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SALT LAKE CITY -- One of the best reviewed films of the year is now in a lawsuit due to what the plantiff claims is "false advertising."
Ryan Gosling is the star of the slow-burn thriller "Drive" which has wowed critics and audiences. Well, not all audiences. Sarah Deming, a Michigan woman, has filed a lawsuit with the film's distributors, FilmDistrict, claiming they "promoted the film ‘Drive' as very similar to the ‘Fast and Furious' or similar, series of movies." This is where some kind of text symbol for speechless would come in handy.
Call me crazy, but I never saw a preview for "Drive" and thought, this may as well be called "Faster and Furiouser, Tokyo Drift in Rio 2." But Deming felt duped and the story is all over the web.
"Deming is seeking a refund for her movie ticket, in addition to halting the production of 'misleading movie trailers' in the future," reports the Hollywood Reporter. "The plaintiff intends to turn her individual case into a class action lawsuit, thereby allowing fellow movie-goers an opportunity to share in the settlement."
But Deming isn't just upset that she didn't get the movie she was expecting. According to her there is much more wrong with "Drive."
"Extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith," Deming claims in the suit.
Now, I have yet to see "Drive" and cannot comment as to whether it is anti-Semitic, but Hadley Freeman of The Guardian, had a few words about this part of the lawsuit.
"Now, being a Chosen Person myself and one with a pronounced tendency to perceive nefarious messages in movies where other people just see plot, I can say with some authority that this latter point is even more cobblers than the former one," wrote Freeman. "Despite suffering from the fatal flaw of not being Fast & Furious, Drive is a very equal-opportunities picture when it comes to violence: pretty much everyone in it gets pummeled."
Richard Brody with The New Yorker wrote that if someone can sue "Drive" for a misleading trailer, there are sure to be many law suits in the future.
"Another trailer that seems to elide the main subject of the film it advertises: the one for ‘The Big Year,' which makes no explicit reference to the sport of bird-watching, though the movie (which I haven't seen yet) is based on a nonfiction book—‘The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession,' by Mark Obmascik—about the world of ‘competitive birding,'" wrote Brody. "We'll see whether this omission is one that some enterprising viewer can feather his nest with. I'll report back."
As I stated earlier, I have not seen "Drive," but it seems that Deming is grasping at straws. If she gets money out of this I would like to see some cash my way for the following films: "Unbreakable." It was promoted as a paranormal thriller like 'The Sixth Sense." It was not. It's a comic book movie. "Indiana Jones 4," because I was hoping to see an Indiana Jones movie and it never happened. And the movie that owes all of us an explanation, "The Never Ending Story." Spoiler alert….. It does, in fact, end.
E-mail: jclyde@ksl.com
