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The Nice Guys - New Shane Black Noir Starring Crowe and Gosling (1 Viewer)

Bob Magaw said:
The Nice Guys is an upcoming American mystery crime action comedy buddy cop film directed by Shane Black (wrote Lethal Weapon and directed post modern noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as well as co-wrote and directed Iron Man 3). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nice_Guys

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJUES1SIvzw
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Will check this out when it comes to On Demand or DVD. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang got a little cloyingly metafictive about halfway through the movie.  

 
rockaction said:
Will check this out when it comes to On Demand or DVD. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang got a little cloyingly metafictive about halfway through the movie.  
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Your posts reek of a guy who hasn't been laid in ages.  Even if you have to pay for it I think you will find it will do wonders for you.

 
Baloney Sandwich said:
Your posts reek of a guy who hasn't been laid in ages.  Even if you have to pay for it I think you will find it will do wonders for you.
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I don't have much to say to that. I think it speaks for itself. That a guy with a weird shirtless soccer player avatar agrees with you says a lot. 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Ebert

[Kiss Kiss Bang Bang] is a little too cute for its own good...Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang contains a lot of comedy and invention, but doesn't much benefit from its clever style. The characters and plot are so promising that maybe Black should have backed off and told the story deadpan, instead of mugging so shamelessly for laughs."
 

 
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Saw a screening today and loved it. It's really similar in tone and theme to Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, but I'd say even better. Shane Black said he actually wrote it in 2002, before Kiss. My favorite movie of the year so far, which yeah isn't saying much. Gosling and Crow have such amazing chemistry. They had us rolling at the Q&A afterward. Don't even needs any Qs with those two. They just riff off each other, and it came across on screen. The girl who plays Gosling's daughter is so good in her first big movie role.

 
Opens tomorrow, 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_nice_guys/

Ebert's site (contains spoilers)   :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:  three out of four stars

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-nice-guys-2016

There’s a scene midway through Shane Black’s fun “The Nice Guys” in which Ryan Gosling’s truly mediocre private investigator has stumbled down a hill, drunkenly trying to impress a girl at a party. As he will do several times in the film, he literally falls into a clue, a rotting corpse of someone he’s been looking for. And what does Gosling do when he comes face to face with it? He doesn’t respond in the typically nonchalant movie star way. No, he digs much deeper into the comedy movie bag of tricks and pulls out, of all things, a Lou Costello impression—that wonderful, silent scream the actor would do when he saw something like the Wolfman. It is a truly hysterical moment, one of several bits of physical comedy that Gosling pulls off throughout “The Nice Guys.” Combined with the excellent straight man work by Russell Crowe, the two actors become a surprisingly brilliant comedy duo, carrying “The Nice Guys” past a few flat jokes, needed edits and a cluttered finale.

Gosling plays Holland March, a pretty pathetic P.I. whose wife died in a house explosion, leaving him with an alcohol problem and the sole parenting job of 13-year-old Holly (the naturally gifted Angourie Rice). March is hired to find a porn star named Misty Mountains, who we know died in a car accident. In the film's opening scene, a kid waits until his parents are asleep and pulls out a porno mag, gazing lovingly at the centerfold model, revealed to be Ms. Mountains. Just then, a car comes careening through his house and down the L.A. hillside. The kid stumbles to the car to find Misty herself splayed out in much the same position she was in the centerfold, but she’s bloody and dying. He covers her up. From the beginning, Black starts developing the theme of a dark world in which the “nice guys” muster as much decency as possible, even if it’s covering up the body of someone you were ogling minutes before.

March’s search for Misty leads him to try and track down someone who worked on a porno with her recently, Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who happens to have hired a muscle guy named Jackson Healy (Crowe) to protect her. Healy is a level below your typical City of Angels P.I., the kind of guy who you hire to send a message with brass knuckles more than to find someone. And so he conveys the message to March that he should stop looking for Amelia. When they realize something very strange is going on with the dead-not-dead porn star and everyone else involved with a particular adult production, March and Healy team up in a very Shane Black style. This is the writer and director who redefined the buddy action comedy when he wrote “Lethal Weapon,” although this particular piece has more in common with his underrated directorial effort “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.”

“The Nice Guys” is a dark comedy that takes place in a time in which Kennedy is dead, poverty is on the rise, corruption is rampant, the Hollywood sign is falling down and porn is as successful as the auto industry (I love the parallel party sequences, one celebrating adult film and one celebrating car manufacturers ... they look nearly identical other than the degree of nudity). It’s really about people trying to keep their heads above rising waters, and what it takes to maintain some semblance of decency in an increasingly indecent world. And yet Black is smart enough to not make his leading men into saints. Healy is a blunt instrument, a man who gets the job done and gets out, but he’s also got a sense of what he should and should not do for a paying client. He'll break your arm, but he's breaking your arm for a reason. March is an alcoholic without much desire to fix that particular problem today; there are more pressing ones. One of the operating beliefs of the film could be summed up when Healy says heroically, “We’re gonna hunt down the people who did it,” and March chimes in with a perfectly timed, “for a deeply discounted rate.” Everybody in this cesspool of a city gets a cut, even the good guys, as  set in a time period when a 13-year-old can be the only remaining, decent voice of reason.

The cast is perfect, but “The Nice Guys” could have used one more rewrite or two and another trip to the editing bay to really streamline jokes that don’t work and a plot that gets more cluttered than engaging. It’s not until an actual villain (Matt Bomer) shows up more than an hour into the piece that you realize that the movie didn’t have one before then (although one could argue the entire city of L.A. is the bad guy). And some of the bits get repetitive before the movie’s over. We know that Holly is the brains, Healy is the brawn and March is the bumbling hero that ties them together before this trio figures it out for themselves, and I wish the film had another surprise up its sleeve, a narrative turn that felt fresher than the inevitable Shane Black Shootout waiting in the climax.

Having said that, what I think people will underrate the most about “The Nice Guys” is the choreography of the entire piece. Without spoiling specific details, the final sequence features Gosling chasing something and falling on car hoods, into windshields, and over his own two feet. He’s far from the suave hero you’ll see in a dozen other summer blockbusters this year. And Gosling completely sells it, as he does throughout the entire film. He may not be the hero that L.A. needs in the '70s, but he's the hero that L.A.'s got in the '70s. And it’s his gift for slapstick, combined with his fantastic chemistry with Crowe, that makes these "Nice Guys” worth a look. Unlike most comedies in recent memory, I'd gladly watch another adventure with these three characters front and center. Maybe they'll finally catch a break. 

 
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I enjoyed it, good job evoking that era (1977). Cribbed a plot point (few really) from The Big Sleep.

Old lady - "Does this mean my niece is dead?"

Kid - "Yes, but we're going to take down the people that did it."

RG - "At a deeply discounted rate."

 
Saw it last night, mixed reviews from me but my wife fell out of her chair laughing many times, I think she made me feel the film was funnier than it was. 

Ryan Gossling: Nails it, hits the right note about 80% of the time in the film, though he got off to a rough start having to endure Crowe run him over and then he gains control of the film at some point and things settle in nicely. I have loved Gossling's work for a long time, this is no exception. Some of the jokes fell flat but he has a few scenes and lines that are just flat out funny. "####### Chet" 

Russel Crowe: Blame whoever you want. Producers for casting, Director for not controlling him or urging him on more, or blame Crowe himself who falls really flat here. Aussie w/accent trying to be NYorker and then I get he might be the straight guy vs Gossling being more lively but he starts off kind of up n down. He never makes any strong choices. One minute he is tough guy breaking arms, the next he is some other character, I just never felt settled with him. He was the weak point for me. 

There was a daughter role of Gossling in the film, it was just OK. I don't particularly like kids in rated "R" type films as anchors but she was OK. It works but I would have liked a straight buddy cop film a little more without the kid angle. 

All that said, the audience we went and sat with STUNK! I don't mean they didn't bathe, they didn't laugh at hardly anything, mostly the foul language made the teenagers and young 20 somethings chuckle but that was about it. People were at times looking at my wife and I as we were chuckling and the film is meant for laughs, it's not that serious of a film so you should be laughing. We said if we were in Los Angeles that the audience would have laughed. We also feel the entire movie experience is a much better go in SoCal, the movie houses, the audiences who understand filmmakers better, the manners, the mgmt and how they run the theaters. 

I would give it 3 out of 5 stars, a dynamite DVD/Blu Ray type rental, not a terrible film to pay and see but it would have been better in a more packed theater with a slightly more intelligent audience that understood what was going on. 

-Example: The opening scene has a Trans Am fly thru a house with a porn star named Misty Mountains in it...after it crashes the kid in the house finds MM and of course she is butt naked laying across the front seats like all porn stars of course...we laughed and laughed and laughed, that was going to be the type of humor in the film. It's not Naked Gun slapstick although that would have been a stronger choice and might have worked. 

Cheers

 
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By the way, while there are some parallels with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it isn't nearly as much of a post-modern, deconstructionist noir (with self-referential fourth wall-breaking).  

A couple scenes in which minors (the daughter and later a witness outside a burned down house on a bike) tangentially intersect with the adult film world were imo unnecessary. The opening car crash scene did, too, but in better taste. The boy who had literally a minute before been ogling the actress (the funny part, as noted in the Ebert site review, was that the dying car crash tableaux mimicked her "Cavalier" magazine centerfold pose) covered her.         

The Atlantic review


The Nice Guys: An Intoxicating Comic Noir


Shane Black’s latest film is uneven at times, but standout performances from Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe help keep it a fun ride.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/the-nice-guys-review/483605/

The essence of The Nice Guys is all there in the movie’s musical intro, which features the three-note, plucked-bass overture of The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Like the song, the film that follows is definingly ’70s, a little funky, a little loose, and prone to wandering off on its own now and again.

The movie is the latest exercise in comic noir by the writer/director Shane Black, and it shares a great many attributes with his terrific 2006 comeback film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: the two mismatched detectives and their more practical female associate, the convoluted plot that features intersecting crime cases—even the hand maimed in an unfortunate encounter with a closed door.

The action takes place in 1977 Los Angeles, with Ryan Gosling playing an alcoholic private eye named Holland March who’s not above accepting the occasional paying job that’s a hairsbreadth shy of outright grift. We’re treated to an example early, when he agrees to help an elderly woman find her missing husband. “How long has he been missing?” March asks. To which she replies, “Since the funeral.” His eyes (and ours) immediately go to the urn sitting conspicuously in the middle of her mantle. He nonetheless takes the case.

Due to a misunderstanding, March soon makes the acquaintance of one Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), another just-this-side-of-the-law gumshoe, though one cut from decidedly tougher leather. Healy’s specialty is messing up guys (preferably bad guys) for money, like a pre-superpower Deadpool, and March finds himself on the wrong end of one of his house calls. Rarely, I suspect, does a successful partnership begin with the line, “Give me your left arm, and when you talk to your doctor, tell him you have a spiral fracture of the left radius.”

But March and Healey quickly find themselves working together to find a missing woman named Amelia (Margaret Qualley), with an assist from March’s extravagantly precocious 13-year-old daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice). The eventual MacGuffin that they wind up chasing along with assorted villains—among them an assassin (Matt Bomer) nicknamed “John Boy” in sly homage to The Waltons—is the sole remaining celluloid copy of a porn movie. But not just any porn movie, mind you: This is one that has embedded in its story a corporate expose involving the auto industry, air pollution, and the catalytic converter. As an incredulous March clarifies: “So let me get this straight: You made a porn movie in which the point was the plot?”

The film, which Black co-wrote with Anthony Bagarozzi, is full of wicked nods to L.A. cinema. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that moments after a reference to a violent crime in a diner, we meet a character played by Crowe’s L.A. Confidential co-star Kim Basinger. There are echoes, too, of Magnolia, Get Shorty, The Big Lebowski, and Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre...

 
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Saw it last night, not a fan. Very odd movie not in a good way. Some laughs but that's about it. Don't see how this has a 90 or mostly positive reviews, really thought it was mediocre at best. 

 
I mostly like it.  It was about 10% too much slapstick.  Some real cringe-worthy moments when they thought they were moe and curly.

 
Yeah, the moment when Gosling was attempting to channel Bud Abbot (party, corpse), intended to be an homage I'm sure, came across as more awkward, amateurish impersonation, and rang a false note. Overall I liked it. Not as much as the stoner noir trilogy (Big Lebowski, Pineapple Express and Inherent Vice). Definitely liked KKBB better, as to Shane Black movies.  

 
The General said:
Saw it last night, not a fan. Very odd movie not in a good way. Some laughs but that's about it. Don't see how this has a 90 or mostly positive reviews, really thought it was mediocre at best. 
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I'm glad others felt it was mediocre as well, I thought it was worth seeing but I also was shocked that 90% of RT was positive. And then I remember reading that many of these reviews can be bought, or some of the time if the actors are well liked they simply give it a decent review. A film can get 3 out of 5 stars from 90% positive critics and it still is just an OK film. 

In the last few years RT has let me down a bunch. I like the TV section better than the movie reviews because TV doesn't cost me $20 a ticket on Sat Night. 

 
Bob Magaw said:
Yeah, the moment when Gosling was attempting to channel Bud Abbot (party, corpse), intended to be an homage I'm sure, came across as more awkward, amateurish impersonation, and rang a false note. Overall I liked it. Not as much as the stoner noir trilogy (Big Lebowski, Pineapple Express and Inherent Vice). Definitely liked KKBB better, as to Shane Black movies.  
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Could have been brilliant if it was done all the way not 50% of the way, and much better if it had been done once...he did it once, funny, kept going and it got a little awkward. At least they're trying. 

 
How long did that house party go on in the movie?

They enter, we see a band, Keith David is beaten within an inch of his life, Crowe finds the pron stash, Gossling finds the pron director...sort of. The daughter gets caught up in World Espionage, right? She's running, she's meeting people, she's running, she finds the magic person with a blinking amulet, she's running, she manages to kill a bad guy...sort of. I don't think the film leaves that set. 

Oh and another thing, these sweeping shots of Sunset Strip with NOBODY around...yeah.  

 
I saw this today with my wife and daughter. We all thought this film was quite good. Crowe and Gosling were both great, as was Angourie Rice as the daughter----I'm sure we'll be seeing her in many more movie roles based on her performance.  Some of the humor/gags fell flat but much more hit than miss.  Overall we laughed a lot.  Well worth seeing in the theater.

 
One of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.  Was uncomfortable to watch and for the most part incoherent.  

KKBB one of my fav's that I'll watch every so often.  

 
The Dreaded Marco said:
I saw this today with my wife and daughter. We all thought this film was quite good. Crowe and Gosling were both great, as was Angourie Rice as the daughter----I'm sure we'll be seeing her in many more movie roles based on her performance.  Some of the humor/gags fell flat but much more hit than miss.  Overall we laughed a lot.  Well worth seeing in the theater.
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Daywalker said:
One of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.  Was uncomfortable to watch and for the most part incoherent.  

KKBB one of my fav's that I'll watch every so often.  
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Not sure why but I understand both criticism/praise for the film. I didn't realize until after I saw this movie, same director as KKBB. 

 
My friend and I were in disbelief.  It was so bad it eventually became memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Once the fly scene happened, I honestly was wondering if the director was toying with us.

 
If you saw trailers for this and STILL went go see it, then that's on you. I am not surprised by all the people in here saying how awful it was.

 
Not BAAAAAAAAAD i guess but would never recommend it to anyone.  Just meh.  It being written 14 years ago makes sense, it felt like very dated humor to me but I couldn't quite quantify it.  Some definite laughs in here so I can't totally crush it but on the whole disappointing. 

Trailers were well made, if I knew how prominently his kid was gonna be in it I would have passed in the theater.  This is a movie about two dudes doing their thing, no one wants to see a kid dragged into the dynamic.

 
Daywalker said:
My friend and I were in disbelief.  It was so bad it eventually became memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Once the fly scene happened, I honestly was wondering if the director was toying with us.
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:lmao: what was this scene again I can't remember/am blacking it out

EDIT : oh him in the car :lmao: yeah that was stupid and lazy writing

 
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Just watched this tonight on illegal streaming.  Very nice copy.  I watched this on recommendation of my 21 year old cousin.  Best movie I've seen in a long time.  I felt it was very derivative of one of my all time favorite movies, 'Lethal Weapon'. It was almost like a two hour long SNL parody skit.  Had sort of the same dynamic and a few of the scenes and many of the characters were straight out lifted right out of it. The setup is obviously preposterous, especially the bit with the 13 year old tagging along, and I can see anyone who can't get past that hating it, but I thought it was great.  I actually dislike most movies that I watch, this one was pretty amazing; lots of very, very funny scenes and shockingly violent to boot, which was a surprise to me.    

 
I was more entertained by this than Civil War, the last movie I saw that I liked.  I would rate it a little higher than that.  I remember being sort of 'meh' at the trailer, except for the fact that I like 70s period movies.  I think this will eventually be a cult classic, something that many people love, but alot of people simply do not get because it doesn't make sense to them. I am not a person for whom every little plot point has to make sense, unless the filmmakers are clearly going for realism/ Academy award type consideration.  Once you get a load of the kid tagging along, you either have to immediately suspend disbelief or it loses you.  I thought the lead actors had great chemistry and a lot of funny moments.  I also enjoyed the little homages to Lethal Weapon, like the swimming pool scene, the partner interplay, the slapstick/ Loony Tunes nature of the violence, and the lead villain, who obviously was a comic copy of Mr. Joshua from LW..      

 
Meatwad Reloaded said:
Just watched this tonight on illegal streaming.  Very nice copy.  I watched this on recommendation of my 21 year old cousin.  Best movie I've seen in a long time.  I felt it was very derivative of one of my all time favorite movies, 'Lethal Weapon'. It was almost like a two hour long SNL parody skit.  Had sort of the same dynamic and a few of the scenes and many of the characters were straight out lifted right out of it. The setup is obviously preposterous, especially the bit with the 13 year old tagging along, and I can see anyone who can't get past that hating it, but I thought it was great.  I actually dislike most movies that I watch, this one was pretty amazing; lots of very, very funny scenes and shockingly violent to boot, which was a surprise to me.    
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Director Shane Black wrote both this and Lethal Weapon. You may like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which he also wrote and was his directorial debut. Like this, it was a noir and imo a funnier, more tightly plotted and overall superior written story (though with more sort of post-modern, self-referential material, somewhat in the style of Arrested Develoment - if it were a noir). Robert Downey, Jr. and Val Kilmer were great in it, replicating the tone of his off-kilter take on the buddy cop genre in Lethal Weapon, revisited here as seemingly mismatched PIs and personalities with actually complementary skill sets.

 
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