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Notes -
I watched two Gosling movies with a "guy" in the title.
The Nice Guys is a +1 buddy movie. Not a +2, it has its downs, but it's one of the most enjoyable movies from the tens I've watched so far. And there's a personal reason for that. More than half a life ago I played a small Final Fantasy MUD. My principal character was a rambler, a gambler and a backbiter, never picking a fight with anyone stronger than him and always looking for the easy way out of every confrontation. I loved roleplaying as him. So yeah, I finally got my own "literally me" moment.
The Fall Guy is a -1 action/romcom. I don't think this genre mashup is a terrible idea per se, but this particular execution is quite meh. The romantic side is not done well. First, Emily Blunt? Really? She has the charm of an HR manager, how can she play a romantic heroine? And then her character is mad at the Gosling's character for ghosting her after he had an accident and was hospitalized with a broken spine. Well, excuse me, princess, which one of you wasn't paraplegic and could have paid a visit to the other? The only explanation is that she's borderline, since it takes her about half a day to reconcile with him. Not much of a "will she won't she" dynamic there.
The action side is held back by the meta nature of the premise. When the protagonist is a stunt man and half the movie is set on a movie set, you have to handle this kind of nesting with care. In a single-layer action movie, the protagonist can perform death-defying stunts unselfconsciously. But in a double-layer action movie, for example, he cannot jump from a roof on a movie set, with a safety harness and all that, and then do the same "in real life" and not react to the difference.
The only character that stands out is the one played by Hannah Waddingham, the producer. I've met sexless English women exactly like her in real life.
Agreed on both counts. I enjoyed The Nice Guys a lot. The Fall Guy just didn't seem to work. I wouldn't blame either Gosling or Blunt for this, they were both miscast. Gosling's intense sincerity felt weird and off for a movie with such a simple, "normie" plot. They needed someone with a more "popcorn movie sincere" feel on the screen, not "arthouse character study" of what an overly sincere guy will go through for the love of a woman who doesn't deserve him. Blunt, while a very attractive woman, was utterly unlikeable in it. The script is likely to blame here too, making her unexplainably angry made me root for the couple not to pull through and for Gosling's character to find himself a girl who's not such a bitch to him.
The only part of his acting that I liked in the movie was him doing the figurative belly crawl before and during the very first car flip scene. You could feel the patheticism? patheticness? patheticity? (it was certainly not pathos!) radiate from the screen every time he opened his mouth to talk about his crush.
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Not familiar with this notation. Stdev?
It's the one I use for my ratings. 1 to 5 is tainted, so I use the same five points to rank stuff like this:
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Have you watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, an earlier film by the director of The Nice Guys? It's essentially a prototype to the latter film, starring a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Junior with a fantastic Val Kilmer (also Michelle Moghnahan). I liked it better, but I liked both.
Seconded, Nice Guys is pretty good but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favourite comedies ever.
I watched Nice Guys after it was mentioned here recently in the same breath as KKBB. I can see where the comparison comes from but KKBB is much sharper and funnier. KKBB is a favourite I can happily rewatch while I can't see myself watching Nice Guys a second time.
Under The Silver Lake is another good one in a similar comedy-noir vein.
As you can probably guess from my many, many schizo posts on here, I love Under the Silver Lake. It’s one of my favorite movies.
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