Hello this is jake winters for eye on the triangle this is snowverated and this week I will be taking a look st the film. The nice guys.

The nice guys was released last year and while it had Ryan Gosling and mr Gladiator himself Russel Crowe in the movie it had a somewhat low key release. The movie was delayed once by the release of another movie. This says as much about what the company releasing the film thinks of the film they released instead as the film that was delayed. They thought it didn’t have as high of a potential as the other. I on the other hand disagree. I think the nice guys was one of the funniest crime movies that has been released in years. It comes off almost as though it really were a strictly serious crime film but throws in some great slapstick humor and comes off in the end as a hilarious story of one fool and one detective solving another case in a series of events that brings them together.

The movie was set in the late seventies and follows two detectives that don’t necessarily work together as they solve a case about the abuse of young women. It never stays light hearted for long and explores some dark and stark violence. A lot of comedies will have extremely up front violence such as the h8tful eight if you could call it a comedy. I thought that movie was pretty hilarious but maybe I just have sick sense of humor. Anyway, their use of violence had a sense of slapstickinees to it that has stuck around for some tim in comedy. It is the same type of humour used inexcess by the three stooges. Except in the three stooges nobody is hurt for long. This is where the film bends expectations by making people come to actual harm. For the most part in comical situations we don’t expect to see horrible violence, or at least we didn’t used to. I think that now comedy is almost expected to have this sort of violence. Well of course not all comedy. One thing I should mention is that this isn’t really a new style of comedy either. Movies like army of darkness made use of it as well. A lot films in the genre of horror do because it is easy to get away with a zombie being killed and it still being funny. It is a little more difficult with real people for obvious reasons.

A great thing about this movie was its willingness to stray away from convention. It may be a bit of a stretch to say there were no archetypes in the movie because there definitely were but they didn’t over use them. They gave you the characters you expected and then payed with you based on your assumptions. This is a technique I really love seeing in film. It has a deep understanding of how movies and stories in general are written and it isn’t apologetic for the fact that it abuses this knowledge. This style of comedy is different from that of will ferrel’s or seth rogan playing on absurdity and just general goofiness, this movie plays on your assumptions about the characters themselves for the whole time. Sometimes the movie even does this without the intention of getting a laugh out of the audience. The moment I am specifically talking about is when the foolish character played by Ryan Gosling makes a discovery during an investigation that leads to a move forward in said investigation. It is not just any trivial discovery either as it took some amount of detective skill. Characters that are portrayed in films as fools often might stumble across a discovery like this so they remain relevant and important to the film but instead of just stumbling it was an intentional discovery. This came closer to the end of the movie and to me was direct nod to the fact that they were using this archetype bending style. It made it apparent it was intentional.

One thing about Ryan Gosling in particular I’d like to mention is his choice of roles. They are always in rather unknown films somehow and he manages to portray a wide variety of characters while still having his own unique style of acting. Maybe it is just his re use of facial expressions that brings me to this conclusion and if so I am not sure it is completely a good thing but nevertheless I enjoy his particular style of acting. If you want some movies to compare this one to of his look at only god forgives and or drive. Both directed by Nicholas winding refn. Another great movie of his was the recent lala land which got a pretty significant amount of Oscar nominations. All of those are pretty distinctly different films and it is worth mentioning how well Ryan Gosling plays all the different kinds of roles.

The movie as a whole was just generally hilarious and exciting. Its hard to see whats coming in the film even if they give you hints and it stays fresh til the credits role at the end. They combined a lot of unique aspects in films and managed to stay within some pretty traditional borders of story telling.

If you want to watch this movie there are a multitude of ways to watch it online and I hope a lot of you end up checking it out. Thank you for listening to this week’s edition of eye on the triangle and snowverated. Im Jake Winters and I hope you have a fantastic evening.