From Cineplex.com: “The Toronto International Film Festival is just around the corner! With so many movies playing, it’s hard to figure out what’s worth checking out. So our pre-show host Tanner Zipchen and film critic Richard Crouse sat down together and discussed 10 movies they are excited for, including Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrivalstarring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner andRyan Gosling and Emma Stone teaming up for the third time in La La Land.”
Way back when Rick Astley was one of the biggest stars in the world Shane Black wrote the classic L.A.P.D. buddy action comedy “Lethal Weapon.” A mix of chemistry and quips it set the template, for better and for worse, for a generation of cop buddy flicks. Black is back, breathing the same air, as co-writer and director of “The Nice Guys,” a hardboiled comedy that places Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling amid the mayhem.
Set in smoggy 1970s era Los Angeles, the story revolves around an odd couple brought together by circumstance. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is the muscle. He’s a brass-knuckled enforcer who makes his money through intimidation and violence. Holland Marsh (Gosling) is a drunken private investigator so desperate he specializes in doing missing persons cases for dementia patients who have forgotten their loved ones are dead, not missing. He’s so inept even his own thirteen-year-old daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice), refers to him as the world’s worst detective.
They are thrown together when March is hired to find Amelia (Margaret Qualley) but she hires Healy to get rid of the creep she thinks is a stalker. An uneasy alliance leads them head on into a wacky web of sleaze, corruption and catalytic converters. There’s a load more plot, but the point here isn’t the story as much as it is the journey it takes its characters on.
By rights “The Nice Guys” should be called “The Nice Guys and a Girl” because the teenage Angourie Rice is a key player. She’s an adolescent sidekick who, unlike Black’s child hanger-on in “Iron Man 3,” doesn’t have a precocious bone in her body. She’s funny, lends some heart to the cynicism on display and nearly steals the movie from the leads.
Nearly, but not completely. Crowe and Gosling bring seedy charm to their roles. They’re part “Freebie and the Bean,” part Abbott and Costello. Each hand in loose performances in a film that is unafraid to spend time listening to its leads bantering back and forth. Gosling excels with physical bits—trying to maintain his modesty in a bathroom stall scene is pure slapstick—while Crowe is more menacing but with solid comic timing.
Black’s way with a visual gag is also used to ample effect. An elevator scene that made me laugh in the trailers is played out with precision, escalating the laughs as the violence increases.
“The Nice Guys” is funny and even thrilling by times, but its greatest trick is to make you fall on side with these two not-always-so-nice-guys. They are neither particularly heroic nor gifted. Instead they are everymen looking for redemption and a fast paycheque. The ending sets things up for a sequel and that’s OK. I’d like to spend more time with these nice guys and girl.
Richard talks Cannes and Xavier Dolan with the Canadian Press.
“I think he’s got probably a pretty good shot certainly at being taken seriously as a contender, even thought he’s up against the who’s who of international filmmakers like Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Verhoeven, Sean Penn,” says Toronto-based film reviewer Richard Crouse.
“There are a lot of people here that are working at a very high level, but I’d suggest that Xavier Dolan is working at just as high a level.”
The Spider-Man movies don’t skimp on the stuff that puts the “super” into superhero movies. There’s web-slinging shenanigans and wild bad guys galore, but The Amazing Spider-Man 2 director Marc Webb calls the relationship between Spidey and girlfriend Gwen Stacy, “the engine of the movie.”
The chemistry the real-life couple brings to the screen is undeniable, but it almost didn’t get a chance to blossom. Before Emma Stone landed the role of the brainiac love interest, Mia Wasikowska, Imogen Poots, Emma Roberts and even Lindsay Lohan were considered.
Stone won some of the best reviews of her career playing Gwen in The Amazing Spider-Man — Peter Travers said she, “just jumps to life on screen” — in a role that gave her the biggest hit of her career to date.
Smaller roles in Superbad and Zombieland hinted at her ability to be funny and hold the screen, but in 2010’s Easy A she turned a corner into full-on Lucille Ball mode, mixing pratfalls with wit while pulling faces and cracking jokes. Smart and funny, she’s the film’s centrepiece.
The movie begins with the voice over, “The rumours of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s the voice of Olive (Stone), a clean-cut high school senior who tells a little white lie about losing her virginity. As soon as the gossip mill gets a hold of the info, however, her life takes a parallel course to the heroine of the book she is studying in English class — The Scarlet Letter.
Stone is laugh-out-loud funny in Easy A, but her breakout film was a serious drama.
In The Help, she plays Jackson, Miss. native “Skeeter” Phelan who comes home from four years at school to discover the woman who raised her, a maid named Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is no longer employed by her family. Her mother says she quit, but Skeeter has doubts. With the help of a courageous group of housekeepers she tells the real story of the life of the maids, writing a book called The Help.
The Flick Filosopher called her performance, “on fire with indignation and rage,” and she moved from The Help to a variety of roles, including playing a femme fatale in Gangster Squad opposite Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin, and lending her trademark raspy voice to cave girl Eep in the animated hit The Croods.
The 25-year-old actress is living her childhood dream of being an actress but says if performing hadn’t worked out, she would have been a journalist, “because (investigating people’s lives is) pretty much what an actor does.
“And imagine getting to interview people like me,” she laughs. ‘’It can’t get much better than that.”
Give the gift of Ryan Gosling for Christmas! Or at least a replica of the cool scorpion jacket he wore in “Drive” from steadyclothing.com. Wear it and try to resist the urge to beat the hell out of people in restaurants!
Know any manicurists? How about Brad Pitt fans? Why not combine the two with these nail art decals from NailSpin on Etsy?
From the etsy.com page: “Give yourself a professional looking manicure at a fraction of the price! This set includes 15 Brad Pitt nail art decals printed on white water slide decal paper.”
Also featured are finger-sized portraits of Liam Hemsworth, Ryan Gosling and many more!
Here’s the dilemma: You’re a young assistant DA who is something of a wizard in the courtroom. In your last case before leaving public service for a high paying job at a fancy legal firm you are faced with a man who is clearly guilty, but you just can’t put your finger on the crucial piece of evidence that will put him on death row. How far do you go to put him behind bars? Such is the question facing Oscar nominated Canadian Ryan Gosling in the new courtroom thriller Fracture.
Fracture doesn’t exactly break new ground in the legal drama genre—Primal Fear, also from director Gregory Hoblit, tread the same ground a decade ago—but there’s no grounds for a dismissal either. The movie’s premise may be a little frayed around the edges and the are more than a couple of fissures in Fracture’s plot, but the performances of the film’s leads, Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, make it worth the price of admission.
Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, a wealthy aeronautical engineer, who discovers his wife is having an affair. When she returns home one night after some afternoon delight with her cop lover, Hopkins calmly and coolly shoots her in the face. The police arrive, he confesses and is arrested. It should be an open and shut case, but of course there’d be no movie if it were that simple. What may look like a crime of passion was actually a well thought out execution, and difficult to prove.
Hopkins plays Crawford as though he was portraying Hannibal Lecter’s creepy brother—he’s cunning, has a genius level IQ and an annoying condescending tone. When he bests Gosling’s smarty-pants Willie Beachum in a game of wits, he sneers by way of consolation, “Even a broken clock gets the time right twice a day.”
There is an echo of the Lecter – Starling tension in the interaction between Hopkins and Gosling, and while nothing in this movie comes close to the atmosphere of dread in Silence of the Lambs it is fun to watch these two great actors spar.
They really are the main reason to see Fracture. The big twist at the end is pure Jessica Fletcher and not particularly shocking—anyone schooled in the Law and Order brand of courtroom maneuvering could figure out Beachum’s next move before he does—but the stylishly shot movie does offer interesting character studies and a satisfying finale.
It’s Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn in over-the-top-mode) has taken over the city—there’s brothels, booze and bad news all over. “I’m building a new city out of the ruins of Los Angeles,” says Cohen.
Corruption is the name of the game for everyone except Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), a honest cop in a crooked town. When LAPD Chief William Henry Parker (Nick Nolte) asks him to create a special undercover team to bring Cohen and his thugs to justice, O’Mara assembles the Gangster Squad, a group of cops who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.
“The Gangster Squad” will likely suffer from the inevitable comparisons to “The Untouchables” and “LA Confidential.” It grabs the atmosphere of post war LA from the latter and the storyline, almost beat for beat, from the former. There’s even a shoot out on a stairway, but this is a far more blunt object than either of it’s forbearers. In the first twenty minutes people are drawn and quartered, incinerated—apparently Cohen prefers medieval techniques—and there’s a vicious fistfight. Then it gets violent.
The film is possibly best known, not for its cast, which also includes Ryan Gostling, Emma Stone, Michael Peña and Giovanni Ribisi, but as the movie pulled from release following the Aurora, Colorado Century 13 massacre. Originally featuring a scene of gangsters randomly firing into a movie theatre, it was deemed inappropriate for release at the time. I’m not sure what they have replaced that scene with, but trust me, its removal hasn’t made the film any less violent in tone.
It’s a gorgeous looking film, with a pretty picture of LA’s glamorous nightlife and features dialogue by Will Beall who has clearly spent some time watching Raymond Chandler movies like “The Big Sleep.” Lines like “The whole city is underwater and you’re grabbing a bucket when you should be grabbing a bathing suit,” have more finesse than the story as a whole.
“The gangster Squad” is a period piece that spends a bit too much time exploring the down-and-dirty side of the story, but is an stylish look at a violent time.
From Cineplex.com: “The Toronto International Film Festival is just around the corner! With so many movies playing, it’s hard to figure out what’s worth checking out. So our pre-show host Tanner Zipchen and film critic Richard Crouse sat down together and discussed 10 movies they are excited for, including Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone teaming up for the third time in La La Land.”
