First Look At Ryan Gosling's Weird Ass Directorial Debut LOST RIVER

The Cannes Film Festival is currently underway in France and we're already hearing all sorts of interesting buzz from a few highly anticipated films.  Grace Of Monoco starring Nicole Kidman was apparently a huge bust while everybody is raving about Steve Carrell and Channing Tatum in Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher.  Get ready for a million "That's what she said" jokes come Oscar season.

Somewhere in the middle ground lies Lost River (formerly How To Catch A Monster), the first film directed by walking meme generator Ryan Gosling.  The film was reportedly met by a mix of applause and boos. Cannes audiences are notorious for having extremely vocal and I really think we should follow their example.  Look forward to hearing me boo the shit out of Transformers: Age Of ExSTINKtion this summer.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here's a fairly cryptic first look teaser.  It features moody cinematography, burning things, and a gold sequined Doctor Who screaming about his muscly muscles.

You've gotta give Gosling credit for not taking the easy road.  As a darling of the internet and basically the most attractive man alive, he could be churning out a romantic comedy or two or year and making piles of Fuck You Money in the process.  Instead Gosling's repeatedly chosen to work with artistic and challenging filmmakers like Nicolas Winding Refn and Derek Cianfrance; the guy's got an odd streak a mile wide and thankfully he's chosen to embrace it.  All that being said, it's little wonder that a movie this bizarre would sharply divide audiences and I quite frankly cannot wait to see it.

Once it hit theaters, I expect Tumblr to promptly implode.

Here's Hoping That A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD Marks The End Of John McClane

"I kinda thought we would just wing it, you know?  Running in, guns blazing.  Make it up as we go."

A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of traveling to New York City in order to not only attend, but actually officiate the wedding of my two dear friends Rob and Kristina.  Rob and I met sixteen years ago on the first day of freshman year of high school.  At the end of the previous year, the admissions department had assigned every eighth grader an incoming freshman that they were supposed to call during the summer to answer any questions the new student might have, and so that the new kid would know at least one person when they got to school.  I didn't know any of this at the time, but when I happened to start talking to some guys at orientation and eventually introduced myself, Rob turned to me and said, "Oh hey, I was supposed to call you this summer and answer questions or something."

"Don't worry," I answered.  "I wasn't really home all summer so you probably wouldn't have gotten a hold of me anyway."

"Good." Rob said.  "If anyone asks, I totally called you."

That's how we got to be friends.

Kristina was a girl who went to Emerson with me and actually ended up living with another friend of ours from high school.  I suppose I can claim some credit for helping to bring Rob and Kristina together, but then again if Rob hadn't attended USC then I never would have met Jamie.  I guess that makes us even.

The wedding was on a Friday night, which meant I had to be there on Thursday for the rehearsal.  Fortunately the trip from Boston to New York is fairly painless, so Jamie and I took a Thursday morning Bolt Bus out of South Station.  If you're unfamiliar, the Bolt is a fairly inexpensive bus service that provides free wifi on board as well as an electrical plug for each passenger.  The wifi usually isn't very fast and the chances that your power outlet will be fully functional are probably about 70/30, but at least it's not as likely to break down and/or flip over like the Fung Wah.

Rob is a big fan of action movies, so when I cleaned out my local Redbox in anticipation of the trip, A Good Day To Die Hard somehow seemed appropriate.  The Die Hard franchise is an odd duck.  The first movie is a classic, the second is an uninspired retread, the third is exceptionally entertaining (mostly because of Sam Jackson) and the fourth is an overblown mess of action that's really a Die Hard movie in name only.  The fifth entry seemed like a bad idea from the start, so it's fair to say my expectations were pretty low.

Not low enough, apparently.

At this point I'm baffled that the entire franchise doesn't have a stake through its heart.  Hopefully this Russian non-adventure will finally be the last straw.  Willis looks downright bored at this point, and his John McClane is barely even a character anymore.  He's just a guy who shows up in the wrong place at the wrong time and is forced to shoot stuff before tiredly muttering "Yipee-kayee" at the end.  McClane is interesting in the first and third films because he's got a flawed backstory, separated from his wife and a borderline alcoholic who's ill prepared for the shitstorm he's thrust into as well as being physically incapacitated in some way.  (In Die Hard he has no shoes and in With A Vengeance he's perpetually hungover.)  It's not that I have a problem with McClane as a family man, and substituting his now grown kids for his wife Holly does alleviate a certain degree of repetition, but all of the wisecracking asshole has been sanded blasted out of McClane and it's becoming increasingly clear that the only reason that Willis keeps making these movies is because someone at Fox is dumb enough to keep paying him just for showing up.

After the initial success of the first Die Hard, there was a glut of pretenders to the thrown, with every other producer in Hollywood pitching "Die Hard on a boat" (a.k.a. Under Siege), "Die Hard on a plane" (a.k.a. Passenger 57), or Die Hard on a bus (a.k.a. Speed).  This past year, we got not one but two movies that are essentially "Die Hard in the White House" in the form of Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, or as I like to call them White Olympus Has Fallen Down.  Tragically I missed both in the theater, (I'm planning on a double feature once they both hit DVD) but by all accounts they were each better Die Hard movies than A Good Day To Die Hard, a film whose only redeeming quality is that it makes Live Free Or Die Hard look brilliant by comparison.  At this point, I've decided that I'd much rather watch a dozen movies starring Channing Tatum or Ryan Gosling that riff on the basic structure and premise of Die Hard than watch Bruce Willis shuffle around with a shotgun one more time.

It's no fun anymore.  Now it's just sad.

We arrived in New York and hopped a train to my friend SJ's apartment in the Bronx.  We had time for a quick drink with her and her boyfriend Travis before it was time to head out again.  The cab ride over to the rehearsal was filled with the sounds of an ultra-Christian call in show, which is ironic considering that I'm a devout atheist and was on my way to practice officiating a wedding with a ministry certificate I got over the internet.  Dinner was a lot of fun, held at a cute little Italian restaurant near the wedding venue in Manhattan.  Late in the evening I was goaded by Rob's dad into saying a little something, which I drunkenly tried to conclude by toasting with my water glass.  I immediately abandoned the gesture as bad juju, and instead took up my wine glass, which was predictably empty.  I ended up toasting with an entire carafe of wine instead.

Classy, I know.

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Title: A Good Day To Die Hard
Director: John Moore
Starring:  Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Rasha Bukvic, Sergei Kolesnikov, Yuliya Snigir, Cole Hauser, May Elizabeth Winstead
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Redbox DVD (Laptop on a bus)

Mexican Vacation Day 3: Getting Burned By GANGSTER SQUAD

"Always knew I'd die in Burbank."

Pro Tip: If traveling to Mexico in July, you may want a stronger sunscreen than SPF 30.

I've got some pretty strong Sicilian roots, so I've always tanned pretty easily.  I usually go with an SPF 15 if I use sunscreen at all and reserve the 30 for the times I've taken a cruise to the Bahamas or the Caribbean.  But I got a bit too much sun on our last vacation in February, so this trip I'd been slathering on the 30 from day one.  Despite my careful precautions, my long shirtless walk on day one plus the next morning spent snorkeling on the beach in Akumal, a.k.a. the land of sea turtles, resulted in my shoulders becoming pretty much roasted by the afternoon.  After a quick snack of empanadas and mojitos, we staked out a new beach spot in the shade of a palm tree and did our best to stay out of the sun for a few hours before grabbing a late lunch of fish tacos and cervezas and then driving back to Tulum.  By then we both had a hankering for air conditioning so we stayed inside and watched Reuben Fleischer's Gangster Squad.

Jamie probably summed it up best: "I wouldn't have been so disappointed if the trailers for that movie hadn't been so awesome."

On paper the movie sounds brilliant: a 40's yarn based on a true story about a small band of honest cops led by Josh Brolin who take on Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) as he tries to cement his hold on organized crime in Los Angeles.  Throw in a romance between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone plus a supporting cast that includes Michael Pena, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Nick Nolte as the chief of police and T-1000 himself Robert Patrick as an aging gunhand and tie it together with a creative up and coming director (Fleischer) who's demonstrated a talent for fun, well staged action in flicks like Zombieland and 30 Minutes Or Less and you should have a recipe for success.  Unfortunately the script by Will Beall simply never delivers on all that promise.  The trailers had me expecting L.A. Confidential 2.0, but instead I got a poor man's Untouchables.

Penn is a worthy successor to DeNiro's Capone, in that he absolutely tears up every frame he's in; Penn doesn't so much chew the scenery as he devours it whole.  But other than one good fist fight with Brolin at the end, he doesn't really have a whole lot to do.  Brolin's John O'Mara is surly and bullheaded but not exactly the kind of guy who can out-think Cohen, to the point that after a while it feels like his success is due mostly to dumb luck.  Ribisi is the squad's Jiminey Cricket and we spend a lot of time with him and his family that would have been better served fleshing out the barebones romance between Gosling and Stone.  Both are phenomenally talented and they demonstrated an abundance of chemistry together in Crazy Stupid Love, but the two are given precious little screen time together.  Most of their relationship is basically left to the viewer's imagination, as the film cuts from the first time they meet and sleep together to their first fight weeks later.  The whole thing feels sloppy and I wouldn't care except that their relationship becomes crucial to the plot very late in the game, so it's not exactly the kind of thing you can brush off.

But that kind of criticism is true of the whole script.  Everything feels a bit out of whack, like Beal was so scared of shortchanging one character that we're left with only broad sketches of everyone and really care about no one.  For example, we're constantly reminded that Robert Patrick is an amazing sharpshooter but the only time we see him display his marksmanship is when he shoots a tin can six times in the air.  The movie is constantly telling us stuff like this without giving us the chance to see any of it play out naturally.  That being said, it's not really a bad flick.  Everyone's clearly giving it their all and Fleischer does a solid job staging most of the gunplay (he relies a lot on speed ramping but that's never really bothered me) and his recreation of 1940's Los Angeles is just gorgeous to look at.  It's a time and place that feels nothing short of magical.  It's actually kind of goofy and fun in a way, and I'm convinced a slightly tighter script would have really put this thing over the top.  So long as you're not expecting a prestige period film and you just surrender to it's frothy, wannabe pulp, then Gangster Squad is not half bad.

After the movie we walked down to El Asadero, where we had the specialty of the house:

That's arrachera (a grilled, marinated flank steak) with chorizo, a roasted jalapeno, grilled cactus and a roasted potato with cheese and grilled chicken.  The cheese on the potato was sort of gloppy and strange, but everything else was fantastic, served with homemade corn tortillas.

Because everything is better wrapped in home made corn tortillas.

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Title: Gangster Squad
Director: Reuben Fleischer
Starring: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Redbox DVD