Once Upon a Pair of Wheels

Wow, somehow I forgot to blog Baby Driver (2017) when I saw it last year! How could that have happened? It was one of the best movies of the year!

It stars Adam Driver - wait, no. It stars Ansel Elgort as Baby. We meet him driving getaway for a heist. Like in Drive, he works with headphones on, and his choice of travellin' music is the trashy, high-energy "Bell Bottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. We find out that he is working for Kevin Spacey (eww), and he has tinnitus - he wears the headphones to keep the ringing in his ears down to a comfortable level.

In between jobs, Baby meets a waitress in a diner, Lily James. They bond over his name and all the songs that feature it - like "B-A-B-Y" by Carla Thomas. Soon, Baby is dreaming of dropping everything and just running away, once he has paid the debt to Spacey that keeps him tied to the life of crime.

As a regular heist movie, this is pretty fun. Baby is an interesting character, retiring behind his headphones and limited hearing. He lives with his foster father, a deaf black man played by CJ Jones, a deaf actor. The gangs that Spacey puts together are interesting, including Flea, Jon Berhthal, Jamie Foxx, and John Hamm, as well as Hamm's killer wife, Eiza Gonzalez.

But the best part is the action - director Edgar Wright cuts the action to the music. For instance, in a shoot out, every gunshot is right on a drumbeat, so the guns become a percussion section. Since the music is also great (some thrash, some alt-rock, some R&B, and "Radar Love"), this makes for a fun, propulsive movie.

There are some Wrightian touches, like long single-take shots of someone walking through city streets, while signs and graffiti echo the lyrics of the sound track. That's just for fun. So is the rest of the film.