A long, long time ago, Ryan Gosling left the comforts of his native Canada, came to Hollywood, and stawted tawkin' like dis. It's been wonderful to witness. The only thing is, sometimes the accent makes more sense than others. As a blue-collar screw-up with heart in Blue Valentine? Yes, absolutely. As a mysterious, doomed loner that knows his way around a face-stomp in Drive? Sure, sure. As a whiz-kid political campaign aide in Ides of March? Ehh, not so much.
To celebrate Goz Appreciation Month — what? it's a real thing, as of now — Time Warner Cable is offering an entire On Demand channel of the newly identified Ryan Gosling Genre of film. Why should you have to hunt around the wildly inconsistent Netflix Instant catalog or wade through dozens of programming grid menu items in hopes of finding your favorite Gosling movie (The Notebook), your second-favorite Gosling movie (The Notebook), or your seventh-favorite Gosling movie (The Notebook, with Spanish subtitles)? Just navigate to Gosling On Demand, click on Ryan Gosling's name, and bam!, you are mere moments of cache-buffering away from buffering your cache to images of Ryan Gosling building a house or some shit. Try it! You can do this for all of February!
BTW, did you know that Ryan Gosling's character in Drive (some movie he's in that's not The Notebook, who cares) was a werewolf? He totally was a werewolf.
Oscar predictors like to complain that the ludicrous number of movie awards handed out in December and January make the Academy Awards themselves too predictable, but let’s give credit where it’s due: This year, critics helped to create a remarkably diverse field of candidates—eleven different actors have won prizes so far. So there’s really no excuse for Oscar voters to resort to autopilot nominations. But when have Oscar voters ever needed an excuse?
Justin and Jessica Biel: CAN SHE TRUST HIM? The formerly womanizing Justin "Trousersnake" is doing a 180 for love, having proposed to Jessica Biel. "Can one idyllic trip offset four years of heartbreak and drama?" The couple "split last spring in the wake of reported infidelities on his part." Biel's friends are skeptical that Justin will clean up his act. She gave him an ultimatum and he "came back to her with his hat in his hands." (Was it the hat he wore in the video for "Like I Love You"? That guy has a LOT of hats.) "She laid down the law: aisle or exit." After that, "it was understood that he was going to propose." She is not stupid about the stakes: "Everybody knows Justin has a wandering eye." But she ignored it "because she really wanted to stay with him." Timberlake, ever the charmer, told her "he wants to make this work too." Jessica won't put up with Justin's skeevy FutureSex/LoveCrap this time around. "There is no way Jessica will deal with his straying eye now that they're engaged. You are going to see some changes from Justin." Can we just hear some fucking MUSIC please, JT? Some people Justin may have banged or tried to bang, some while he was dating Jessica: Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Munn, Kate Hudson, Ciara, and Rihanna. "Then of course there are his layman conquests." Biel "struggles with his flirting, but loves him so much." Justin "seems to have all the power and is treating Jessica like a doormat. Often a week will go by without seeing him. He's calling all the shots. But she's taking what she can get — and the one thing she wants is to be his wife — at any cost." Timberlake "really loves Jessica, but he just can't stay monogamous." Ah c'mon, CAN'T or WON'T? "Basically his brain and his penis operate separately, and the brain proposed to her." So on their wedding night all she gets is brain?
Oh hiiiiiii! It's your weekly frenemy, the tabloids, back to humblebrag about how hard it is to have the perfect husband, children, and job. You've been looking kind of tired lately! Maybe you ought to take it easy on the cocktails during holiday parties this month, especially since you're trying to meet someone. Oh, you're seeing somebody? Huh, that guy. Yeah I don't know about that. Anyway, I'm sooooo busy making tiny coral wreaths for my daughter Gingerbeer's fish-tank nativity and poaching a brie-stuffed boar sous-vide for dinner. I better go. Luv yaaaaaaa!
They should really just rename all of these tabloids Judging Other Women for Their Choices and Appearance Magazine. Can you imagine if men's magazines were like this instead of the monthly blowjobs to manliness (suits! whiskey! cars! titties! war!) that they are? What if there were a Bros Weekly and the stories were like, "Darren Aronofsky: Did He Put His Career Before His Marriage?" "Are Leo's Friends Making Fun of Him Behind His Back?" "Clint Eastwood Wishes He Was the Young Clint Eastwood"? Feeling old? Feeling fat? Feeling ugly and insecure, like your fabulous wife is going to leave you for James Bond? Now multiply that times a billion and you know what it's like to be a woman who consumes media. These magazines are like a passive-aggressive friend that hates you and makes you feel terrible about yourself. I love the good men's magazines because they make me feel cool and informed and ready to slam dunk the Henderson account. Tabloids and women's beauty magazines all make me want to stab myself in the face with an emerald.
Let’s start with a rant. Last week, in a long New York Times lamentation, the paper’s two lead film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, argued that talking about the Oscars this far in advance, specifically in the context of film festivals, is “a drag” that sucks up “all the air in the room” (Dargis), that “the machinery of hoopla and trivia…overshadows everything else” (Scott), and that awards jockeying is an “unwelcome guest” in the conversation (the headline writer). Dargis and Scott are two of the smartest and most engaged critics around, and when they’re both pissed off about the same thing, it’s worth confronting.
Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s hyperviolent ode to fast cars and pink fonts, is crammed with memorable visual details: a tense, gloved hand on a steering wheel, Carey Mulligan’s doe-eyed gaze, Ryan Gosling popping skulls like Birdman pops bottles. But the most iconic image of the film is the white satin jacket worn by Gosling’s character, Driver. Pitched perfectly between immaculate throwback and haute hipster, the ever-present jacket — which becomes ever more bloody as the film progresses — was the work of costume designer Erin Benach, a veteran of films including Half Nelson, Blue Valentine, and even a few not starring Ryan Gosling. We spoke with her about her greatest creation.
Nicolas Wending Refn’s Drive is about a stunt driver by day, getaway driver by night played by Ryan Gosling. Among its many recommendable qualities (the performances, Refn’s visual virtuosity, bringing back toothpicks and satin jackets) are the film's fully analog car chases and stunts. So who was responsible for Drive's action? Meet stunt coordinator Darrin Prescott. We spoke with him this week about his career, Ryan Gosling, and a funny thing that happened one day on the set of the Jet Li/DMX classic, Cradle 2 the Grave.
Trend alert! Last week they were peeing on airplanes, but this week, Hollywood's biggest celebrities are saving lives. Notebook star Ryan Gosling kicked things off yesterday when footage hit the Internet of him bravely intervening in a New York City street fight. And it was quite a melee: As the video above shows, the two brawlers were locked in shirt-pulling, painting-grabbing battle, with pleas from bystanders falling on deaf ears. Finally, with one fighter in the midst of strangling the other, the Gos steps in to calmly separate them. Notice that, as he pushes one away from the other, Ryan selflessly drops a grocery bag on the ground, sacrificing his own earthly concerns (we hope there weren't chips in there) in the name of peace.
Gosling would probably have been this week's biggest hero — if not for Kate Winslet. The Academy Award winner was vacationing at Richard Branson’s home in Necker Island when a giant-ass fire broke out in the middle of the night.
Suits! Ties! Philip Seymour Hoffman! One can practically smell the autumn crispness in the just-released trailer for The Ides of March, the sort of serious-minded film studios release in the fall with hopes of winning Oscars the following winter. Still, as far as pedigreed political parables go, this one appears to be a doozy. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s well-regarded play Farragut North by handsome prankster George Clooney, the film concerns backroom shenanigans set in a fictionalized version of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Marisa Tomei lectures, Evan Rachel Wood flirts, and Paul Giamatti does his best Toby Ziegler but the star in all senses is the resurgent Ryan Gosling, who appears charismatically conflicted as Dean/Clooney’s trusted adviser-turned-traitorous mole. While the trailer gives away a boatload of plot points, it does manage to keep under wraps our most anticipated scene: the inevitable moment when the normally debonair and understated Clooney is forced to uncork a ferocious, campaign-killing primal yawp.
Like a cool breeze blowing through a stultifying summer of sequels comes the first extended look at Drive, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s hard-bitten ode to pulpy Americana. And whether it’s the unrelenting heat or the paranoiac visions of a gigantic blue monster staring down at us, we’re going all-in with this trailer. Hell, to our 3-D-scarred eyes these 146 seconds seem like the best film released so far in 2011! It’s basically got it all: Ryan Gosling, finally taking full advantage of his charismatic cocktail of rough-edged good looks and character-actor kook, Carey Mulligan playing someone tougher than Shia LaBeouf’s girlfriend, Christina Hendricks perfectly cast as a gangster’s moll, Albert Brooks surprisingly cast as a vicious criminal, Christina Hendricks … oh did we already mention her? Plus, the picture appears to be a near-perfect blend of genre gas (He’s driving backwards! He’s threatening to hammer a bullet into someone’s skull!), and art-house design (a wordless montage of straight-razors and flying fenders set to a soaring orchestral score!). It’s a blessed reminder that the silly season will eventually come to an end, that cinematic pleasure can be experienced without guilt or Ryan Reynolds. Slick, sexy, and smart, Drive makes all the other cars on the road look like wiener-mobiles.
