Shout To The Heart! 'The Fall Guy' Is Too Late
#271: "The Fall Guy," "The Idea Of You," "Traffic," "How To Talk To Girls At Parties"
Edition 271:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Ryan Gosling stars in an ode to stunt performers, and Anne Hathaway in a straight-to-streaming rom-com. Two wildly different streaming suggestions for you on Netflix and Max. Then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” what happens when indie darling Barry Jenkins takes the reigns of a Disney live action remake?
The Fall Guy
Let’s talk about stunts. After all, that’s the only thing The Fall Guy is interested in. From the very literal plotline of the movie to its “message” (if you want to give it that much credit) to the promotion and marketing have all foregrounded a celebration of the stunt art form. And why not? Stunts are often the most exciting and most memorable part of your favorite action movies.
Throughout Hollywood history, stunts have necessarily gotten bigger and more ambitious. Take, for instance, the showstopping sequence in 1994’s Speed. Just 30 years ago, audiences’ minds were blown watching a man jump from a car onto a bus at…medium speeds. Today that’s child’s play. In this movie, we see Ryan Gosling’s protagonist jump quite easily from a crane attached to the back of a pickup truck onto a flying helicopter.
The difference, of course, is CGI. As stunts progressed, they eventually reached the limit of what was physically possible and pushed past it using a combination of human stunt men and photorealistic animation.
But ironically, the bigger stunts have gotten, the lower the stakes have become. There’s no sense of real danger for Gosling on that helicopter jump, or cars jumping between skyscrapers in Fast & Furious, etc. etc. … because it’s not real, and audiences are under no presumption that what they’re seeing is real (even if there is a real human being attempting some part of the action in real life!).
That’s sort of the fundamental problem with The Fall Guy. Every five minutes we see another incredibly staged and performed stunt, wild and death-defying except for the fact that it never seems like anyone is defying death. That’s not even a mistake on the movie’s part, that’s built directly into the story!
Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt man, who has a crush on Emily Blunt’s movie director and tries to save her movie by tracking down the missing star actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He uses his stunt man skills to become a real life action hero, except all of it is done with a tongue-in-cheek glee. In his very charming Ryan Gosling sort of way, his face is always asking, “Isn’t this fun!!?”
The answer is yes. It’s extremely fun, but as I’ve said many times, a movie cannot ask its audience to take its dramatic tension seriously when the movie itself does not. It may have worked in the 1980s — which this movie desperately wants to transport you back to, with a soundtrack of obvious 80s hits from AC/DC, Journey, Bon Jovi, Phil Collins, ELO and CCR — but nothing about the movie feels current or zeitgeist-y.
Does that matter to make a good movie…no, but it’s one reason why the movie is disappointing at the box office. An old school, action comedy romance with no real stakes is no longer a frame sturdy enough to hold up the expectations produced by a $130 million budget. These movies can be good, they can be entertaining, they can even be popular, but they can’t be blockbusters.
(To which you might be saying Matt, what about Barbie? I think the lessons of Barbie are much more in its genius marketing than its content, which was basically a transgressive trojan horse.)
Setting all of the dark realities of the business aside, this movie is kind of perfect diversionary entertainment. Gosling has proven many times over to be a brilliant comedic performer, and still has his fastball when it comes to romantic charm. He pairs well with Blunt, whose character is given little to do but makes every scene she’s in better (a consistent theme in Blunt’s career). The supporting cast is great, the jokes are pretty decent and the action is fun to take in almost like a spectator (let’s see what they do next!). As an incredibly expensive ode to stunt performers across movie history, I mean, what a tribute.
Something New
The Idea of You (Amazon): What is Amazon doing?? I realize that the company’s market cap is higher than the GDP of 92% of the world’s countries, but does Supreme Leader Bezos have so little regard for his movie business that he would bury all the studio’s projects on its streaming service? We’re four years removed from Warner Bros.’ pandemic-induced, straight-to-streaming debacle, yet Amazon has now pivoted Road House (a movie I thought was bad but had legitimate commercial potential) and this starry rom-com straight to Amazon Prime Video.
Anne Hathaway stars as the most unrealistic-looking 40-year-old of all time, who accidentally bumps into a 20-something pop star at Coachella (oops! hate when that happens) while chaperoning her kids. Their whirlwind romance takes her all over Europe, a storyline as ridiculous as it is entertaining, fulfilling everyone’s Harry Styles fan fiction fantasy. Sure, you could poke holes in this plot and quite easily deflate the whole thing — like, the idea of someone being as beautiful and successful as Hathaway’s character, who owns a successful art gallery and a large home in Pasadena, having the self-confidence of a high school girl is insane — but why pinch yourself to wake up from a good dream?
As I always say, rom-coms are judged almost exclusively on the performances and chemistry of their two leads, and in this case, Hathaway and relative newcomer Nicholas Galitzine give us not only believable romance but also really convincing heartbreak and drama. They make the movie worth watching, and honestly, bring a good deal more than that to the table than that. If Anyone But You was a box office surprise hit, I gotta believe this movie would’ve been a moneymaker for Amazon.
Something Old
Traffic (2000): I saw Dennis Quaid randomly out in public recently, no entourage or anything, and was shocked when I later found out he’s 70 years old (whatever combination of Ozempic and hair dye he’s got going on is really working for him!). My second surprise was finding out how few of his movies I’d seen. We all know him from family fare like The Parent Trap, The Rookie and maybe Yours Mine & Ours, but considering how well-known he is, he didn’t really headline a lot of stone cold adult classics.
Traffic is definitely not Quaid’s movie. He’s a relatively small part of a stacked cast — Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, Don Cheadle and Albert Finney — and if anyone deserves authorial credit it’s director Steven Soderbergh, who won his one and (criminally) only Oscar for it. The movie is a maximalist fever dream, covering several aspects of the international drug trade like a collage of separate storylines. It’s very ambitious, and also a very opaque, neither condemning nor glorifying any side of the industry. While not the easiest movie to watch, it’s very well done.
Something to Stream
How To Talk To Girls At Parties (Max): It’s 1970s London, and a couple of punk rock teenagers are looking for a hookup. The only problem is…the girl our protagonist meets happens to be an alien visiting from another planet. Has there ever been a better casting of the ethereal Dakota Fanning?
This movie has all the charm of those coming-of-age indie dramas, with quirky characters and unexpected situations that could really only happen on a low budget. Plus, Nicole Kidman shows up randomly as a punk club owner?!? Considering the kind of juvenile title, I promise you’ll never expect the way the movie progresses toward hard sci-fi through the middle and into some kind of environmental metaphor in the end. It’s a truly wild ride, and despite its obvious ridiculousness it somehow manages to maintain its dramatic tension through to a genuinely emotional conclusion. If you’re a fan of movies like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or maybe something like Safety Not Guaranteed, this is a sneaky good one for you.
Trailer Watch: Mufasa: The Lion King
My full review of 2019’s “live action” remake of The Lion King left very little room for nuance on my thoughts about Disney’s soulless plan to remake all their classics rather than invest in any new ideas. Spoiler alert: I hate it. There’s nothing “live action” about simply replacing the animation technology of the 1990s with the photo-realistic CGI technology of today, and playing to the nostalgia in an almost shot-for-shot fashion.
I’d love to believe that having Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins (for Moonlight) — who, lets not forget, made what I consider one of the best movies of the 21st century in If Beale Street Could Talk — would bring originality to this spin-off prequel about young Mufasa….but then I think about what happened when Academy Award-winning director Chloe Zhao (for Nomadland) tried to do that on Marvel’s The Eternals and…well…I’m not hopeful.