2016’s summer blockbuster season is just getting started but is already getting crowded. With competition between franchises getting fierce, is there really room for a stand-alone action movie from an original screenplay? How about an R-rated comedy that is in no way connected to Judd Apatow?
Apparently not so much, conside
ring its unremarkable performance at the box office so far, despite generally good reviews and two big stars. It can be hard to find the time to see everything that’s out there and I know priority has to go to seeing the latest installment of all your favourite franchises but I am quite sure you won’t regret making some time for The Nice Guys.
A thug-for-hire with a heart of gold (Crowe) and a cynical private eye (Gosling) team up to search for a missing girl who seems to be connected to a murdered porn star and has somehow caught the attention of the justice department. And it all takes place in 1977 Los Angeles with an excellent sense of time and place.
After A Good Year, Crowe’s last attempt at headlining a comedy, it’s a pleasure to see one finally play to his strengths. The Nice Guys uses his tough guy image to its advantage instead of trying to make us forget about it. Paired with the ever-versatile Gosling, they are just as hilarious as writer-director Shane Black’s previous pair of detectives in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
The Nice Guys works because the escalating insanity rarely feels contrived or forced. As a team, Crowe and Gosling are just dysfunctional enough to be funny but competent enough to be almost believable. Best of all, the movie has just enough darkness to it that it’s not easy to forget.
She takes a little dating advice from a millennial and suddenly she’s adopted by a whole crowd of hipsters who fail to recognize that her “retro chic” look isn’t exactly ironic.
screen, from the very first minute to the last.
The brilliance of this film is that it makes you question what you would do, and it challenges our notions of propriety.
and Jasmine know a dark secret and are steering things to play sleuth. Billie (Jasika Nicole) and Jordan (Brianna Baker) know that something’s up but the note is the furthest thing from their minds. They’re just trying to navigate this incredibly uncomfortable encounter – and we’ve got front row seats!
Lenny is a young man in his 20s who, not unlike his peers, is struggling to find himself. He’d like to find a girlfriend, preferably a very independent one, but he feels strongly that they’re all out of his league. There’s anguish here. Lenny will break your goddamned heart. Lenny is a smart guy in his way, and he’s aware. He’s aware of how much his differences have set him apart and all he wants is to be “normal.”
woman with her own disabilities. Though not a classic love story, you can see how much love and care there is between them. His wife knows how to get him talking, and how to recognize his affection. It’s incredibly endearing.
it’s embarrassing, but you start to think that they’ve got it right, because in recognizing their weaknesses, they’re actually working harder at overcoming them than a lot of the rest of us. Their communication is open and honest, even if it’s a bit of a trial. Everyone should be so lucky.
are films that literally everyone loves. Sure, Once featured unprofessional actors and didn’t have much going in the way of plot but the music and characters struck such a chord mostly because of the unpretentious sincerity that everyone involved seemed to bring to the project.
Carney does his best to get back to basics, returning to Ireland with mostly unknown actors, in Sing Street. Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) has just started at a new school and, though he hasn’t made any friends yet, instantly falls for an older girl (Lucy Boynton) who aspires to be a model. Based in part on Carney’s own memories of the mid-80s, Cosmo decides to start a band inspired by The Cure, Duran Duran and Hall & Oates. For Cosmo, this project is mostly an excuse for him to film music videos starring his crush at first but the opportunity to write and play his own music soon becomes about much more. Music, he’ll soon learn, can be the perfect outlet to express his feelings about the tension between his parents, their financial troubles, and the restrictions at his strict Catholic school.
insightful and considerably funnier script. (I laughed myself into a coughing fit twice and I don’t even have a cold)..It is much better acted and more imaginative. The dream sequence of Cosmo’s ideal video for Drive It Like You Stole It is my favourite scene by far but there are so many perfect moments in Sing Street.
It’s not exactly ground-breaking material but here’s the gimmick that’ll put butts in theatres: it’s Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong playing Perry. And is it pretty effing cool to see him play the guy he might have been had his own post-punk outfit not taken off when it did? Yes, yes it is.
moment that he was watching Billie Joe Armstrong. I, on the other hand, thought it was a scootch worse than that. Unnatural. Self-conscious. Very “you can tell I’m acting because my hand is over here on my hip, which means I’m going through some internal conflict I’m not subtle enough to convey any other way.” And yet I’m not going to condemn him because the movie really is a vehicle for him. He’s what makes it cool and relevant, makes the movie rise above the other mid-life-crisis\path-not-taken meditations. Plus, Kirk pads the cast with some better talent: Judy Greer as the old flame, Selma Blair as the current wife, Chris Messina as the scowling brother, Fred Armisen as an ex-bandmate.
The regret without resentment shows maturity I’m surprised to see in a character like Perry. Billie Joe never quite transcends the role, but there is an honest vulnerability there that’s a little charming. And Billie Joe is not just a casting liability, he’s an asset to the soundtrack because he’s written some original music for it, and the movie is never more confidant than when Armstrong is performing. In this he excels. The songs he wrote are great and I imagine they’ll be invading your radio waves sometime soon, lending the movie some major credibility.
an energy that defies the fact that Armstrong is in fact a middle-aged father of two. They played a couple of Green Day tunes as well, Scattered and then American Idiot, which morphed into Bad Reputation. Oh, did I not mention that Joan Jett was in the house? Yeah, she has a small cameo in the film but she got up on stage and showed the boys what a scene-stealing badass she still is. Her voice hasn’t aged a single minute and the woman’s still sporting leather pants. Armstrong closed the night with Ordinary World, the film’s acoustic ballad, and I couldn’t help but wonder at the twinkly goodness of my life. In the movie of my life, there is no path not taken.
J.R. Brinkley was a doctor in small town Kansas who, through the grace of his revolutionary goat-testicle transplant surgery, cured many men of impotence and infertility while bringing vitality and prosperity to the town. Brinkley had to build hospitals just to deal with the growing demand, and almost accidentally became a radio pioneer simultaneously, broadcasting ads for his services and answering write-in medical questions between blasts of good ole country music. Despite exponential interest and a horde of faithful followers, the American Medical Association accused Brinkley of “quackery.” Just as they set out to discredit him, he came out with an elixir just as 
effective as the goat-testicle procedure but with much less risk. And then he ran for governor, with a slogan borrowed from a laxative commercial. True story.
used for each segment, but there’s a uniform style that injects a lot of kinetic energy into a story hilariously but dryly narrated. You won’t believe how quaint goat fucking can look.
exaggerated facial features on his favourite cartoon characters. One day Owen’s father is able to hold his first conversation with him in years simply by pretending to be Iago, the talking parrot from Aladdin.
can express their love and see it reflected back, even if it’s a line originally quoted by Belle to the Beast. What I do know is that this film opens a lot of doors. This isn’t just a talking-head piece, we actually get to visit with Owen in his new situation, and his family as they continue to take on new challenges. We get to see autism in action, impacting a family and influencing a community. And we get to see that Owen is a guy with wants and needs like any other. He expresses them differently, and once you get the hang of his language, it’s not necessarily even worse, it’s just different.
interesting and watchable is Owen himself, a very dynamic individual. He’s at his best at the helm of his Disney Club, where other learning-disabled young people gather to watch and discuss Disney animation. They may even run lines afterward, or play the score, and once in a while Jonathan Freeman, voice of Aladdin’s villain Jafar, drops in to lend a hand, and even Gilbert Gottfried, voice of Iago himself, has attended, but nobody knows the lines better than Owen himself.
the lines. Many of the film’s crew were on hand, as well as the entire Suskind family, to launch this movie into orbit. There’s a lot of love and care gone into this work, and some of the best bits are when Owen’s own stories are beautifully animated (by Mac Guff). Owen identifies more with the sidekicks rather than the heroes of his beloved films, and he brings them to life in a very moving way.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 