Tag Archive: Ryan Gosling


CHASTE LARS AND HIS SILICONE GIRL

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL directed by Craig Gillespie (USA/Canada, 2007)

Cover of "Lars and the Real Girl"

Cover of Lars and the Real Girl

What an odd and creepy movie this is.

it is billed as a comedy-drama, yet this quirky look at mental illness has no gags and practically no dramatic tension.

In the lead role as Lars Lindstorm, Ryan Gosling remains straight-faced throughout and believable as a painfully shy individual whose isolation is heightened by the fact that he cannot bear to be touched.

The consensus is that he needs the love of a good woman to bring him out of his shell. One equally gawky woman who works in the same office has a crush on him but he goes out of his way to avoid her.

Another work colleague, who spends a good part of the day looking for porn sites, inadvertently finds an alternative solution, He tells Lars about a Real Doll site and, although he feigns disinterest, we soon see Lars taking delivery of a wooden crate with his very own life-size silicone doll. Continue reading

THE DRIVER WITH NO NAME

Drive is adapted from a novel by James Sallis but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it had been based on a video game. With its focus on action, minimalist dialogue and car chase sequences, it is tailor-made for the joystick generation.

Ryan Gosling is perfectly cast as the man with no name and as strong and silent as Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. He plays a mechanic and a part-time movie stunt driver who moonlights as a the go to guy when you need a fast getaway from the scene of a crime.

The thrilling opening scene shows what he can do behind the wheel of a fast car, outwitting the police with ease. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn shoots the scenes from his perspective so you get a point of view effect of being in the car with him (another feature that would easily transfer to a video game).

When he’s on these jobs he is unarmed and for half of the movie he seems like a white knight in a silver bomber jacket who can handle himself without resorting to violence. Continue reading

THE WANDERING NAZI JEW

 

THE BELIEVER directed by Henry Bean (2001)

the-believer-e1453813837189Ryan Gosling’s full-blooded performance as Daniel Balint made me think of two other on-screen neo-nazi skinheads :  Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain (1982) and Edward Norton in Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998).

As with those characters he is lean, mean with fierce, but misguided, intelligence.

One of the aims of all these films is to show that to brand all extreme racists as thugs is simplistic and misleading.

In The Believer, Balint’s hatred of Judaism stems from what he regards as the religious abstraction. He believes Jews are too passive when faced with oppression. Having rejected the faith he was raised in, he seeks a more militant doctrine and this bizarrely leads him to anti-Semitism. We see him strutting about proudly wearing a red T-shirt with a swastika symbol and proclaiming an ambition to ‘kill a Jew’.

Balint is articulate and well-read, although in the company he keeps, even if he had scanned through a copy of  ‘Fascism For Dummies’ he might have been praised as an intellectual. Continue reading

“I know I’m a chain-smoking, drunken slob but I can change”. Ok, he doesn’t say this in so many words but this is essentially the flawed argument put forward by Dean (Ryan Gosling) to save his marriage to Cindy (Michelle Williams) in the heartbreaking movie Blue Valentine. Not surprisingly she is unconvinced: “I can’t do this anymore”.He is still in love with Cindy and in desperation he books them into a love hotel in the ironically named ‘future room’. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but I would say that courting couples seeing that the movie is billed as a ‘love story’ should be warned that this is no date movie.

Many of the scenes incorporate improvised dialogue and the performances of Gosling and Williams are exceptional; almost painfully realistic when the relationship begins to disintegrate. This is only the second movie by young filmmaker Derek Cianfrance who risked financial ruin to get this movie made.

Fortunately it is getting the critical praise it deserves. It works not because of the originality of the story but because it is presented in such an honest, unpretentious way. It has a great soundtrack by Grizzly Bear and features a mystery  R’n’B song ‘You And Me’ by Penny and the Quarters believed to have been recorded in the 1970s though no one can trace exactly when or where. The story is all the more poignant through the presentation of the flashbacks to the couple’s rapid courtship 6 years before things started to go pear-shaped. Particularly touching is a scene after they’ve just met where she tap dances as he plays a toy guitar and sings the pop standard ‘You always hurt the one you love’ :

Related Articles