It’s rare to see a movie that has the power to surprise, and surprise, and surprise. Luckily, his latest work, The Nice Guys, serves up more of this same formula that has worked so well for him in the past.
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Both are intermittently competent and incompetent, whichever a scene requires – one problem with “The Nice Guys”.
But these movies, when done well, have the appeal of a good romantic comedy. It’s not a great movie.
It probably says something about how far we’ve wandered into Superhero Of The Week territory that Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is being positioned, by critics and analysts, as risky summer counter-programming. You can see that in the promos for the film. Every scene is enjoyable, containing its own little kick or twist, and everything is always rushing forward.
A porn-stached Gosling plays Holland, a frequently blitzed private eye so inept that when he tries to break a window with one cloth-covered hand, he winds up in the emergency room. Movies like this are usually only made these days as satire: It’s as if our self-aware culture decided they were a cliché, rather than a perfectly sturdy genre.
For others, it was about getting the right look.
The actor chuckled as he related the story at a recent interview in Los Angeles. He knows the conventions he has to deliver on and the ones he can upend, and he seems to have a second-by-second understanding of an audience’s thinking.
“From the first phone conversation I had with Ryan, which was a few years back, we just had a very easy sense with each other and then we met for the first time and again had just a very simple easy rhythm with each other”. “The thing is, to get her to that place of comfort, apart from the work that Shane did with her, Ryan put a lot of effort into that”.
Set in 1978, it captures the 1970s milieu, not just with the cars and the clothes, but with a story that involves a series of murders within the fringes of the porn industry. Your life becomes better than you ever thought it could be. Due to the abundance of humor and intrigue, the self-referential nature of Black and Bagarozzi’s screenplay never comes across as off-putting, nor does the storyline’s intentional intricacies.
One of the most attractive aspects of the project was to see the two actors, known primarily for their more dramatic roles, take on quite different characters, something Black did “for a reason”, Gosling said.
Fortunately for them, they get frequent help from Holland’s daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), who’s in her early teens but seems more mature than both of them. A young actress named Angourie Rice just about walks off with the movie. He proved, decades later, that he had the 21st century knocked too when he wrote and directed “Iron Man 3”, the best of the “Iron Man” movies and a comic book movie so cool that Bill Maher and Joan Rivers had cameos.
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Russell Crowe has opened up about working with Ryan Gosling on new comedy The Nice Guys, and revealed the moment that he knew his co-star would be a great dad. In Shane Black’s obscenely entertaining period comedy, Healy is the gruff muscle operating outside the law, while private dick March brings a mere squeak of legitimacy to their investigations, alongside style without swagger, spectacular cowardice and a fatal weakness for a free bar.
