The Nice Guys (2016)

After two Iron Man films, Jon Favreau retired to a more personal film with Chef, which seems to have rejuvenated his creative batteries while remaining an entertaining movie in its own right. Likewise, three years after Iron Man 3 it’s Shane Black’s turn to scale back for a smaller film – misplaced, perhaps, in the summer blockbuster season (I can’t help thinking it’d have performed better financially in, say, October), but right up there with Hail, Caesar! in terms of laughs per minute.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star as errant private eyes whose paths cross on a missing persons case before the case turns into an apparent murder (or, as it turns out, murders) reaching as high as the head of the Department of Justice (Kim Basinger). It’s a 1970s extravaganza, from the music and locations to the politics and pornography; hat-tip to Angourie Rice as Gosling’s daughter, overeager and spirited despite her father’s protestations.

I’ve been a fan of Shane Black’s going as far back as my first viewing of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and his clever screenplay on The Monster Squad. Of course, the former had a lot to do with Robert Downey Jr. in a starring role, but that has a lot to do with the fact that RDJ is naturally adept at delivering the kind of lines that Black writers – quick-witted, dryly sarcastic, and unapologetically buffoonish when need be. Throw in the buddy cop element (lest we forget, Black screenwrote Lethal Weapon), and you’re well on your way to The Nice Guys.

Another way to put it would be to think of The Nice Guys as “Thomas Pynchon’s Big Lebowski,” juxtaposing the neo-noir aesthetics of the Coen Brothers with Pynchon’s penchant for the absurd, Inherent Vice if it starred a pair of detectives. Yet for all the twists and turns that analogy might lead you to expect, The Nice Guys is never less than straightforward, its mystery meandering but never straying while wrinkling in a nice bit of ambiguity just because the final reel (in brief, is someone lying about the truth of the case?).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a success because of the unlikely chemistry between the extreme personalities of RDJ and Val Kilmer (the latter in an uproarious turn as Gay Perry), and The Nice Guys continues that pattern by joining Crowe and Gosling in a successful combination of thuggish straight man Crowe and waggish clown Gosling. While Crowe gets in his fair share of punchlines and confident one-liners, it’s Gosling who runs away with the film’s funniest moments (some playing off his daughter, in an entry for “World’s Nuttiest Approach to Parenting”).

Unfortunately, it seems that The Nice Guys is flying under the commercial radar, though critically it’s hovering around 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps The Nice Guys will find its audience on DVD, and hopefully so because this is a film that is a guaranteed bad-mood-killer. Hail, Caesar! gave me an unending grin on my face, but The Nice Guys goes for the comedic jugular and left me wheezing with laughter throughout much of the picture.

The Nice Guys is rated R for “violence, sexuality, nudity, language and brief drug use.” Definitely a hard R between the violence (gunfights, fistfights, people getting hit with cars and falling off buildings), profanity (F-bombs aplenty), and nudity (topless and nude women in the opening scene and in an extended party scene).

Monday at the Movies - April 1, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Even though it's April Fool's Day, no joke - this is a movie that could be reviewed in a single word:  “perfect.”  (Don’t worry, you’ll get the other 249, as well!)

The Maltese Falcon (1941) – As well as a directorial debut and a book-to-screen adaptation, The Maltese Falcon is the curious case of the remake that’s better than the original (is it the only one?).  Director John Huston takes the Dashiell Hammett book of the same name and films it virtually word-for-word, casting Humphrey Bogart in a star-making role as private eye Sam Spade.  It’s your classic MacGuffin film, where the object of pursuit is less important than the characters who pursue it, and here The Maltese Falcon shines with an amazingly engaging set of protagonists and antagonists who are all in it for themselves – even if it means double-crossing each other to get there.  Spade gets embroiled in a search for the fabled “Black Bird,” though he’s not sure who really wants it or why; in hot pursuit of the jeweled statue, Spade becomes embroiled in a sundry cast of characters including a charismatic pathological liar (Mary Astor), an effete but well-mannered criminal (Peter Lorre), and a garrulous gentleman (Sydney Greenstreet) whose vocabulary is matched only by his girth.  The Maltese Falcon is perfect on a number of levels – perfect cast, perfect direction (which practically reinvents noir before your eyes), perfect script that wastes not a single shot in relentless pursuit of the plot.  Huston has made something really remarkable film here, almost the noir version of Seinfeld, in which essentially nothing happens while four ostensible allies scramble over each other to come out on top.  On first watch, the pursuit is all; on second watch, you’ll be able to appreciate the performances now that you know who’s after what at which point.  On third watch?  You’ll be saying the dialogue along with them.  The Maltese Falcon is that perfect crystallization of earnestness and infectiousness, a movie instantly rewatchable time and again.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

I think that Sorry, Wrong Number and I had a bad connection - not that I was ever tempted to hang up.

Director Anatole Litvak adapts Lucille Fletcher's classic radio drama into a 90-minute thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck as the bedridden Leona Stevenson-Cotterell, who overhears a telephone conversation in which two mysterious men plot the murder of an innocent woman. The premise seems simple, but in true film noir tradition there is more than meets the eye when it comes to the secrets that Leona and her mysteriously absent husband (Burt Lancaster) are keeping. Through a series of phone calls (and flashbacks), the awful truth comes out.

I'll freely admit that I hadn't heard the radio play before watching this movie. (Prep work isn't exactly my forte when it comes to this site, loyal reader.) So I was coming into this one fresh, ready for a film noir twist but also prepared to play along until the ending happened. This isn't the best noir out there - I'm a devout fan of The Big Sleep, mystifying though much of it is - but Litvak does an adequate job of keeping the movie going while not losing sight of the urgency of the murder to be committed at 11:15. It's not much of a mystery, true, but the why is more important (and more surprising) than the who and what.

Stanwyck and Lancaster are serviceable in their roles as the not-so-happily married couple, though at times Stanwyck borders on overacting (though she does a fine job of creating a simultaneously sympathetic and loathsome heiress) while Lancaster underplays what should be a more devastated part. As items submitted from the 1940s, though, and from a genre that highly prizes stylization, this is to be expected and so does not detract from the overall enjoyment of the picture.

What does, sadly, hurt Sorry, Wrong Number is that it is a touch too long. Some of the flashback scenes overstay their welcome, unnecessarily belaboring a few points (such as the courtship or the chemist's dream of owning horses). Perhaps this is the fault of the script, adapted from a nonvisual medium, or perhaps this is the fault of Litvak, who fails to yell "Cut!" when scenes run overlong. In the hands of, say, Hitchcock, this one might have been a ballpark favorite (I'll have to have a look at Dial M for Murder now to see what Hitch does with a similar premise), but as it stands, a few lines get crossed with Sorry, Wrong Number.

That said, if you can make it through a moderately drawn-out initial 70 minutes, the last 20 minutes - in which the reality behind the overheard phone call is revealed and its staggering consequences play out in brutal real time - are solid gold. In top film noir tradition, the film's final reel makes brilliant use of shadows, shouting, and snappy cuts to build a white-knuckle tension and a staggering climax we all saw coming but hoped wasn't so. That's the genius, I suppose, of the film - like The Taking of Pelham 123, Sorry, Wrong Number did a bang-up job of convincing me how it wouldn't end... and then ended just like it was supposed to. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

It's like a great dessert after an okay main course.

Sorry, Wrong Number made it to theaters before the MPAA carved out their ratings stamps, but this is definitely PG fare. As a 40s flick, this one is fairly innocuous, without any on-screen violence - the tension and the action is all in your head.