The Review: The Place Beyond The Pines

The Place Beyond The Pines 10/10

There will be spoilers for this years old movie. I loved The Place Beyond The Pines. I don't know why I didn't check it out sooner. It stars Ryan Gosling who is bae. Eva Mendes who is co-bae. Seriously. This has just been sitting in my Netflix cue and I have been thinking of deleting it for no reason. Thank god I didn't because all I thought this was about was Gosling riding a motorcycle and doing crime with Mendes as his partner and Bradley Cooper hunting them down like some bootleg Bonnie & Clyde. I was super wrong. Gosling is Luke Glanton. He is a motorcycle stuntman that just breezes through towns. One day he is found by a girl he slept with, Romina Gutierrez played by Mendes. He drops her off at home and that is that. He ends up finding out that she had a baby and he is the father. He is upset that she was going to let him leave town not knowing that he had a son.

Theater Whore: La La Land

La La Land 10/10

I got to see La La Land with Cam at the Arclight over on Sunset and I have to say that this movie made me all kinds of happy! Just pure happy! This is why movies are made and why I go to see them. I love when a movie makes me feel something strongly whether its joy, excitement, or laughter. I'm not into being sad. I know. Weird, right? Cam says she would for sure call this movie a musical while I think its just the way older films were made where all of a sudden people would just start dancing and singing to express how they feel. Hell, I do it with Cam and my cousin Jasmine. I'll just make up songs or dance like an ass because I am excited or on a food high which strikes just before getting the “itis.” If this movie doesn't cheer you up maybe you shouldn't have come right after a funeral.

Way Back: Driver

"If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive." That is a quote from the 2011 film Drive starring Ryan Gosling and it could also be the tag-line for this 1978 film Driver starring Ryan Oneal. When Koko told me about this movie she said that Drive was a remake of Driver and I said it wasn't because the book for Drive was written fairly recently.

Turns out that Drive just borrowed heavily from Driver.

Theater Whore: Gangster Squad

I am listening to a review for Gangster Squad as I am writing this and I am wondering if they were in a bad mood when they saw this or even saw it. I’m not a movie critic. I’m just a dude that likes seeing movies and writing about them. I never wanna be at the point where I overanalyze the shit out of a movie and cant just enjoy it the way these guys at Spill are. Its as if they watched it writing down jokes just to use later and that’s a disservice for people who like their reviews and value their opinion. Enough about them!

I saw this with East over at the Arclight last night and I loved this movie. Let me just get that out of the way. It was more than I expected and had a lot of actors that I didn’t know were in it. I intentionally didn’t read up about this, choosing to go in blind. This is the story of a team of cops that are brought together by Josh Brolin to take down a Chicago gangster played by Sean Penn that is ruining the city. Nick Nolte plays the police chief that assigns Brolin the task of doing this though his wife is the one that tells him that he needs less clean cut cops.

"Bad Ass Mofo": Ryan Gosling

“The writing was on the wall when I saw 'Rocky' for the first time. I went and picked a fight right afterwards and got my ass kicked. The movies took me into their dream.” Ryan Gosling

I have a total man crush on Ryan Gosling who is this weeks Bad Ass Mofo. There are a few men on this planet that when I see them its like “I would probably let him put it on my shoulder if I were in jail…meaning my kitchen.” This dude is just fucking amazing in everything he does. I watched The Notebook because of him. The Notebook!!!

Theater Whore: Drive

“If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive.”

I didn’t even want to see this movie. I saw the trailers and commercials for it and it looked like a chase film and if Vin Diesel isn’t driving in a chase film or if it wasn’t made in the 70’s I probably wont like it. But a co-worker told me to see this and after his recommendation on Devil’s Double I decided to check this out. Twice. Yes, I went to The Grove and saw this movie two times in three days.