Not since Pulp Fiction, has there been a cult film as important as last year's Drive. To actualise my thoughts on it in words is beyond me, and not particularly necessary. If you're interested in some sort of criticism on both the film's depth and shallowness, then please read Mario Bauer's article over at Senses of Cinema.
Here's a (probably all too long) extract:
It is not about coup de maître, but about par excellence. Is Drive a film, i.e. what is (such) a film today? What is the interest, the singularity of its emptiness? It seems to be more crystalline, more polished, more subtracted, more self-reflexive, more paradigmatic, consciously and conscientiously committed to “the consciousness industry.” Winding Refn is very straightforward: “I am a fetish filmmaker.” Drive is pop, absolute advertising as information, “a complete combinatorial, which is that of the superficial transparency of everything,” a video, where differentiating between art-experimental and commercial appears as mere moralizing; it is a fashion/designer video, which continues to be, and is ever more so, the cultural dominant. To put it in up-to-date terms, Drive is a flickr/tumblr/hypem/vimeo aggregate or an aggregator, (1) to the point where it is completely pertinent to ask whether the film is even meant for reception in cinema theatres or rather via VLC player.
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