Is This Something?

(Putting this up again for a while. I'm going to delay my other Fun Thread until Wednesday, I think.)

Ryan Gosling will star in a remake of The Fall Guy.

Kind of. In the remake, he's still a stuntman, but he's not a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. Rather, he's a stuntman on a troubled production whose star is kidnapped, so, for some reason, he takes it on his own shoulders to track him down.

Before you say, "But they've changed the premise," well, a TV show needs a premise that can be repeated week-to-week, thus the need for a steady job tracking people down. A movie does not need the hero to track people down every week. They only need him to track someone down once -- or maybe two or three times, if the first movie does well enough to support a sequel or two.

Sounds okay. If he's a raw amateur who doesn't really know what the hell he's doing, even better. I like it when the hero is trying to get by on what he's seen on TV shows. I'm just hoping it has the vibe of The Nice Guys, to be honest.

So one thing I like about this movie's backstory is that it's being made by the 87eleven production company and directed by David Leitch. Leitch is a stuntman himself, and formed 87eleven with a fellow stuntman, Chad Stehlaski, reasoning, I would assume, "Everyone in Hollywood is a stupid, stupid retard and if these stupid retards can make stupid retard movies than we can too."

So far I think they've made Bullet Train and the Jamie Foxx vampire hunter action movie that's virtually not Blade, Day Shift.

I don't know if those are any good, but I do support outside challengers to the corrupt and incompetent system, and it's a nice background detail that The Fall Guy is being made by stuntmen.

(I also know that as a very, very general matter, stuntmen and other "below the line" Hollywood talent skews more conservative than the "stars." But I have no idea who these particular guys are and can't say what they believe. I've just met some stuntmen at conservative meet-ups who've told me that stuntmen generally are not all gayballz for the left.)

One question: We know that Ryan Gosling can sing.

So...?

John Wick vs. Donnie Yen.

The Ralphie sequel movie just started airing on HBO, I think.

Oh, a couple of months ago, I promoted the trailer for See How They Run, now airing on HBO. I wouldn't bother watching it. It's long, sluggish, only occasionally funny, overly twee, and it thinks it's a lot funnier and witty than it actually is. It's a movie that's very impressed with itself. (One might say it insists upon itself.)

The mystery is trash so this is yet another "comedy mystery" where they just decide the mystery part can be garbage because the audience will be eating up the comedy too much to notice. Wrong.

There are four or five funny parts in the movie but you have to sit stone-faced through a real self-satisfied slog waiting for those.

So one last thing: The movie is about Agatha Christie's famous play The Mousetrap, which is the longest-running play in the world. Still running. The murder takes place on the night of the 100th performance of that play and one character/suspect is Agatha Christie's agent.

I think the movie believes that people will like experiencing this world.

I am a huge Christie fan and I really want to see The Mousetrap so I'm a good target for this. But it fell flat for me. Apart from worrying they were going to spoil the ending of the Mousetrap (they don't), I just couldn't stop thinking: "Make your own stuff, stop trying to dickride on someone else's success and tap into the warm feelings associated someone else's body of work."*

Not a recommend. Sorry if led anyone to pay money to see this.

* Oh: Maybe this is the only way to get an "original screenplay" made now. Maybe you have to find some way to connect it to a Shared Universe, like... the Agatha Christie Extended Universe. I doubt that, but... in a way, I think that was a reason this screenplay got made. It's not very good. I gotta think a selling point was, "But it's part of the Hercule Poirot/Miss Marple connected universe, sort of, kind of!"

And now: Ann Margaret screen test.

Bridget Bardot, Moi, Je Joue. (Me, I Play. She means, "I like playing games.")

Sophia Loren:

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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