For the 15th iteration of this series, I’ll be focusing on a man who tends to be the most noted example that is brought up when discussing what a modern movie star truly is. A man whose greatness cannot be denied, yet a man who seems to get a lot of eye rolls when it comes to discussions about modern-day movie stars…
Ryan Thomas Gosling
There’s like this Ryan Gosling conundrum that I can’t help but notice. Whenever there is a big movie that is about to come out (like project: hail Mary) or movie that’s in the works that is big and that is starring him (like the new Star Wars movie that’s supposed to come out next year) the kind of casual moviegoers that I tend to talk to tend to get excited for these projects and he’s a big part as to why. When these people talk about his resume at length, they have four or five movies that they honestly really liked him in, if not loved him in. And yet….when we start discussing things like legacy, the same Ryan Gosling fans will sit there and tell me that he is not done enough to be considered anything more than just some famous actor.
This is patently false. Ryan Gosling’s post-2004 resume is something to be deeply admired. It’s one of the more complete resumes in all of Hollywood, but nobody really looks back to think on that. However, just because that is a fact, it doesn’t mean that some movies absolutely do not matter when we come to look at the resume of this man; these movies are as follows:
Frankenstein and me
The believer
The slaughter rule
Stay
Fracture
Lars and the real girl
The United States of Leland
Fracture
All good things
Song to song
Regeneration
Murder by Numbers
Murder by Numbers, you say? That’s the movie that he broke out in, how is that not a critical movie to judge this man’s resume upon? Well, that’s primarily because his movie stardom has ascended way past it. Nobody talks about it anymore. We know he did it once, but ultimately it’s not essential to talk about that film. lars and the real girl is pretty good, but it’s not important enough when discussing the legacy of this performer. If one must be reminded that that’s a movie that a performer has done, then that movie itself is not important enough to be mentioned here.
Anywho, without further ado, here is…….
THE RYAN GOSLING TIER LIST!!!!
in retrospect….
Ryan Gosling
🤩GREATNESS🤩
REMEMBER THE TITANS
Yes, I know he had a small role in this, but it is a role that is consistently referenced when it comes to the early movies that he was in. As I have said before (in my Denzel Washington In Retrospect) this is one of the very greatest movies about American football that is ever been made. Nobody tends to argue that, and it has endless rewatchability. It does everything that great sports movies are supposed to do.
THE BIG SHORT
Simply put, I feel this is one of the best-written films of the last 25 years. It takes an amazingly complicated subject with almost impossible-to-understand terminology (the 2008 housing market crash). It absolutely simplifies everything as much as possible without the film going over the three-and-a-half-hour mark. This is an easy top 5 Ryan gosling performance. In a film filled with great performances and cameos, it is his character that stands out the most, has the best dialogue, and has the most memorable scenes of the entire film.
BARBIE
Gosling once said in an interview that he was inspired to make this film after finding a pantsless Ken doll face down in the mud in somebody’s backyard and felt the need to “tell his story,” though that may have been said as a joke. This performance digs so deep into the alpha-male (Redpill, perhaps?) insecurity that I think he may have been dead serious when he said that. This is not just a performance played as comic relief. Because this man is in love with someone who repeatedly rejects him, it does make him relatable to just about every man out there who’s had to deal with those emotions and their own ego at the same time. The film portrays both how to handle such a thing in healthy AND unhealthy ways. There’s a little bit more to say about this film, so I’ll hold back for now. top five RYAN GOSLING performance for sure. Only a hater would say otherwise.
BLUE VALENTINE
About as unflinching a book on a dissolving relationship as there’s ever really been. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you take an indecisive woman, withholding, and unhealthily overstimulated by life, and pair her up with a man who is emotionally immature, petty, and somewhat obsessive? I’m pretty sure you can guess the answer. This is a movie that should be shown to all the teenagers who talk about their soulmates and the love of their lives when they haven’t even moved out of their parents’ apartment. Gosling and Michelle Williams are unbelievably great here. They’re so convincing that cordial interactions between them are kinda hard to imagine. An easy top five Ryan gosling performance.
GREATNESS ADJACENT
THE NICE GUYS
I am not a member of the cult of Shane Black. I’m not a hater by any means, but I’ve never really understood how people swear by him as one of the absolute greatest directors in the world. That being said, between this movie and kiss kiss, bang bang in particular I see movies that have done nothing but age really well over time. Gosling and Russell Crowe are absolute magic in this film, playing character archetypes that they particularly specialize in, and it is proof that Gosling can have comedic chemistry with just about anybody (Can’t think of a role where Russell Crowe was this intentionally funny). Gosling himself is quite slimy in this and kind of dominates most of the film. I’m not a part of the Shane Black cult, but I can deny that there is undeniable skill here on a high level.
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
Derek Cianfrance is a director who knows that his films look amazing. He is a man who loves to have an awesome shot linger on just a little bit too long, and long close-ups for characters who are not speaking. And at the end of the day, when you look at the running time of his films, you come to realize that they’re all just kind of around the 2-hour and 15-minute mark, and it takes you a while to figure out why. A lot of this movie feels overindulgent, but much of that overindulgence is handled so well that it doesn’t take away from anything. Both things can be true. Gosling is really good here. One can say that he’s… Smoldering ferociously. His face is continuously contorted in a way that tells common folks that I’m a troubled man who rides a motorcycle for a living.
PROJECT: HAIL MARY
HALF NELSON
In 2007, it was a foregone conclusion that Forest Whitaker was going to win the Oscar for his performance in THE LAST KING of Scotland. It was a no-brainer. Anybody who saw that movie knew the best-actor race was a wrap. In the same essence, one could say that those who did end up seeing HALF Nelson in that very same year absolutely knew that Gosling gave one of the best performances of that year. An Oscar nomination was also a foregone conclusion. This is one of the better films I’ve seen about functionally drug-addicted people. The quiet burning inside, the internal screaming, you see it all in Gosling’s face. He had been in quite a few things up until this point, but in many ways… THIS was his breakout performance. Not only A TOP 5 RYAN GOSLING PERFORMANCE, But possibly his best performance ever.
CRAZY STUPID LOVE
Perhaps it’s the rise of the poorly written and executed Netflix romantic comedy (that we seem to see every couple of months since the pandemic ended) that makes a romantic comedy such as CRAZY STUPID LOVE age more and more gracefully. Clever, funny, and relatable, the dialogue is absolutely on point; the performances have enough snark and vulnerability to make them likable; and this has one of the more creative plot twists in recent memory at the end of the second act. Steve Carell and Gosling’s chemistry is the anchor of the story, and it absolutely works. And we all know that Stone and Gosling have such chemistry that they end up making another romance film together….. (*Sigh*) A film that wasn’t as good as this.
😊GOOD😊
DRIVE
The month of the film’s wide release was October 2011. In the summertime, Nicolas Winding Refn won best director for this film at the Cannes Film Festival. I was a year into my stay in Los Angeles after moving here from Seattle, and upon touching ground all the films snobs in this f****** city were wildly praising this movie as the next coming of….whatever masterpiece they were masturbating over at the time. Don’t get me wrong. This is good. But the level of greatness to which this movie was bestowed was wildly undeserved. This was misadvertised as an action film; the dialogue was sparse, the main character was not as cool as the movie thinks he is, and even Albert Brooks as the villain of the piece was really underwhelming and overpraised. Again, not bad. But if there was ever a definition of an overrated movie. It is this.
THE FALL GUY
It is here that I came to realize, relatively late in my Ryan Gosling experience as a moviegoer, that comedic Gosling is really the best Gosling we can have. As good as he’s been in dramatic films, he seems to have an endless source of energy when it comes to overplaying a scene for comedic effect or giving gravitas to comedic material because he’s skilled enough to do so. The only problem with this movie is that everything surrounding the performance (except Emily Blunt’s brilliance) is underwhelming. The visuals, the action, and most especially the villains of the piece are just not up to snuff to make this a great summer film. But it is good.
THE IDES OF MARCH
I might be crazy, but this movie was the first time that I realized that Ryan Gosling was truly a leading man. HALF NELSON showed me how deep his bag was, and that he could carry a film despite having a co-star who was way more of a draw than he was at the time. Looking at this film and its politics before Obama’s second term, it’s funny to see that the “explosive” thing this movie is building up to isn’t even remotely close to the kinds of things already exposed about the current administration we’re in. It’s hard to look at this film as anything but a remnant of a simpler time. Again, Gosling really is fantastic here, and it’s one of his more underrated performances.
MEH…..
BLADE RUNNER 2049
We have to stop lying to ourselves. One of the most blasphemous things that movie fans have done collectively over the past 10 or 15 years is to compare this movie to the original BLADE RUNNER. I think of a film like the recently released gladiator 2, and it was uniformly understood that the quality of the first film was not to be surpassed. We, as a society, quickly understood that about Gladiator 2… but for some reason NOT Blade Runner 2049. There are some of you film snob cretins out there that really put this on par with the 1982 original, and you guys should be ashamed. People who have this opinion should not have their film opinions taken seriously whatsoever. This is entertaining enough, and it does look incredible….. but Jared Leto as the villain didn’t work, the ending is anticlimactic as hell, and the best performance in the movie might come from Dave Batista. This is eye candy and not much more, respectfully.
FIRST MAN
This movie might be a little higher on the list if not for that really, really garbage IMAX sequence that came at the very end of the film. We all knew the ending of this film, or at least its climax; we knew that moon landing sequence was on the way because of who we’re telling the story of. But that IMAX sequence of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon is THE MOTHER F****** WORST TRUE IMAX SEQUENCE EVER PUT TO FILM. I saw this movie at the true IMAX CityWalk screen at Universal City, and during a sequence, it looked like half the screen was missing. It’s pitch black except for the dead center of the film. Though that’s understandable given the fact that that’s how a space sky looks, there was barely any sound. There was no score. There were barely any interactions between characters. This movie really thought it was putting on some spectacle, and it was just dramatically underwhelming, to say the very least. Oddly, it could also be said that it was very strange that Gosling did not get any standout love for this performance. Coming out of the film, I was WAY more impressed with him (And Jason Clarke’s performance as Ed White) than really anything else the film had to offer. Dare I say….This is a TOP 5 RYAN GOSLING PERFORMANCE.
THE GREY MAN
I can’t even hide my disappointment with this movie, given all the potential it had. Like many Netflix original films that cost in excess of $200 million, this one really had something going for it… until it just didn’t. Netflix movies of this size always have something holding them back. It’s not the fact that it’s not a theatrical release. It’s not that. Even if this were worth a theatrical release, it would mostly be the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm oatmeal, with the exception of the Chris Evans performance and most of the action sequences. If we’re keeping it real here, Gosling seems to be in full cash-out mode. This is not a character that he hasn’t played before. Spectacle is the point with all these big-budget Netflix movies, not character. The problem with Netflix movies is that there’s an open window for a character to come through amid all the action-type chaos, but none of these movies ever want to go there.
LA LA LAND
When the conversation of the most overrated movie in the history of Cinema comes up, I tend to look to both Avatar movies and this without hesitation. La La Land is quite simply the most overhyped movie in the history of awards season. From September 2016 until the Oscars ceremony in late winter of 2017, every Hollywood trade known to man was telling you that this was GOING to win Best Picture. It won all the Golden Globes, it got 11 Oscar nominations…. and for what? There is nothing that this musical does that MANY other far superior movie musicals have not done, and done better. The real ones know that this is NOT EVEN F****** CLOSE to being a top-five Gosling performance. The real ones know that this isn’t a top-five Emma Stone performance. The real ones know that this is not Damian Chazelle’s best f****** movie. But for 5 months of my life, every media outlet that I trust demanded that I think so. That being said, the movie is not the worst by any means. It is just the median; it sits at the 50-yard line of what makes movies great and what makes them trash.
🤮WTF IS THIS GARBAGE🤮
THE NOTEBOOK
For a long time, I could not understand the lore of this movie. This is not romantic. Allie is ridiculously toxic; the romance between her and Noah isn’t worth rooting for, and Lon Hammond is an innocent victim who wasn’t a bad guy whatsoever. By the way, just because you’re two leading actors who are really good-looking people does not mean that they have chemistry on screen. (Ahem, Wuthering Heights) It doesn’t matter how romantic-looking that rainfall kissing scene was, and it doesn’t even matter THAT YOUR TWO LEADS WERE DATING IN REAL LIFE! That doesn’t mean s*** either! Go watch The amazing Spider-Man 2 and tell me that Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield had chemistry in that film. They were dating in real life as well. Foh. 3/4 of this movie is the epitome of horses***.
But then Gena Rowlands and James Garner show up. And in the time that they are on screen, we get a WAY F****** MORE romantic story between them than ANYTHING that’s taking place on screen before it. With respect to those legends, even they couldn’t save this movie, no matter how hard they tried. I will give them separate credit from the other 3/4 of horses*** that were here.
CINEMATIC APOGEE
There’s a scene from The Big Short involving Jenga blocks that explains the entire housing crisis of 2008 as simply as it possibly can be explained. In that scene, there’s a cameo by Anthony Bourdain explaining the destructive power of a collateralized debt obligation. It’s such an amazingly constructed scene with tons of dialogue. A scene that’s so good that under any other circumstances that scene would unquestionably be the cinematic apogee of Ryan Gosling…. But we all know that it’s not. We all know that NO MATTER WHAT, he will always be known for one scene above all else. No matter how many awards he wins, or how many big movies he does from here on out.
You’ve got to remember who he used to be. 2023 was the year that reminded us that Ryan Gosling is indeed a Disney kid. A Disney kid who was once in the Mickey Mouse Club alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. Not to say he’s a world-class musician, but at one point, he was kind of training to be one.
It’s not that the sequence didn’t stand out on my first viewing of Barbie; I just kind of saw it as another bizarre comedic sequence in a film full of them. But this is obviously one of the movie’s strong points, it wants to drive home. It’s not that Ken is a bad man. It’s not that Ken doesn’t have good intentions. The lyrics of this song are those of a very miserable person. A song of a man who is suffering. The visuals, of course, are objectively goofy and cartoonish. Gosling perfectly conveys the gray area between these two points in this sequence. He is not overdoing it he is performing this material as a man in a lot of pain. And I mean that both in the course of this dance sequence and the movie itself. The only thing more iconic than this scene is possibly the performance of the song by Gosling at the Academy Awards.
**************
Gosling is about as close to a movie star as we are going to get in this version of Hollywood. All the other individuals who have established themselves as the 20 million-face-of-the-poster type of stars… have been so since the 1990’s, or at the latest, the early 2000’s. The studios have abruptly changed in the way they market their leading men, and Gosling is a guy whose consistency of work, natural charisma, and absolute versatility make him a perfect Swiss army knife to either co-star with someone as famous as he is or to carry a movie by himself with the greatest of ease. He’s done both extremely well. He will continue to do so.
Consistency is key in Hollywood today. Not a lot of people have consistency in their work. Gosling does. And it should be a lot more f****** appreciated than what it has been.
