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Notes -
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.
I feel Gosling needs to be more careful with his movie choices, because he might end up with the same problem that ruined Nicolas Cage's reputation in the general public: both actors tend to act their heart out in every situation. Doing that even for scripts and direction that don't demand, or more frankly don't deserve it makes the actor look cringe, unhinged, and gives a poor impression of their acting chops, even though they actually went above and beyond.
OTOH, that could lead to a Gosling-based Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent-style movie. So we'd have that going for us. Heck, I think I'd have to go see it just to see what they did with it!
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