THE NICE GUYS: Black Is the New Black

Director: Shane Black
Writers: Shane Black, Anthony Bagarozzi
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley
Runtime: 116 mins.
2016

The worst thing I can say about The Nice Guys is that it's no Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, writer/director Shane Black's other neo-noir comedy. That film, one of my favorite meta-narrative movies, may upstage Black's latest directorial effort, but by any other reasonable metric The Nice Guys is a rousing success.

Beginning with a hauntingly beautiful scene of a child discovering a dead porn star in the wreckage of a mangled car, The Nice Guys firmly establishes itself in the seventies. Our heroes are Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a bruiser for hire who gets embroiled in detective work despite his better judgment, and Holland March (Ryan Gosling), an inept P.I. who mostly coasts by on alcohol and exploiting the elderly. The other major player is Holly March (Angourie Rice), Holland's hypercompetent daughter, only the most recent in the storied line of child actors in Shane Black action movies who manage not to be annoying at all, but are in fact quite charming. I'm going to cut off the plot summary hardly before it's even started, as I cannot remember much about the twisty narrative details. Though in this case, that's no detriment; the joy of The Nice Guys has little to do with its plot intrigue, instead putting all the eggs in the bounteous basket of how delightful Crowe and Gosling are to watch bounce off each other for an hour and a half.

They both bring their A+ game. Between this and Noah, it's great to see Crowe in the midst of a career resurgence. He's cribbing from John Goodman here, playing Healy as paunchy but vivacious. Plus, Crowe is capable of selling the hell out of the movie's isolated moments of tragedy. Meanwhile, I have been a Gosling advocate for years (Drive, Only God Forgives, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl, etc. etc.), but he manages to shift into a new tier of talent in The Nice Guys, at least comedically. His physical comedy is far more committed than anything we could reasonably expect from a Hollywood A-lister. Black likes to beat the hell out of his characters, and Gosling sells every painful mishap.

All things considered, The Nice Guys is an exemplary if somewhat traditional noir. It may not transcend its own structure like the aforementioned Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but The Nice Guys sees a cavalcade of tremendous talents at the top of their game, knocking it out of the park as if it were routine to do so.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS

THE HITCH-HIKER: Thumbs Up

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ida Lupino
Writers: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph
Cast: Frank Lovejoy, Edmond O'Brien, William Talman
Runtime: 70 mins.
1953

When Ida Lupino was a child, her father told her, "You're a strange, interesting girl. Your mother and I, to be honest with you, prayed... we would have a son. I think you're going to end up doing what my son would have done. You will write, direct, and produce." This would turn out to be prescient, or perhaps something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Lupino would grow up to become an actress who was dissatisfied with the limits of a Hollywood acting career. She was frequently suspended by Warner Bros. for not making the movies they wanted her to make, and during that time she familiarized herself with the technical processes of filmmaking. In her words, while she was sitting around being bored on set, "someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work."

Lupino transitioned into producing, writing, and directing with her own production company, an unheard of feat for a woman in Hollywood during that era. In the earliest years of film female filmmakers were fairly common, but by the '40s and '50s Hollywood had become a boys' club, with women primarily relegated to acting and editing. Seventy years later and women are still by and large unwelcome in the director's chair, which makes Lupino's achievements all the more extraordinary. Not only was she prolific, but she was uncompromising in a way that was unpalatable to the gender roles of the time, yet she still managed to toe the line enough to keep finding opportunities to make her art. She was interested in creating strong female characters, "[not] women who have masculine qualities about them, but [a role] that has intestinal fortitude, some guts to it." Again, seventy years later and this is still a concept that big budget writers and studio execs cannot wrap their minds around, instead construing the term Strong Female Character as a hot woman who can punch things hard. Lupino accessed the power of the feminine in a masculine-dominated world, preferring to be called "mother" while on set, which she considered emblematic of the act of creation.

All this is fascinating to keep in mind when looking at The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino's sixth (though only fourth credited) directorial effort. The film follows two fishing buddies who pick up a dangerous hitchhiker, the psychopathic killer Emmett Myers (William Talman). The film chronicles their captivity, in which they are forced at gunpoint to aid Myers' escape across Baja California. Snippets of the police pursuit are sprinkled throughout, but for the most part we are trapped in pressure cooker situation after situation, in which Myers abuses his captives both physically and psychologically. He considers them weak, you see, too dependent upon the love and support of others, whereas he is strong because he's always made his own way and never taken any help from anybody.