feel like the movie undercuts it with the trial montage, where everyone emphasizes how good Baby was and how he was just a good kid forced into it, etc. If the intention was that this is Baby's pivotal choice to own up to being a criminal and be redeemed, why not put the onus on him in the scene (I.e. him pleading guilty and accepting his sentence) rather than a weird reverse-Seinfeld-finale of folks justifying and exonerating his behavior? I think to show that while the bad stuff that he did mattered, the good stuff also mattered. The fact that he did take risk upon himself to try and mitigate the damage he was doing showed that he was someone who wanted to be redeemed, which I think is why the judge allowed him a parole hearing after serving only 1/5th of his sentence. If he continued to demonstrate his commitment to redemption by being a model prisoner (and the prison montage showed that he did), then he would be released back into society still a relatively young man with a great deal of life and opportunity in front of him. He needed to pay his debt to society, but by taking into account his extenuating circumstances and his own choices to do good, they gave him the opportunity to lower that debt.
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Jul 4, 2017 01:31
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IOwnCalculus posted:Reiterating that the whole Hocus Pocus scene was amazing. Fun Fact: the studio did not want to pay for that scene. Edgar Wright financed two extra days of filming out of his own pocket because he wanted a Hocus Pocus footchase scene that bad. Worth every penny. 
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Jul 4, 2017 04:56
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BobKnob posted:Don't most states have that law that if you are part of a criminal enterprise where someone gets killed you are charged for it? Shouldn't Baby be on the hook for like 20 murders? The rule with felony murder is that if you participate in an 'inherently dangerous crime' and someone dies, you can be charged with murder even if you did not do the killing yourself. There have been cases where robbers have been charged with murder because their partners were shot dead by the homeowners. But given that Baby's 'trial' only seemed to involve character witnesses attesting to his decency in order to mitigate his sentence, I'd guess that Baby was likely part of a plea bargain, which means his prosecutors agreed to drop some charges or at least reduce their severity in exchange for a guilty plea. Saves time and headaches for everyone involved.
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Jul 4, 2017 14:36
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Colonel Whitey posted:If anyone can make sense of this mans tweet I would appreciate it I'm pretty sure he liked it!  In other news: Edgar Wright interviewed actual former getaway drivers in the process of writing this. Not only did they give him a lot of details that ended up in the movie, but some actual word-for-word lines as well.
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Jul 4, 2017 16:28
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I've never been able to find Shaun of the Dead on streaming no matter how hard I look, so Scott Pilgrim and Hot Fuzz are the only other Wright films I've seen, and I was only able to find Fuzz about a week before Baby. Hot Fuzz brought me indescribable joy, incidentally. I loved how basically every single thing I thought was incidental or a one-off gag either came back later or turned out to be a clue.
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Jul 5, 2017 16:41
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There's a podcast where Wright talks about the possibility of a sequel and discusses the ideas of sequels in general, and I'll say at the very least he seems to be aware that most of his movies don't demand sequels and that the laziest thing you can do in a sequel is somehow set the characters back to square one so you can do the same movie again. I still kind of hope he just leaves it alone though.
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Jul 6, 2017 15:20
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Another fun bit: in he script, immediately after the line "If you never see me again, it means I'm dead," the stage directions read 'We never ever see him again.'
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Jul 6, 2017 15:57
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Coffee And Pie posted:I love it. Is the full script available anywhere? https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/5w938w/request_edgar_wrights_baby_driver/ This clearly isn't the shooting script, as it's still set in LA, so a lot of stuff is different here. What's interesting to me is how different the tone of the ending is here. For one thing, in this version, Debora isn't there for the final clash, and it's made clear that Buddy's parting shots leave Baby completely and permanently deaf, or at least much worse than he seems in the movie. Baby goes and gets Debora after Buddy dies and it's played almost like he's abducting her without realizing it. When they confront the police blockade, he gets ready to speed off, but realizes that she's scared, has an "oh god what the gently caress am I doing, who even am I anymore" moment, and surrenders instead. It's also clear in this version that his happy ending with Debora is a fantasy that he's coming up with based on a postcard she sent him, and it's left up to the audience as to whether or not he really gets any kind of happy ending. All-in-all, much more of a downer. 
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Jul 6, 2017 19:56
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Mulva posted:Well, counterpoint: He's white.
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Jul 8, 2017 12:17
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PostNouveau posted:I don't think it's an implausible take on the ending. The visual language just struck me as a clear movement from fantasy to reality. I could be reading it wrong. You pretty clearly see him look into the mirror and close his eyes before the final shot begins. It's very clear that it at least starts as a fantasy, but what happens after that is up for debate. What I want to know is how deaf is Baby at the end of the movie. In the original script, it's pretty clear that he couldn't hear at all, but I guess at some point they realized that having the last 5 minutes of the movie be completely silent or just a high-pitched whine would be really depressing. The sound is really muffled immediately post-showdown, and then just kind of echo-y for the rest of the movie. It's also possibly the first time the music in the movie isn't diegetic; from the second he turns the car off, all the music is in Baby's head. It's clear something has changed for the worse, but he seems largely aware of when people are talking to him and it seems in that last shot that he can kind of hear the tv. Going to prison by itself sucks. Going to prison and losing most of your ability to enjoy the main thing that has given your life meaning up until that point would be straight-up soul crushing, girl or no girl.
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Jul 8, 2017 23:25
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Is Armstel Eggbert the new Bendydick Chamberpot?
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Jul 9, 2017 22:09
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His siblings both have normal names so he was clearly intended as the dump child. He was not supposed to become famous.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:17
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Krispy Kareem posted:It didn't help that Buddy was killing off qualified crew members for stupid reasons. I assume you mean Bats and not Buddy. Bats is pretty much a case study in how one rear end in a top hat can wreck an entire operation.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:26
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The shot works. It's fine. I'm sorry it didn't work for you but it clearly works for most people because that exact shot is in the trailer in that exact order and it never fails to get a reaction.
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Jul 10, 2017 17:40
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Krispy Kareem posted:How good would a prequel work? Baby had done probably 3 or 4 heists prior to Baby Driver and you could still use all the cool characters from the first movie (except Hat and Bats). Doc said Baby had been working for him for nearly a decade, didn't he? I think he's done way more than 3 or 4 heists. One of the former getaway drivers Edgar Wright interviewed got away with something like 30 bank robberies before he was caught.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:49
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After listening to quite a few interviews, I am coming to the realization that Edgar Wright is sort of, like, sort of, basically, like sort of, sort of like, basically kind of terrible at talking.
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Jul 11, 2017 22:49
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Steve2911 posted:Saw it a second time. Still good, but the sound in the cinema really let the film down and the overall product suffers quite a drat bit when that happens. A lot of the musical scenes fell sort of flat, and the gunshots and cars almost entirely drowned out the music. I really want this movie on my computer so I can inject that sweet, sweet sound design directly into my ear canal like it was meant to be. 
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Jul 12, 2017 01:38
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Does Edgar Wright realize that in a little over a decade he's going to have to deal with a bunch of angry teenagers who blame him for their idiot parents naming them "Baby" not realizing that they would eventually grow into non-babies?
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Jul 13, 2017 01:54
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I don't think this is gonna be a thing. Shaun of the Dead didn't inspire a wave of Shauns or Eds, and Hot Fuzz didn't inspire a wave of Nicks or Dannies. Those were already names. 'Baby' is a new one. Edgar Wright has accidentally expanded the Acceptable Name Threshold. It won't even necessarily be people who loved this movie; it will be people who have vaguely heard of it and thought 'oh, what a good name for a baby, specifically this baby, MY baby!'
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Jul 13, 2017 02:25
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I loving love the way they incorporated Baby's tinnitus into the movie's score, and I love that it's basically the first sound you hear. I also love Baby's wordless journey from  to     and back to in the span of like a minute.
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Jul 13, 2017 23:09
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Krispy Kareem posted:So did the spike strip not knock out one tire or was Baby using runflat tires or something? Everyone but Baby was wearing gloves, and Baby's fingerprints are meaningless because he's not in any criminal databases because he's never been caught. 
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Jul 14, 2017 02:41
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Coffee And Pie posted:That makes me like him a lot more for some reason He apparently won multiple Golden Demon awards for his miniatures back when he was a teenager. Other celebrities I just learned were into Warhammer; Ed Sheeran and Robin Williams.
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Jul 15, 2017 13:07
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All this just makes me think of the interview where Wright says that car chases are basically impossible in London and how any heist movie set there would involve a getaway on Vespas.
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Jul 19, 2017 13:03
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Yeah, it's not exactly realistic Atlanta but it at least features legitimate place names and actual local business, which hopefully will see a boost from this. Apparently Wright also wanted to feature a couple of ATL hip hop tracks in the movie, but the tracks were deemed unclearable because they were not commercially released and used samples that hadn't been cleared by the original artists. He even offered to personally go to the original artists and ask them for permission, but Sony's legal department just said nuh-uh.
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Jul 19, 2017 20:08
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For me, it's less creepy because for the majority of Baby's life, his mom has been nothing but an extremely rose-colored idea. I mean, poo poo. A little research shows that the kid who played Young Baby was six when the movie was filmed. Do you know how much I knew about my mom at age six? I'm not even entirely sure I knew her real name. For Baby, his mom is a series of distant images that make him feel nice, but little more than that. And none of those images are of her as a waitress. When Baby remembers his mom, he remembers her everywhere but the diner. His primary and most comforting image of her is as a singer. Even when Debora tries to invoke the image of her as a waitress by asking if she worked at the diner, Baby looks a little uncomfortable and kind of brushes past it and says she was a singer. Because that's how he prefers to remember her. All that helps bring down the oedipal vibes to relatively normal levels. Yes, "normal" levels; I hate to break it to you, but it's actually ridiculously common, even among non-hosed-up people, to marry someone who strongly resembles your opposite-sex parent. This is true even with animals. Biology is hosed up, man. It's times like these I'm slightly thankful I'm gay as hell and don't have to worry about this. :iamafag:
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Jul 21, 2017 14:05
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got any sevens posted:So are you into dudes that look like your dad? Nope! My dad is short and stocky like me, whereas I'm into tall dudes. Like Ansel Elgort.  Though now that you mention it, it is a well-known (and slightly depressing  ) joke in the gay community that white gays tend to go for guys who look exactly like them and would probably gently caress their clones if given the opportunity. I think I read a story a few years back where two dudes started dating only to realize they were long-lost brothers or something. 
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Jul 21, 2017 18:11
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CJ Jones is a boss and apparently the first black deaf actor ever to be cast in a major motion picture. Which is, you know, pretty cool. I don't know why Edgar Wright wanted Baby to be raised by an old deaf black man, but I'm glad he did, because CJ Jones is a boss. Also helps balance out Jamie Foxx's Scary Black Man and add a much-needed splash of color to a cast that is painfully white for a movie set in Atlanta (which is 54% black people, for those who didn't know). Kind of a weird thing to be impressed by, but the marketing for this movie has been really on-point and I think a large part of why it's doing so well. This right here is pretty much a perfect summation of the movie's premise and it takes about 15 seconds. https://twitter.com/edgarwright/status/888448197332418560
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Jul 22, 2017 02:54
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With hearing loss from loud noises, you almost always have a large temporary threshold shift that recedes over a few hours or days, leaving a smaller permanent threshold shift. In other words, a bunch of hearing goes away, and then most of it comes back. Most, but not all. Over time, multiple instances of TTS build up to a very noticeable PTS. That is for things like loud concerts and firing ranges without ear muffs. There's a pretty big difference between firing a gun around unprotected ears and firing one right next to them, to the point where you could conceivably have sustained minor burns from the muzzle flash. It's entirely possible the pressure wave from a gunshot that close could have literally torn a hole in his eardrum. I'd say dude was more or less fully deaf when he woke up in the car, and over the next few days went down to partially deaf.
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Jul 22, 2017 20:59
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Chieves posted:Plus, Buddy was probably pretty sure that he was about to kill him. It's almost like he saw it fitting that Baby would at least die deaf. Actually, according to Wright, Buddy's plan was basically 1. Blow out Baby's ears 2. Kill his girlfriend in front of him 3. gently caress off and leave him for the cops Basically he wanted Baby to have to live with the same loveless, miserable existence as him.
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Jul 22, 2017 23:10
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Xealot posted:As someone who's previously ruptured my eardrum (due to an infection, not concussive force, to be fair), significant hearing loss isn't necessarily a given. A perforated eardrum can heal, or be surgically repaired in extreme circumstances. This is true. Eardrums heal on their own most of the time. It's the tiny hair cells behind them that don't heal. Anything that fucks with those will in some way permanently gently caress your hearing, and concussive force resulting in a perforated ear drum is far more likely to rupture, bend, or otherwise damage those hair cells than most infections. Like your example, sometimes a single exposure to a loud noise in the wrong circumstances can permanently mess with your ears. My right ear got infected a few years back, resulting in a burst eardrum. I've had tinnitus in that ear ever since! No music-based driving superpowers though.
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Jul 23, 2017 18:12
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Stray observations from another rewatch: -Any problems I had with the character agency of Debora were washed away when I realized that Debora very clearly wants and chooses to go for one thing in this movie: Baby. No, for real. She goes after him. 90% of their first interaction is her flirting like crazy and him just being all  and flustered that a real person is talking to him. Every time he goes into that Diner, she basically orbits him, invades his personal space, cutely asks him probing questions and tries to get him to open up. She is the pursuer, and he is the object of desire. This is especially clear when you realize the only obstacle to them being together is Baby's life of crime and feelings of unworthiness. Her comment at the end of their date suggests to me that she kind of suspects something untoward is going on with him but she doesn't care because she took one look at him at the beginning of the movie and thought "I'm fixin' to climb that boy like a tree."-There is a moment that actually foreshadows Doc going over to Baby's side at the end. When he plays the Debora tape, his expression goes from mild annoyance/secondhand embarrassment to genuine surprise. Then, when the other crooks start questioning Baby and it becomes clear that they know about his girlfriend, he makes the exact same "goddamnit" face that he makes when he sees them together at the end and pointedly turns to look at the wall for the rest of the scene. I actually think "take this fool back to his shithole" was a sincere attempt at getting Baby out of the shitstorm he created for himself, but Bats being Bats scared Baby into not taking it.
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Jul 25, 2017 01:01
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duz posted:Not until Edgar Wright gets a chance to shoot his alternate ending to Scott Pilgrim where Scott is arrested for the murder of Ramona's 7 exes. According to Bryan Lee O'Malley, they didn't die, they respawned at home with their lessons learned (and presumably missing half their money).
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Jul 25, 2017 04:11
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DC Murderverse posted:Even with the secondary characters in his movies, the closest you get is Darling and Buddy making out like teenagers and Wallace sharing his bed with numerous men (leading up to the "what a spectacular rear end in a top hat joke"), Thank you for reminding me of that joke and that character.  LadyPictureShow posted:I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this or even noticed/cared, but I was happy to see CJ Jones in the role of Joseph. I read an article written by someone in the deaf community that said anyone who knows sign language can plainly see in the way the characters use it that Baby has learned sign language, while Joseph knows it. Which makes sense for the characters: Baby has come to it relatively recently and learned it mostly to communicate better with Joe, whereas Joseph has been using it his whole life out of necessity and knows it in his bones. That's hard to fake, and even if you could fake it; why would you, when you can just get the real deal? Edgar Wright apparently gave CJ Jones a lot of creative freedom in interpreting his given lines for sign language. ASL grammar is pretty different from spoken or written English, so the captions that pop up beside Baby and Joseph when they're signing are not literal translations, but 'the gist' of what they're signing. I don't know sign language that well, but one thing I did notice: there are two different signs translated as 'girl.' Baby uses the one where he kind of makes a fist and rubs his thumb against the side of his face, whereas Joseph traces the silhouette of a woman in the air with his fingers. I'm guessing Baby's is the literal translation, whereas Joseph is kind of teasing Baby and using a sign with more salacious implications. Basically, the difference between  and 
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Jul 26, 2017 22:19
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