Jennifer Lawrence (Mother!), Shailene Woodley & Ansel Elgort (Ascendant?)

The first teaser for Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! has arrived, and it looks gloriously strange. Synopsis: A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. Aronofsky has reveled in sharing sordid little teasers, like a creepy poster for the new film that features an illustration of Lawrence holding her bloody heart in her hands.

Naturally, the poster was revealed on Mother’s Day. Mother! will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival at the end of the summer, where critics and fans will finally see the project Aronofsky has been zealously guarding. The film is selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 74th Venice International Film Festival, and is scheduled to be released on September 15, 2017, by Paramount Pictures. Source: www.vanityfair.com

Jennifer Lawrence and her filmmaker beau Darren Aronofsky have been avoiding the limelight at all costs since they got together in 2016, but the quiet couple are definitely stepping things up in their private relationship, a source tells E! News. The insider says, "Things are getting serious with them. They are so in love with each other." What really connects the two of them is their shared sense of humor, adds the source. "Jennifer always cracks jokes and Darren just gets her humor. They laugh all the time!" They may be low key but their romance is certainly heating up!

The source also said that the Oscar-winning actress and the Black Swan director, who met while filming their upcoming thriller Mother! in New Orleans, had "an amazing dynamic" on set. As for what's to come for the under-the-radar duo? The source says that the two have indeed discussed their future together but are "not in any rush to get married." However, marriage is "something Darren would love." The insider also noted that, "[Darren] adores Jennifer so much."  “He is a visionary,” the actress gushed of the director to Vanity Fair in their 2016 holiday issue. Source: www.eonline.com

A new study suggests that men and women's views diverge widely on the significance of a kiss and how a kiss can have profound consequences for romantic relationships, and can even be a major factor in ending one. In a recently published article, Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. reveal that many college students have found themselves attracted to someone, only to discover after they kissed them for the first time that they were no longer interested. "In other words," said Gallup, "While many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss, particularly the first kiss, can be a deal breaker." According to the study, kissing between sexual or romantic partners occurs in more than 90 percent of human cultures. "Kissing is part of an evolved courtship ritual," said Gallup: "When two people kiss there is a rich and complicated exchange of information involving chemical, tactile, and postural cues. This may activate evolved mechanisms that function to discourage reproduction among individuals who are genetically incompatible." Source: www.sciencedaily.com

'Ascendant' Series in the Works at Starz as 'Divergent' Franchise Moves to TV: The Divergent franchise is inching closer to continuing on the small screen.  Premium cable network Starz is developing a TV take on Ascendant, which was to be the fourth movie in the Divergent franchise. Ascendant is in its early stages of development. It's unclear if the project would reunite any of the stars of the films including Shailene Woodley, Theo James and Ansel Elgort. Lionsgate TV and Starz declined comment.

Shailene Woodley, for her part, has been open to completing the story. The actress, who stars as Tris, initially rejected the idea of doing a TV movie to wrap the franchise. "I signed up to tell the whole story of Tris, and I would love to be able to do that," she said in September: "Nothing would make me happier." Multiple stars are expected to opt out of their deals if the movie evolves into a TV series. Ascendant was originally poised to debut June 9 of this year, but after the franchise's third installment, Allegiant grossed a mere $66 million domestically, Lionsgate began to rethink its strategy for the fourth film based on Veronica Roth's book series. For Lionsgate TV, the Divergent series could be a win for the former independent studio that now has a cable network to supply content. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Divergent – There have been three installments, starring Shailene Woodley as Tris Prior, a heroine often compared to Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen, although Woodley's Tris operated in a more alternative fashion. The first two installments, Divergent in 2014 and Insurgent in 2015, were successful, generating domestically the first $150 million and the second $130 million. However, 2016’s Allegiant barely made more it’s entire domestic run — $66 million — than the previous two installments did their opening weekends.

Although Tris' love interest in the Divergent saga was Four (Theo James), Ansel Elgort (who played Tris' brother Caleb) and Miles Teller (playing her antagonist Peter Hayes) also shared great chemistry with Shailene, and both actors would become her love interests, in The Fault in Our Stars and The Spectacular Now, respectively.

Shailene mentioned her favorite scene in The Fault in Our Stars was Hazel and Augustus consummating their relationship at a hotel room in Amsterdam. Elgort added: "We really can call it a love scene and not a sex scene—it's not lust, it's real love." Which on-screen sex scene did Shailene enjoy most: The Spectacular Now with Miles Teller or The Fault in Our Stars with Ansel Elgort? "Um," she said, "both different. I guess Ansel smells more pheromone-y and Miles smells more delicious—is delicious an appropriate word to say for a man?"

Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort just won Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards 2015. "It's so much fun, cause I've always wanted to make out with my brother," Woodley jokingly told E! News. On a more serious note, Woodley admitted she was surprised Elgort got the part. "I actually didn't think at first that he would get it, because of our relationship in Divergent," Woodley admitted. But when the pair did a screen test together, Elgort blew the casting team away.

"Everybody in the room was sort of like: wow," a very proud Woodley gushed. And it seems Elgort enjoyed kissing his co-star so much that he offered to sub for her new love interest, Theo James, as they filmed their forthcoming flick, Insurgent. 'I asked Theo if it was alright to kiss Shailene because he wasn’t feeling well,' Ansel said during a press day for Insurgent in Los Angeles. "We were very comfortable with one another going into The Fault in Our Stars," Elgort said.

"Immediately we are totally comfortable which is nice, because sometimes you do love scenes with people and you have to kiss them and you have to be romantic and it could be very awkward. But we totally understand one another. Me and Shailene have a really platonic relationship. She's one of the best actors right now around, the fact that they put me with her twice is a huge compliment to me. It's given me confidence and made me feel great." Source: people.com

At 18, amid his professional debut in the off-Broadway play Regrets, Ansel Elgort was the focus of a breathless Vogue story about his journey so far: “Ansel Elgort radiates the brooding magnetism of James Dean,” the piece claimed, “uplifted by a kind of glinting purity”, earmarking him as one to watch.

“I don’t walk around calling attention to myself,” Ansel Elgort recently told Billboard Magazine: “It’s important to be able to blend in, otherwise you turn into a Hollywood douchebag. I’m sure plenty of people think I am one, too. I’m super easy to hate. But it’s fine. It’s hard to be liked and successful.” Edgar Wright gave these reasons why he chose Elgort for Baby Driver: “The thing that really charmed me about him was the fact that he’s very musical, and he can play lots of instruments. Ansel is actually obsessed with music. And also he’s a great actor and a nice guy.”  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Stephen King's "It", "The Dark Tower", "Carrie"

The running time of Stephen King adaptation It has been confirmed - and fans should prepare for an onslaught of sustained terror. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) website reveals that the duration of the long-awaited horror film is a sizable 135 minutes meaning audiences will have to put up with the evil Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) for two hours plus - good news for fans of the source material considering King's novel spans well over 1,000 pages. It will be released on September 8, 2017.

There's another King adaptation to come ahead of It. Later this month, 18 August, The Dark Tower - starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey - will be released, the confirmed running time of which (95 minutes) caused concern among fans despite getting the nod from Stephen King. Source: www.independent.co.uk

In the last few years alone, we’ve had a new-new Spider-Man, a new Batman, a new Power Rangers movie, a revival of “Full House,” “One Day at a Time,” “Arrested Development,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Samurai Jack,” and The Mummy, as well as variously faithful adaptations of Archie Comics, Anne of Green Gables, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast. Remakes are nothing new, but the type of remakes in development these days consistently emerge under a cloud of 'Dark and Edgy.' Who are these reboots for? Are they doing so to attract that elusive, all-important Millennial viewer, capable of blowing up a show’s popularity with a single tweet? Or are they hoping to capitalize on the nostalgia of Generations X and Baby Boomer, in order to create a wider audience ? 

The present-day contexts in which “Riverdale,” and “Anne with an E” are located also differ wildly from when they were originally introduced. When Archie, Anne, and the Power Rangers first showed up, their audience was largely children. But even though the CW is for teens, it’s still watched by plenty of adults, who recap its shows and write critical think pieces on them. Would a “Riverdale” that matched the precise tone of the comics — light, happy, slapstick, non-serialized — even be greenlighted, even if it was no longer a period piece?

Archie Andrews first popped up in the 1940s - 1950s, and was supposed to be reminiscent of popular movie star Mickey Rooney. By the time he got his own series, he and his world were perfectly suited to the ideals of the era: a bright, clean town, everyone declaratively heterosexual, front lawns, nuclear families, America as the greatest — a wholesome, idyllic vision of the United States. “Riverdale” (2017) in contrast, responds to a very different world, of the recent television landscape. If “Gossip Girl” were being made today, surely it too would have a murder mystery thrown in as well. Source: theawl.com

If De Palma’s vintage masterpiece Carrie (1976) was one part adolescent dream, three parts nightmare, with a sly streak of satire unning through it, Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie (2013) is a more earnest take on the story that should connect with contemporary teens. Aimed at captivating a new generation of viewers unfamiliar with the tale of a cruelly unloved high schooler who unleashes telekinetic revenge on her classmates, Peirce’s version (with her impressively coherent vision) eschews De Palma’s voluptuous style in favor of a somber, straight-faced retelling. Certainly there’s a case to be made for revisiting “Carrie”, given the alarming prevalence of cyber bullying in the post-Columbine era. Chief among the film’s selling points are an intensely committed Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, enacting a subtler, more psychologically insidious take on the mother-daughter relationship immortalized by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. 

Chloe Moretz, though superficially deglammed with a strawberry-blonde mop, is still rather too comely to resemble the pimply, slightly overweight figure described in Stephen King’s novel, and her efforts to look downcast and withdrawn strain credulity at first. Still, the actress is canny and sympathetic enough that she eventually slips under Carrie’s skin. And when she puts on that dress and strolls into the prom on the arm of handsome Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort), it’s hard not to feel a rush of bittersweet emotion, as well as anticipatory dread, as this Cinderella story proceeds to go terribly wrong. 

A delicately winning turn from Ansel Elgort as Sue’s boyfriend, Tommy, who Sue convinces to take Carrie to the prom, movingly displays the transition from charity to sincerity. And not in a “She’s All That” kind of way. Both the hateful Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday) and conflicted good girl Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde) are fleshed out with a touch more nuance than usual.

Carrie spends time cultivating her telekinetic powers, in “Exorcist”-style levitation scenes that suggest the origin story of a comicbook superheroine, or a more adult version of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda.” De Palma’s luridly funny sensibility is little in evidence; Peirce has excised every dirty chuckle and whisper of camp from the material, nudging the story in a more textured, realistic direction.  Source: variety.com

Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Romance, JFK

Shailene Woodley is a Hollywood actress, climate advocate and board member of Our Revolution, a Bernie Sanders-affiliated advocacy group. She supports 100% renewable energy for the future with these words: Every person on this planet has one thing in common, the need for clean air and water. Right now, our nation is at a crossroads. Fossil fuel companies have pressured members of Congress into denying that climate change exists and is caused by human behavior.

These corporations think that Americans won’t notice when their water is polluted and their farm lands are covered in oil. Americans who care about clean air and water must come together now to support increasing our country’s use of renewable energy. Now is the time to create a just transition away from fossil fuel consumption to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Oil, natural gas and coal are finite.

America is one of the most dynamic and inventive countries in the world. The reason we haven’t stopped climate change isn’t because we aren’t trying, it’s because a small subsection of the 1 percent are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo. America has the technology, the workforce and the need to transition our energy grid away from fossil fuels to 100 percent sustainability as soon as possible. Renewable energy advocates in Congress are working to make that happen — Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sander (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) recently introduced S. 987, the “100 By ‘50 Act,” named for the goal of transitioning our nation to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. Source: thehill.com

Here’s what our 35th president might have said about the challenges of energy transition and the opportunities in clean energy: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” "Kennedy was able and willing to embrace industry and the environment at the same time," said Joshua Fershee, an associate professor at the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University. "The way he talked about things was unique, it was evolutionary." Early in his administration, President Kennedy was willing to take on multiple industries and make clear that the government would support and facilitate projects that were in the best interests of the country, not particular constituencies. President John. F. Kennedy, Feb. 23, 1961: “From the beginning of civilization, every nation’s basic wealth and progress has stemmed in large measure from its natural resources.  This nation has been, and is now, especially fortunate in the blessings we have inherited.  Our entire society rests upon—and is dependent upon—our water, our land, our forests, and our minerals.  How we use these resources influences our health, security, economy, and well-being.” —"Atomic Power, Fossil Fuels, and the Environment:  Lessons Learned and The Lasting Impact of the Kennedy Energy Policies" (2009) by Joshua P. Fershee

“Baby Driver” star Ansel Elgort has signed on to play John F. Kennedy in the drama “Mayday 109,” scripted by Samuel Franco & Evan Kilgore, based on the 1943 sinking of Kennedy’s PT boat during World War II. Kennedy was the commander of patrol torpedo boat PT 109 in the South Pacific when it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer Amagin, killing two crewmen. With the crew presumed dead by allies, Kennedy led the 11 survivors in swimming to a deserted island, where the crew had to hide from passing Japanese barges.

Kennedy swam over two miles to two other islands in search of help and food, then led his men to Olasana Island, which had coconut trees and drinkable water, before they were rescued. He and his shipmates engaged friendly locals and after scrawling an SOS on a coconut, they were finally located by rescuers. “We could not be more excited about Ansel coming aboard,” producer Basil Iwanyk said, per Deadline.

“Not only is he a tremendous actor, he embodies the charisma, athleticism and looks of a young JFK. We love that this is not a bio-pic nor a film about politics. This is simply a riveting and unbelievable tale that very few people know—about a young man who was a hero long before becoming the iconic 35th President of the United States. With Ansel, we’ve found our perfect JFK.” Source: variety.com

No one can play the 35th President and emerge fully unscathed. They either don’t look right or they overdo the accent or both. Elgort’s main advantage is that he’s matinee-idol handsome and slender like Kennedy, although he’s slightly disadvantaged by being too tall at 6′ 3″. Elgort would have made a note-perfect Han Solo — he’s got the slightly brash attitude, the smug assurance and the guy-ness. Han Solo movie directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord, not to mention producer Kathy Kennedy and the Disney brass, were dead blind not to see this. Instead they hired a 5′ 9″, beady-eyed Rabbinical student with a gloomy countenance (Alden Ehrenreich).

Ansel Elgort, who resembles the young Marlon Brando of the mid ’40s, is the anchor and owner of Baby Driver. Lily James is almost terrific as a heart-of-gold manic pixie waitress whom Baby falls for early on. The noirishly cool baddies are played with great flair by Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm (best thing he’s done since Mad Men), Jamie Foxx (a little too hostile and crazy), Jon Bernthal and Eiza González. However this strange-sounding Mayday 109 project turns out, Ansel Elgort is definitely a movie star in the wings.

After seeing The Fault In Our Stars three years ago I wrote that “Elgort’s charm and charisma has a lulling effect… I sat there saying to myself, this guy’s got it.” He has that X-factor quality, he just does, and one thing strongly in his favor is that he’s acquired a rep as a bit of a scamp. If you ask me, anyone who doesn’t play the game as ordered by the PC banshees is doing something right, and especially if they inspire Jezebel articles that seem to take exception to some of his interview comments. Source: www.hollywoodelsewhere.com

—Ansel Elgort on Shailene Woodley: Shailene is very different. I wouldn't use her as an example of what most women are like. She hates people pleasing. She wishes the world could be a place where we could be really honest and true to our emotions.

For a generation of young women, Ansel Elgort may always be Augustus Waters, the cancer-stricken heartthrob in the heartbreaking romance The Fault in Our Stars. Gus is basically Prince Charming with an iPhone. It turns out Elgort is a hopeless romantic too, often speaking as if he's been sprung from a Shakespearean sonnet. If he is so in touch with his emotions, perhaps that's because he graduated from Manhattan's LaGuardia High School Of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and spent his summers at Stagedoor Manor, the storied theater camp in the Catskills. The dude knows drama.

—Ansel Elgort: I'm not a playboy. I like to go on really nice dates... I go to nice dinners. I prefer being with a girlfriend longterm. I prefer to be with someone I can trust. I'm more into that. My mom is very romantic. As is my dad. They appreciate real romance. I like romanticizing romance. I think I could say this: If you like someone and the sex is really good and you enjoy spending time together, why wouldn't you make that person your girlfriend? Why go around dating random girls and having terrible sex when you can be with someone you really like? Source: www.elle.com

Ansel Elgort and his girlfriend Violetta Komyshan (his high-school sweetheart whom he started to date at LaGuardia High in 2012).

RIP Barbara Sinatra, Ava: A Life in Movies

Barbara Sinatra passed away on Tuesday at her home in California. The former model and fourth wife of Frank Sinatra was 90, and had been in declining for several months. Barbara became one of the most famous women in the world when she married Sinatra in 1976, spending 22 years with the singer before he passed away in 1998 at the age of 82 from a heart attack. She leveraged the fame afforded to her by way of her marriage to raise funds and rally support for a number of charitable causes, most notably the Barbara Sinatra Children's Center at Eisenhower Medical Center.

Barbara divorced Zeppo Marx in 1973, at which point she and Sinatra had already made a very public display of their relationship. She said it her way: The star, seen here in 2005, wrote about Frank in her tell-all autobiography "Lady Blue Eyes" (2011). Barbara converted to Roman Catholicism before marrying Frank in 1976, with the two enjoying a long and happy union. Barbara had previously told the Desert Sun she was never sure why Frank wanted to marry her instead of another star like Ava Gardner or Mia Farrow. 'I’ve tried to analyze it,' she said. 'I think it’s because we were friends before anything romantic happened. He would call and chat, but it wasn’t romantic until later. It’s something you can’t explain why or how it happened.'

There is no one Frank trusted more however, which was made very clear in his final will and testament, which left almost everything to Barbara. She received over $3million, three California mansions (in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Palm Springs), the rights to Sinatra's legendary 'Trilogy' recordings and complete control over her husband's name and likeness. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

For more information about Barbara Sinatra, please read my previous post Frank Sinatra biographies: Mr. Ol' Blue Eyes and Lady Blue Eyes

Ava, a Life in Movies (2017), a new biography by Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, delves into the late screen siren’s colorful life, on and offscreen.  From her wild affair and marriage with Sinatra to her other rocky romances here are some of the most fascinating details about the woman who won the hearts of movie audiences and some of Hollywood’s most famous leading men. She was divorced twice before the age of 25.

“She was more than just a sex symbol or Mrs. Frank Sinatra or this crazy hard-drinking person,” Bean says. Bean’s co-author Uzarowski echoes this sentiment: “She was a real person, and she was an actor as well. There is a legacy there that needs to be looked at. It’s not just image.” For Gardner, image and glamour are central to her identity; after all, it was a photograph that first earned her a ticket to Hollywood. The authors compare her to Marilyn Monroe in this regard, with Uzarowski noting, “There exists this very one-dimensional view of her as just this unbelievably beautiful person.” “She just had a really keen sense of humor. She didn’t take life too seriously,” Bean says.

Sinatra was still married when he dated Ava, and the book recounts a time when an insistent Gardner made the crooner drive to his house, where he phoned his wife Nancy asking her to confirm to the actress that he had asked her for a divorce. Though Nancy initially refused to give in, she eventually granted Sinatra a divorce and he married Gardner in 1951. She had two abortions while married to Sinatra: While the two traveled to Nairobi for Gardner’s role in Mogambo, Gardner became pregnant with Sinatra’s child and chose to have an abortion after Sinatra left, without telling him. 

Sinatra was reportedly crushed when he found out about the abortion, but the two continued to try to make their difficult relationship work. When Gardner became pregnant again and decided to terminate it, Sinatra was there when she woke up with “tears streaming down his face.” The two would go on to have multiple affairs with others before divorcing in 1957, though they remained close friends until her death in 1990. By merging the image of a woman renowned for her physical beauty with a nuanced study of her life and career, the book forces readers to look beyond Gardner's exterior star persona. “It puts her in a wider cultural context, and that was very important for us,” Bean says. Source: www.laweekly.com

‘Baby Driver’ Strikes the Right Notes

“The linkage of musical passage and unreason is a philosophical commonplace… of course music speaks through mere sensations without concepts, and hence does not, like poetry, leave behind something for reflection, yet it moves the mind in more manifold ways and, though only temporarily, in deeper ways…” —Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement

Baby Driver (2017) is a heist and dark-comedy hybrid, as well as a musical thriller written and directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), featuring a baby-faced antihero whose insouciant attitude vaguely echoes James Dean for the millenial generation. Baby (Ansel Elgort) is an outcast prodigy who keeps the rhythm at the wheel—even during an impossible car chase or after a botched bank robbery—all the while  strategically synchronizing oldies from his iPod. The soundtrack serves not only to underline the emotions that the main characters (Baby’s partners in crime) want to communicate in certain key scenes—the songs add further momentum just like in classic musical movies.

The eclectic track selection mixes the frantic action scenes and the romance subplot with the melodies of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Beck, T. Rex, The Detroit Emeralds, Martha & The Vandellas, R.E.M., Queen, Barry White, Simon & Garfunkel, etc.

A very precious moment is the introduction of Debora (Lily James) while The Beach Boys’ tune Let’s Go Away For Awhile resonates inside the diner—that instant brings out the nostalgia factor, which will prove to be crucial for the resolution of the story. Debora is a charming young waitress who shares with Baby her dreams of escaping into another world, by etching in his mind the ‘open road’ leitmotif as a 1950’s retro postcard.

Throughout the film, Baby seems to be trapped in Doc’s criminal enterprise in order to pay off an old debt. Doc (Kevin Spacey) is a calculating mastermind who doesn’t ever hire the same gang twice for his planned heists, but feels a special bond with the inscrutable Baby. Spacey gives a menacingly laconic performance, reminiscent of his manipulative manager John Williamson in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Despite Doc and Baby’s power imbalance, Doc persistently courts the ultracool chauffeur’s respect and friendship. Buddy and Darling (played by Jon Hamm and Eiza González) are a romantic couple of crooks plagued with an addiction to sex, drugs, and luxury. Their constant displays of trashy affection and sympathy towards Baby’s plight (tinnitus or ‘hum in the drum’ due to a childhood car accident) turn them into sort of his surrogate parents for a while.

Edgar Wright’s major influences in Baby Driver are Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), and Quentin Tarantino’s blend of pop culture references angled towards bursts of violence. The central ingenious gimmick in Wright’s story, however, hinges on an underlying commentary of how most of us periodically file in our memory a meaningful song of our choice to drown out the reality’s adversities. Debora lost her mother and now aspires to “head west on 20 in a car I can’t afford, with a plan I don’t have, just me, my music, and the road.”

Related to this aspect of taking refuge in nostalgic music as a means of survival, Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (2010) expounds: “All musicians have always proceeded by drawing their own diagonal, however fragile, outside coordinates and localizable connections, in order to float a mutant sound block down a liberated line. In order to unleash, in space, a haecceity.” This understated philosophy, sprinkled underneath the choreography of spectacular getaways and flippant non-sequitur jokes, makes Baby Driver trascend the ‘fun summer blockbuster’ label.

Not quite so obvious as the intermittent allusions to Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, True Romance), Walter Hill (Streets of Fire), Michael Mann (Heat) or Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), but equally powerful is the absurdist undertone that connects Wright’s film to Vanishing Point (a post-Woodstock road movie influenced conceptually by Kerouac’s mythical On the Road). In addition to this context, Baby Driver (1981) is a novel written by Jack Kerouac’s daughter Jan Kerouac, and although her narrative style is often gloomy (opposite to Wright’s sunny touch), both stories share similar strokes of hopeful obstinacy.

In a tender scene with his foster-care father, Baby fixes a peanut butter sandwich while the piano music starts a descending octave. In Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver, the heroine bravely recalls: “At Bellevue, the girls had given me a hard time. I had been thrown into a pit of rational vipers. They plastered my head with cold cream, peanut butter and talcum powder, expecting me to resist. But I sat there shrugging vacantly beneath their slopping blobs.”

Also, there is a parallel with the love interest instigating mutual desertion of an oppressive past. In the Baby Driver novel: “I was despairing over my star-crossed affair with Paul. The desire to get out and see him filled my spirit, leaving rom for nothing else. Paul brought me a red chiffon nightie with black lace to cheer me up. I wore it around that night, lost in imageries of my own, tiptoeing through the halls with a faraway look on my face.”

In Wright’s film, Debora, a flawed underachiever girl, is seen in Baby’s eyes as an angel who will be waiting for him forever. “I got all the time in the world,” she assures him. Baby’s childish magnetism seduces the sexy Debora, especially in the diner and laundromat scenes. Their romance is indeed ‘love at first sight… and sound,’ having Baby found a woman who—like his aspiring singer dead mother—will love him unconditionally. To Ansel Elgort’s credit, he can look detached and warm at once, being capable of fleshing out an old-school antihero without unnecessary mocking gestures or a sense of false superiority.

The erotic tension between Elgort and James is sincere and palpable, despite of their innocent stares and kisses. Indeed, the film would have benefitted from developing Debora’s persona a little more, since Lily James creates such a delightful character. Maybe Wright wants us to remember her just like an angel, standing before a gleaming classic convertible, a white 1954 Cadillac Eldorado.

Article published previously as Movie Review: ‘Baby Driver’ Strikes the Right Notes on Blogcritics.