The title takes its cue from the song of the same name, by Simon and Garfunkel, and contains both the identity and the job description of the hero. He is a driver, and he is called Baby (Ansel Elgort). Things could be worse, I guess. He could be Cecilia.

  1. The French director Bertrand Tavernier has a memory that would trounce any reference book, yet one virtue of his new documentary, “My Journey Through French Cinema.
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My Journey Through French Cinema (2017) Movie Photo

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I made my way through Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, Lemmings, Winter Olympics: Lillehammer 94 (my absolute favorite), and Tengen World Cup Soccer (my other. A beautiful wedding blog full of inspiration for brides and those planning a wedding.

Or a fair- haired guy called Scarborough. Baby is a getaway driver. Time and again, he is hired by a villain named Doc (Kevin Spacey), who says of him, “He’s a good kid, and a devil behind the wheel. What the hell else more do you need to know?” Near the start of the film, we find Baby in a Santa- red Subaru, waiting for robbers to sprint from a bank with their swag.

Soon, they are off, with the law in pursuit, and Baby fulfills all the civic duties that regular moviegoers are taught to expect: the hand- brake turn, complete with crying tires and a gasp of rubbery smoke; the daring dart through cross traffic, at a stoplight, that causes the chasing police car to crunch into the flank of another vehicle; and an old- school race up the wrong side of a freeway. If you can avoid bumping fenders with Jason Bourne, Smokey, the Bandit, the Blues Brothers, and the entire cast of “Ronin,” so much the better. Even at this early and very bracing stage of “Baby Driver,” I worried that the smell of gasoline might be overpowered by the pungent aroma of the rehash. Pumping fresh life into a car chase, or a shoot- out, is not easy; every trick has already been tried, and the joy of “Hot Fuzz” lay in its hyperawareness of that fact (“You ain’t seen .

The joke was that middle- class Englishmen, in a country town, were temporarily swept up into a tumult of American pop culture, whereas the inhabitants of “Baby Driver” behave as if they rightfully belong in such a world, and where’s the joke in that? The one person who gets the point—who realizes how secondhand the proceedings are—is Doc. There’s no sense that he is entering this diner, in this particular spot, as Marty Mc. Fly does, in “Back to the Future.” Rather, we feel that we are on a movie set, and the ensuing dialogue does nothing to curb that impression, as Debora confides that her dream is to “head west on 2.

I can’t afford, with a plan I don’t have.” Before long, she becomes a pawn in Doc’s thieving game; issuing murky threats against her, he persuades Baby to pull one more job—a post- office raid, in the unsavory company of Bats (Jamie Foxx), Buddy (Jon Hamm), and Darling (Eiza Gonz. Amid the starry cast, the most natural performance comes from Allison King, who has a couple of short scenes as a teller in the post office. It isn’t just that she seems kindly, and genuinely vexed when danger looms; it’s also that, alone in a landscape of posturing, she makes no effort to be cool. Would that the same could be reported of Ansel Elgort. My, does he give it everything—strutting and gliding, along sidewalks and into shops, during the opening credits, as if treading in the red- booted footsteps of John Travolta, at the start of “Saturday Night Fever.” The regrettable truth is that Baby’s a dull boy.

Or maybe not. His voice is papery, he appears to think that sunglasses are still chic, and, if his movements have any snap, it is supplied by the editing. Though the screenplay gives him a halfhearted backstory about being with his parents, as a child, when they died in a car crash (and that would make him want to become a driver?), most of his motives remain a blur; given a chance to flee, he hesitates, not because, like Ryan O’Neal in “The Driver,” or Ryan Gosling in “Drive,” he runs in some existential groove of his own devising but because he’s barely a character at all. He’s an agglomeration of tics and style tips. Suffering from tinnitus (“a hum in the drum,” Doc calls it), he seldom pulls the buds from his ears, explaining to Debora, “I’ve got different i. Pods for different days and moods.” Not since Daniel Craig showed off his Omega to Eva Green, in “Casino Royale,” has a product been placed with such tender solicitude. Watch Online Free Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 (2017). The good news is that, although “Baby Driver” is not much of a movie, it is an excellent music video—a club sandwich for the senses, lavishly layered with more than thirty songs. These include the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, T.

Rex, Queen, Golden Earring, Barry White, the Damned, the Commodores, and, for funk’s sake, the Incredible Bongo Band. Sometimes, as on an album, one track simply fades out and makes way for the next, with events onscreen bustling to keep up; most telling of all is the sequence in which Baby, listening intently to a tune of his choice, advises his comrades, poised to jump out of the car and to start robbing, to wait until the beat kicks in.

There are nights when that kind of rush is all you require from a film, but I still prefer the Edgar Wright who made the London- based “Shaun of the Dead”—less frantic, less hip, but so much funnier, and more lovingly planted in a place that he knew well enough to mock. I look at his new movie and all I can think of are the words of Robert Mitchum, in “Out of the Past”: Baby, I don’t care. The French director Bertrand Tavernier has a memory that would trounce any reference book, yet one virtue of his new documentary, “My Journey Through French Cinema,” is that it makes no attempt to be encyclopedic.

To be sure, it lasts more than three hours, and it covers a huge stretch of ground, from Jean Vigo, in the nineteen- thirties, to Claude Sautet, who was still making films in the nineties. Along the way, Tavernier digs up works so obscure that the hardiest of cin. Yet much is omitted, and the film is defined by the stamp of his personal passions, by undimmable humor, and by recollections of his own time in the trade. Long before he created “A Sunday in the Country” (1. Life and Nothing But” (1.

Tavernier was a press agent. He was present when Carlo Ponti, a producer on Godard’s “Contempt” (1. Brigitte Bardot. And he reveals that Sautet, during the shooting of the sombre “Classe Tous Risques” (1. Lino Ventura, during meals, to insure that he didn’t eat too much.

His character was meant to be in decline. Tavernier was a war child, born in Lyon.

He remembers being three years old, in September, 1. French and American troops. In his mind, those lights merged with the no less sacred glow of the cinema screen, when he was taken to the movies. Such illumination, he says, “symbolized in a way the hope that I sensed around me.” The whole documentary is lit by that generous phrase. He is rarely corrosive, opting instead for a just assessment of the figures who troubled and inspired him.

For instance, he notes the alarming political swerves of Jean Renoir, citing “despicable” letters that the director wrote to a minister in the Vichy government, in 1. Popular Front. Yet Tavernier remains awed by Renoir’s grasp of improvisation, “as if the camera just happened to be there,” and happily concedes that, when confronted by “Grand Illusion” (1. I felt I was seeing another type of cinema.”What lingers from this journey, crammed with clips, is not Tavernier’s tributes to fellow- directors, such as Jean- Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker—whose “Casque d’Or” (1.

Tavernier, “flexes emotion as you flex your muscles”—so much as his regard for less famous names, like the composer Maurice Jaubert, who was killed early in the war, at the age of forty. In works as lyrical as Julien Duvivier’s “Un Carnet de Bal” (1. Vigo’s “L’Atalante” (1. Jaubert demonstrated that a score, in Tavernier’s words, “should find the heart of a film. It should come in when words can no longer translate emotions. Music prolongs them.” Watch the slow- motion waltz from Duvivier’s movie, and try not to melt. Homage is paid, above all, to Jean Gabin, who bestrode French films with a nobility that has no exact equivalent on the American screen.

It would be a shame if the film were to be seen only by those already interested in French cinema. Anyone with an eye for grace, industry, resilience, rich shadows, and strong cigarettes should go along. Like the kid on that terrace in Lyon, you see the light.