so the oscars have now happened, & ive dont bloody well to watch everything i can before it, & one of the few missing off my list is Drive My Car (also so is best picture winner coda darn you apple). & its really hard to find. However my local cinema is showing it at 7:30pm on the tuesday after the oscars in screen 3, my favourite screen fo theirs, so cheers to my boss for the voucher. I hope this is good & not just long for the hell of it.

so theres about 45 seats at screen 3 & each row had at least 2 people in. The row behind me had the most millennials in 4 to be exact, who i had a chat to when i arrived as i recognised one of them from the quiz night (years ago i miss our film quizzes) & they said ahh where are the rest of your lot & then said they were doing the award season list too, so that was nice to see them again (i did mention letterboxd to them)

Trailers unbearable weight (yes), Morbius (booked for thursday) the lost city (yes) & Downton (nope) so not bad that list really.

& then the film started… yea i can see why this won best international film & was up for best picture last week, i can so see that. It was very clever & very well done.

It was long, very long. I mean i know foreign films that are usually up for oscars usually are, but this was long. I mean you know how films usually show you about 5 maybe 10 min of a film & then put up like the directors name to say the film has started… Drive my car did that 40minutes in… FORTY MINUTES BEFORE THE FILM STARTS! We had already had a (spoiler but wont say who) death & betrayal & accident in that time & then the film decides to start. I mean yes that does then mean the film is only 2h20min long (still long) but you know. I mean thats balls to do that it really is.

One thing that helped but also hindered it was all of the different languages. To go from Japanese, to Korean, Mandarin, Korean sign language & then suddenly the sub titles disappeared & someone started speaking English… what the hell. I wasnt expecting that. I had to get my head around why different people didnt understand others. It was very weird.

Im pretty sure i missed some bits & the context for not speaking the languages (other than english) in the subtitles. There may have been some sarcasm & jokes i missed, but it wasnt that kind of film, but some of that is missed in translation.

Someone in my little screening at one point leapt up & screamed after a very quiet scene before it was then followed by a large gun shot, the guys behind me from the film quiz had a little laugh at that. It wasnt that startling so didnt require that kind of reaction. That same person read out the warning before the film & went strong sex, how can they do that. Why would you say that out loud at a cinema seriously. The comments just flowed from around the room at them.

The strong sex was very random especially as we didnt actually get an explanation until about 10miutes after it happened & then after that it happened again. What a weird way to write a screen play for TV. whatever floats your boat tho.

There was some very nice cinematography. I mean there could have been a few more nicer bits of the road they drove on, but we got that nearer the end of the film. There is one shoot of them both smoking in the car with the cigarettes out being held out of the sun roof, i bloody loved that. Thats when a film becomes art.

A lot of this must have been shoot during the pandemic. He parked at an airport & could pick any gap at all. Hardly any other cars on the road at all. If it wasnt they didnt need to shut that many roads or stuff to make it look like that, i would have worked better with more traffic.

He did love that car, he really did, but was it actually down to the accident that he could drive it? Nope. Just a plot devices to hear another struggled story. That was the only extra thing we picked up from that. Otherwise other than the last trip he would have done the same thing if he was driving himself.

There were points where there were some very personal heart-breaking storys which when reading i was like oh wow really, but because it was so wordy, i had to concentrate on that & not the actual acting in the film. & the life lessons that came from those storys were very good too.

I didnt like the actual end of the film, like the last few shoots. The bit before it was nice but nah that gave me more questions than answers, that i didnt have already. I will chat with you about it once youve seen it.

Overall this was a good film, but it was too long & due to the subtitles i think i missed some bits & connotations that were said. Worth it to complete your award season list, but other than that, unless you like foreign language films & art, it probably wont be for you. Im glad ive seen it.