So, it turns out Ryan Gosling a
really good physical comedian.
The Nice Guys proves it. Its a pretty solid action comedy, tips more towards the comedy end of the scale, with Shane Black riffing extensively on the genre that he pretty much invented. Even if you didn't see the credits you could still tell it was him writing all that tart and witty dialog, and it even has that Joel Silver feeling, probably because its a Joel Silver production. Its such a self-consciously retro throwback, that its 70's setting doesn't even feel purely necessary, only in that it provides some joke fodder and helpfully removes cell phones from mucking up the plot. I enjoyed it, a flavor of comfort food cinema that's become all too rare anymore.
Now on most days, The Nice Guys would have been the funniest thing I'd seen by far, on most days. But today I also went and saw
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping because its about to be damn near impossible to find in a theater come this Friday. It'll be one of the biggest major studio bombs to come out this year, which is really a shame, as its financial failure can perhaps be traced to its utterly ruthless skill at satirizing current pop music and celebrity culture, but at a glance it looks very much like the sort of multi-level approved
pop star hagiography that its brutalizing. I don't want to accuse any movie of being too smart that has a full-length performance of the song 'Fuck Me Like How Bin Laden Got Killed', as its plenty goofy, with lots of discursive, bizarre, and wonderfully juvenile jokes there just for the hell of it. But mainstream comedies this good aren't all that common, and its a shame that like the also great, also Lonely Island affiliated
Hot Rod, that being a cult hit is the best it can hope for.
