AWhole lot of Last Boy Scout DNA in this. I feel like Black is almost caught up in remaking his old scripts because he was disappointed in the often heavily rewritten final product.
I really enjoyed it and I don’t think the trailers ruined the best gags (Nixon, the Killer Bee) but it’s familiarity hurts it a bit. Still, I do like stuff like the coffee gag, which very much illustrates Black’s approach to this material. Why is the coffee always hot? And since we’re so used to seeing the hot coffee gag, wouldn’t it be funny if a character in that situation would go off that assumption and be totally mistaken?
I don’t know, fun little metatextual stuff like that really works for me.
Yeah, they may not come as fast and furious as KKBB, but there are some pretty classic Black subversion gags in this one.
My favorit was probably the joke about Gosling assuming that the ankle gun Crowe told him about was real, and not just part of his Killer Bee dream. I mean, hell, Black has played that joke for real with Perry’s derringer in KKBB, so seeing Gosling scuttling around on the floor while everyone else looks blankly at him and he slowly realizes there’s no gun is hysterical.
While The Nice Guys isn’t as good as I thought it would be, its a good movie. I thought it would be more like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. One should go into this movie expecting it to be its own thing.
I did like that the mystery because it starts off small and turns into a massive cover up.
Gosling was great in this. First off he was funny as Hell in this: his screaming never got old and as mentioned before his Lou Costello like gasping was spot on. Even though he was a tad on the shifty side and a drunk, knowing that he feels responsible for his wife’s death give the character some pathos. Crowe and him had good chemistry in this.
As for the ending
It made sense to me. A lot of times in the real world bad people get away with shit because people don’t give a shit.
I was bummed that Amelia was killed. Yeah she was a Britta, but she meant well and she was 100 percent right.
Matt Boomer was good in this. He was great at projecting malice with just a look.
I might be seeing a movie later today with my mom. She’s not a prude by any means, but how’s the violence and sex in this? Are we approaching Wolf of Wall Street or is it totally OK?
A[quote name=“Freeman” url=“/community/t/155439/the-nice-guys-2016-discussion-thread/60#post_4070089”]I might be seeing a movie later today with my mom. She’s not a prude by any means, but how’s the violence and sex in this? Are we approaching Wolf of Wall Street or is it totally OK?
[/quote]
Do not see this with your mom.
AI have to say that some of the gags involving underaged kids (and there were many, like far more than I anticipated) appeared to put my audience off a bit, but I thought most of it was funny. The movie sometimes plays like a really blue Nancy Drew mystery. Now that I think of it, though I like this movie a lot, I’d almost prefer that it was about March’s daughter either seeking his help or getting herself involved in one of his cases without Crowe’s character being involved. Not that I have an issue with Crowe, but the idea of Black really leaning into the “Nancy Drew as written by Mickey Spillane” element is appealing to me and would help eliminate some of the KK,BB and Last Boy Scout redundancy.
AI don’t want to derail the thread, but I couldn’t help but be constantly reminded of some things I’ve read about Black having “issues”. Feels like there’s a lot of him working out those issues I’ve read about in this and KKBB.
In the Writer’s Panel podcast I linked earlier in the thread, Black defended the things Mel Gibson said in drunken rages as things one shouldn’t necessarily held accountable for. I’m fairly certain I’ve also read about Black having had drinking problems in the past, so his defense of his friend comes from his own experiences in saying awful things while drunk just to escalate things.
The understated way the film portrays Crowe’s character declining drinks throughout the movie up until the ending seems like it could be a part of this.
I THINK I’ve also read about Black having had problems with women in the past. But I’m not certain about that.
ALoved it. I’ll have to think on it some more but I think I do like it better than KKBB.
It truly is surprising how funny Gosling is. The bathroom stall, the “no” when Healy was trying to get his arm to break it and the Costello bit, Nixon in the pool, etc…In fact the whole Nixon/death stuff was gold.
This seems like the perfect type roll for Crowe too. The aged bruiser. His fight with David was fantastic. The daughter was pretty good too. How she insisted on no killing despite all the shit she saw. Loved it.
A[quote name=“mcnooj82” url=“/community/t/155439/the-nice-guys-2016-discussion-thread/90#post_4070108”]I really enjoyed when Holly’s annoying friend got hurtled through the window!
[/quote]
It was so brutal. It got laughs in the audience when I saw it.
AThis movie actually repeated an issue I have with the Last Boy Scout: The Tragic Backstory Pile-On.
In LBS, Jimmy Dix is out to find the guys who killed his girlfriend, which is a perfectly fine motivation, but then halfway through the film he has this monologue about a wife and unborn child who died in an accident. It seemed like a bit much.
Now, March doesn’t have a double tragedy like Dix, but I’m not entirely sure he needed the fridged wife back story. When it came up, it just didn’t mean anything to me at all. Black has repeatedly spoken about liking his characters to be “tarnished knights”, but he keeps going back to the same well as if he’s afraid to just allow his characters to be natural born fuck ups.
AIt’s not entirely wasted as Black threads it well enough through Holly, but I wouldn’t call it effective or affecting. When you drop something like that it’s supposed to be illuminating, but with March, it doesn’t give us any real glimpse of who he was before or who he might have been if his wife hadn’t died. It’s not like Holly ever suggests that her father was ever anyone but the person we spend the entire film with.
It’s easy to see that he isn’t functional enough to do basic things like drive himself around, so his daughter is pulling double duty as child and caretaker, but I’m not entirely confident that his wife needed to be dead in order for that to work.
Definitely seems like a crutch Black leans on a bit as an obligation. In this case, I kinda appreciated how little it’s elaborated on. But of course, you can easily suggest “Why have it there at all?”