Hacker Cinema
Baby Driver
2017 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Edgar Wright
After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.
7 positive3 negative1 mixed12 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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23 comments on Hacker News
I think this explanation is incomplete. There were still plenty of mid-size movies after the DVD era that still had profitable theatrical releases. The prototypical example to me is Baby Driver.
Pre-Covid there was simply not enough major weekends to release a big movie. They end up competing with each other.
Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business unfortunately and his last two films did poorly
Last Night In Soho was a absolute cinematic treat but had mixed reviews. I was fortunate to see it a week before release in 35mm in NYC and it was truly a special moment. But lets be real, even with films being graded on a curve due to the pandemic, the movie still did poorly.
Ok fresh start a few years later with The Running Man. This time he got big money, three time more than Baby Driver. (34mil vs 110mil) and the result? Baby Driver brought in ~227 mil and Running Man? Just ~69 mil.
Maybe he is better off producing smaller budget films and while I want nothing but success for him since he's my all time favorite director: Hollywood is a business. They will not look kindly on someone that keeps losing money.
I saw Baby Driver, which I really liked but I haven't seen any of the three movies since that.
The Cornetto trilogy are excellent. I'm a big fan of Three Colours (my favourite is White) and I think that actually in the same way that Kieślowski clearly doesn't care about the supposed theme, he just wants money to make movies, we can say the same for the Cornetto movies. We're bringing the commonalities to it in our interpretation, Wright didn't pour great effort into ensuring that these movies "work" as a trilogy, but they do if you squint, in the same way that Kieślowski didn't put great effort into relating his three films to the French flag but if you squint you can make it work fine.
Trigger Warning: Gonna talk about sexual assault and physical abuse below.
"caregiver" is a big red flag for me. I'm on the autistic spectrum. My parents took a different tact and let me become an emancipated minor at 15. I'm not gonna say they did their best or that that was a good thing to do... I cannot as an adult fathom just letting the kid go to the wolves... but I survived.
There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
There are tons of laws and very questionable care giving organizations. The history is brutal. Frequently they are handed over to people who get into the role of caring for these people because they want to beat and rape people who can't complain (see Jimmy Savile). This isn't that dissimilar from the highly publicize Britany Spears conservatorship. There is money in taking care of an adult with "the mind of a 12 year old" also you can beat and rape them if you wanna.
There is an old and "hippie dippie" model for spectrum disorders where they refer to them as indigo children and they claim that kids used to be called that because the baby was replaced by fairies and now speaks truths beyond their years. Look at the classic traits of a vampire. Being scared of water, can count things very fast, maybe has surprising strength and old wisdom.
Autistic people aren't extra wise, they span the range of dipshit to genius like any other category of people. Autistic people do spend a lot of extra energy trying to predict a world that is confusing and hostile to them and when they vocalize how they navigate said world, it creeps people out who have to deal with a society that says lying is wrong but the rule actually is "fuck it, do whatever you can get away with."
If you get hooked up to "caregivers" that take away your agency and you are an outlet of justifiable (to the abuser) sadism for them you can't run far enough. The state will put you back in their arms.
Autism Speaks is a eugenics organization. Autism does not mean a person is unaware of the world around them, actually quite the opposite. Also the messaging that autism can be a super power is the same thing in disguise (see the most recent Predator movie or Baby Driver). It's a sensory disorder. It's not a lack of emotion, it's that overload frequently makes it difficult to respond to people and situations as "normal people" expect so abuse becomes a default mode for "caregivers". There are organizations that are CURRENTLY advocating for electric shock or physical harm to help "correct" autism.
Yeah... (speaking about the perspective of a hypothetical person in a situation of abuse) Change your name, run away, hop trains. RUN if you can because you're autistic enough to see that people will always abuse you in any situation where you're put into the care of the ghouls that own your name. Even the Arc and Autism Self Advocacy Network have some massive problems including putting autistic people with weird abusive special interests into positions to hurt people who just want to live their fucking lives.
I recently saw this video by a fellow I really relate to where he lays out all the things I say in a fit some times but... yeah. They lay it all out. The history of helping the disabled is pretty wrought with not checking in with the disabled. Also, I think they are a hilarious humorist and the rest of their stuff is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlEjWaejAw - You Don't Seem Autistic - or - How I Learned to Love the Meritocracy _ Woohooligan Comedy
I mean, it's a 6 min clip; and the red subaru definitely exists (they went on sale after production ended if I recall, a bit out of my price range:)... although why they took a canonical AWD rally car and made it RWD is beyond my understanding.
There are what - hundred or more individual shots linked in there? So we'd have to narrow on which one is CGI augmented and how much. But it's a lot more "Weighty" of a setup either way than most car chase scenes these days, and received praise at the time accordingly :). I just watched Red Notice last night, and beyond all the other horribleness, the car chase scenes had the classic shiny, unbelievable Star Trek Warp Space feel to them that's common in so many movies today - and with 5-6 times the budget of Baby Driver, it's not that it's a "cheap movie with cheap effects".
edit after a brief Google: Indeed Edgar Wright takes tremendous pride on the car stunts and practical effects in the movie:
https://www.inverse.com/article/33512-how-baby-driver-did-car-stunts-edgar-wright-george-miller-ansel-elgort
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/the-baby-driver-subaru-awd-rwd/
In fact, the Baby Driver stunt drivers are complaining wildly about CGI in other movies:
https://carbuzz.com/news/baby-driver-s-stunt-driver-condemns-cgi-in-car-movies
So I feel if anything, that movie proves my point :-)
Car chases are often filler like action scenes in general are filler, IMO.
It's not universally true and depends on how consequential the scenes are. If you could flash "<insert fight scene here where X gets the upper hand>" instead and not miss much, I don't want it.
Movies with top, top notch action and/or better integrated action are exceptions. The original Matrix, John Wick movies, Baby Driver, The Italian Job, Mission Impossible, etc.
Superhero movies are usually not (it feels like they paste the drama and the action together in editing and it's dreadful).
> (this sentence applies to the furious films as well, skipping the chase scenes there gives you the dumbest drama of all time)
Well, yes, and I don't watch those movies :d.
(I don't actually skip these car chases, but I do often zone out.)
This is something that really grinds my gears with the movie "Baby Driver".
Edgar Wright went to incredible trouble to set the film in Atlanta. It features Atlanta landmarks, culture, food, and dialect. It feels quintessentially Atlantan.
Despite that effort, they're constantly referring to highways and interstates with the definite article. "The 75", "the 85", "The Buford Highway". We don't do that here, and it sounds a bit like nails on a chalkboard.
It's hard to fault the film for this trivial issue, but it is amusing.
Just rattling off the action movies I can immediately think of, I don’t believe any of which include a conspiracy in their plot/synopsis. The only action movie I can think of about a conspiracy is the movie Conspiracy with Mel Gibson, got any others?
- The Last Action Hero
- Robocop
- Karate Kid
- Baby Driver
- Rocky
- The Revenant
- Mad Max
- ConAir
- Terminator
Blackkklansman was a relatively big budged film starring popular actors and made by an established director back in 2018, Spike Lee, and oh boy did he take risks. Despite being a historic drama/comedy the movie ends with the horrors of the Trump presidency. Just like Mel Brooks, the message is pretty obvious. Despite these risks this movie was aired in most big cinemas throughout the USA for several weeks (just like any other big budged drama/comedy would).
Casting: I don’t remember a time when casting didn’t cause the hate mobs to go haywire. When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger people went nuts. Some historians raised issue with the fact that Xerxes II was acted by a black man in the movie 300 despite being Persian. And I’m sure casting a black man as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar was equally controversial. Now in the era of people realizing how much representation matters, of course it is going to cause controversy if you hire an actor to play a role of a underrepresented group while the actor does not belong to said group. This didn’t used to be the case, but it is today. However this has such an obvious solution that I doubt it has hindered the production of a single movie.
> "It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise."
The times change. At one point hiring a white actor to play a black role did not stir a huge controversy, now it does. Franchises come into fashion, people get tired of them, creators move on. Just because comedy franchises aren’t big today, it doesn’t mean they are not possible. More likely is that people have seen enough sequels in other genres that they don’t want to see Baby Driver 2 no more then they like to see Dump and Dumber 5. And I think for a reason, comedy sequels tend to be pretty shitty (and I guess it makes sense, how often can you tell the same joke before it stops being funny).
I think you are over-reading into the twitter mobs. I don’t think they have as much power as you give them credit for. I think the biggest achievement of the twitter mob in the film industry was to give Sonic the Hedgehog a makeover. I don’t know of a single example where a comedy was cancelled because twitter didn’t like it. And I think comedies get made today just like they did yesteryear. And I think producers of comedies had to be careful about the subject matter before just like today. And I think they stirred controversies before, and they will continue to do so, irregardless of the political climate.
Since moving out of my parents' house ~15 years ago, I have lived without cable TV of any kind, and I miss it.
Live TV offers a 'channel surfing' experience that does not exist on streaming. I want to be able to come home from work and plop down on my couch and just turn the TV on and have something be showing. If I don't like it, I switch channels. I have discovered numerous TV shows, movies and documentaries this way, even if I come across it halfway through an episode.
It is a completely different experience from streaming, where my home screen is basically a billboard, and I have to invest time in selecting something and then start it from Season 1, Episode 1, timestamp 00:00. That seems like a big commitment for something that's recreational, especially when TV shows start off slowly to introduce all the characters.
I come to this realization every time I am in a hotel room that has cable TV. If it's 1 in the morning, I'm fine with watching the Veronica Mars movie or Baby Driver even if it started an hour ago.
They all had an established director, producers, and/or actors. It’s a safe risk because studios (from this list fox (rip)) can either bank on the casting list/director history (baby driver, the Martian, arrival) or have it as their one “cinema” film for awards season. Theres a lot missing for 10 years of film that just didn’t take off.
This is absolutely part of the American cultural bedrock. The gap-year road-trip, the teenager's first car, every single fast and furious movie... A really good recent example of this sort of meme is the movie Baby Driver. American culture equates driving with freedom, youth, and good times. Getting a car is a rite of passage in a lot of US communities.
I recommend reading the submission you're commenting on, as this is actually answered in the article:
“Sometimes we’ll start on a trailer before they’ve even started filming,” Gritton says. “We just break down the script. Then we’ll get dailies—literally everything they’ve shot, hours and hours.” The dailies are covered in ghostly watermarks and stamped with the producer’s and house’s name for security’s sake, making them nearly unwatchable and of no real use to pirates. Theoretically.
Given the extraordinary and time-consuming process of CGI, sometimes green screens, motion capture dots on actor’s faces, maybe a cardboard cutout where a dragon will eventually go are still visible in these early cuts. “We’ll pick what we think are the best takes,” Gritton says. “The majority of the time it’s not what ends up in the film, which is why you see stuff in the trailer that you may not recognize later.”
As a recent example of this, there are several trailers for Baby Driver where we hear Doc describe Baby as "Young Mozart in a go-kart," [1] but this line is never heard spoken in the film (though we do see it written on one of Baby's cassette tapes).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YirEgK7yJCg
I don’t know for most viewers, but I assume the bread and butter of these videos is to see reactions of people you don’t get to see otherwise.
For instance a kid watching a Charlie Chaplin movie for the first time, a US veteran play Doki Doki Litterature Club, or an indian gramma watching Baby Driver. It shouldn’t be predictible nor relate to you in particular.
iPods, however, were much more prevalent than other digital, portable media players. iPod Classic likely will have a comeback, as people are talking about it right now. There's was a lot of chatter when the movie Baby Driver was released, as the main character uses one, and the director talked a lot about his. Google "ipod classic nostalgia" or "ipod baby driver" to see a lot of articles.
I have seen baby driver, it was ok except large plot holes (especially around his girlfriend and boss behavior which made little sense to me by the end of movie). Dunkirk does not seem my thing, but I will check Logan, thanks.
I probably go the cinema once a year, and don't really watch much at home either, but I have some movie buff friends so I get tangential exposure to which movies are good: I just Googled what's out and the ones I've heard were very good include Dunkirk, the new Planet of the Apes, Baby Driver and The Big Sick, and Beach Rats. On top of that are the movies that I probably wouldn't enjoy seeing but that someone who likes movies would likely enjoy: Guardians of the Galaxy, Logan lucky, maybe even Wonder Woman (I just know that one's popular, but not much about how good it is).
This is just stuff that I (who doesn't even enjoy going to the movies) happen to Know about, and wouldn't mind being dragged to if a friend wanted to socialize at the cinema. I find it kind of hard to believe that "Hollywood is putting out garbage" could be true to the degree that that's the reason there's nothing you want to see.
Note that I've left out indie movies since those tend to be less accessible and more polarizing and also left out popular things like the Transformers movie.
Dunkirk Spoilers: I feel like Rotten Tomato doesn't work all the time. I watched Dunkirk, excited from the 93% on RT, and I walked out and felt disappointed. Like I get the cinematography was great, the story structure is amazing, everything a critic should be looking for was all there, but did I enjoy it? No. I thought it was boring. The movie didn't do anything to foster the relation of characters to the audience. I frankly didn't care about any of them, maybe except the Captain that stayed behind to help the French. I personally thought this was Nolan's weakest movie, although the RT score would suggest otherwise: Inception - 86%, Interstellar - 71% both of which I enjoyed way more than Dunkirk.
I think the audience score also on RT is more telling: Inception - 91% Interstellar - 85% Dunkirk - 82%
We could also take movies that people mentioned on this thread: The Dark Tower - RT: 16%, AS: 54% Baby Driver - RT: 93%, AS: 89% Baywatch - RT: 18%, AS: 60%
I also don't trust critics on the basis of people like Armond White, and since many of them do this for a living, a lot of critics can be bought.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Rotten Tomato is actually inaccurate metric for how enjoyable the movie actually is, and consumers are being misguided.
I also think theres an inherent misunderstanding of the RT score. People look at the score and think this is the quality of the movie, when in reality I think of it as a probability that I would like the movie. A score of 50% doesn't mean the movie has a failing grade, it's that when 100 critics viewed it half the critics enjoyed it and the other half didn't, so there's probably a 50% chance that I'll enjoy the movie.
I used to use Rotten Tomatoes to help select which movies I went to see. Recently I've seen some very highly ranked movies that I thought were terrible. "Baby Driver" was a 97% critics rank when I saw that movie (93% now) and I would put it at a 20. I don't really like personalized computer filter systems for what I see, but does anyone know of a site that rates current movies based on how you would rank other movies? What would be really great is to have a survey that would match me up with a movie critic.
I'm the same way.
In middle school, I was sent to the principal's office because I complained to the teacher about a painful noise and the teacher thought I was just being disruptive. There it was determined that the "silent" alarm had gone off.
I also get it when touching some glass surfaces as there's a high-pitched squeak. My parents just accused me of trying to get out of doing the dishes.
Watching the movie 'Baby Driver' was torture. In his attempt to convey to the audience what it was like to live with tinnitus, the director made the film nearly unbearable to people like us.
There's just so many instances where people who can't hear these frequencies ignore the consequences for those that can. And then they disbelieve that anyone's hearing is substantively different than their own.
Yes, that's what I do as well.
Also, I go to the movies more often to see the films I'm actually interested in.
Baby Driver was my favorite movie of the year--in fact, the best movie I've seen in many years.
Dunkirk, Detroit, and Inconvenient Sequel all good as well!
I don't agree with the 1st statement really, but if you have seen the movie Baby Driver then I can under the nostalgia you are talking about. There is still a market for old ipods like you are talking about for this reason.
Edgar Wright's new film "Baby Driver" makes virtuosic use of Queen's "Brighton Rock" in it's grand finale. Don't think I've ever witnessed that level of per-frame synchrony with every beat!