Pictureland

B-A-B-Y-DRI-VER!  Edgar Wright's sixth film has arrived in the summer of 2017 with all the insistence and irresistibility of a great pop song.  Already in his splashy career the Englishman has written better tunes than this. And yet Baby Driver pulses with more precision and originality of expression than most of his contemporaries can approach at their best.   Resist if you dare.  As summer fare goes, fast, furious and not lobotomized is hard to pass up. Wright has apparently had the notion for Baby Driver bouncing around in that energetic mind of his since the 1990s.  You can see a version of the film's first scene in a music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" Wright directed in 2003.  The super kinetic action is certainly a perfect fit for the writer/director's crisp editing, wit and inimitable unison of sound and action. Baby Driver both charges from the start line and yet saves it feeling for character and emotion for a bit later. ...

If you find yourself in Los Angeles with no more pressing decisions than where you shall take your first meal of the day, which film you will see and where...if you are the beneficiary of this unaccountable good fortune, you better get out there and try to live the day as well as you can. So you trail along the controlled jungle of your motel's courtyard, various of the guests placed about a metal patio table or contentedly prostrate in pool deck chairs beneath the strengthening sun.  You pass through the vestibule of this establishment that could write pulp novels with what it has seen and emerge through the motel's curiously plantation-like facade (the face whitewashed, a broad expanse of porch and a row of imposing, unfluted columns).  Into the the Los Angeles morning!  Well, the late morning at least.   You emerge again from the Hollywood and Vine Metro station and decide as the day's voyage is beginning you will seek augury in the stars set into the...