Cinematic Car Chases

I've yet to go see "One Battle After Another" for a second time (but I'm trying to figure out how to take Corrie with me), but I've been ruminating on the car chases. 

Before seeing the film I'd heard about the wild and original take on a car chase, similar to hearing about the journey through music that we take in Sinners before seeing it---when it happens, I remember thinking, 'Oh, here it is.'

But there are two visceral car chase sequences, one very early, and another much later, likely to become known as The Chase. The first one is less about being chased than it is about getting away, if that makes sense, but you feel it as you watch it. Later on, The Chase is on a whole different playing field, and has callbacks to Bullit.

But that whole enterprise got me thinking about some of movie's better car chase scenes. Obviously Bullit ranks as the originator of the vocabulary, or at least gets credit for it. How it gets filmed, though, is practical and original, and so exciting to see in context in a film that shows its era: it demands you pay attention. When the follower becomes the followed, and the driver snaps his seatbelt, you're tense with anticipation---you know it's going to get crazy.

When Gene Hackman as Popeye is chasing the J train's elevated tracks down Broadway in Brooklyn in The French Connection, you can feel the true danger, since they filmed it without permits. The exhilaration comes from that real peril.

I've see the opening chase scene in Baby Driver, and while I think the cinematic nature of the chase looks nice, I find the getaway highly annoying. He keeps running into cops! He never gets away until the maneuver with the two other red cars and the overpass. I heard about it and saw it very soon after the opening chase sequence in Drive, which I found far superior as a realistic approach to chase scenes goes. It's how it would play out in reality, or at least I could be convinced as much. It's not flashy, a full daylight bank robbery getaway like Baby Driver...Drive is the dive bar that pours its gut-rot scotch into the PBR can for the five-dollar boilermaker, while Baby Driver is an overpriced bar at a themed restaurant in Las Vegas.

Maybe my reaction to the realistic quality in Drive contrasts to the glee I get watching all the cop cars that get destroyed in Blues Brothers. Or how about the general entire movies that are essentially car chases, besides Blues Brothers: Smokey and the Bandit; Road Warrior and Fury Road; all the Cannonball Run movies...

But that brings me back to realism and originality, two things I found in Bullit, The French Connection, Drive, and this new classic, One Battle After Another. All four of these look nothing alike, and feel both realistic and original.