Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone a lot

On Friday I was playing a game of CineNerdle (discussed here if you don't know it), and one of the pivot answers -- in other words, an answer that helps you get the name of two different movies -- was "Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone."

And I suppose if you do play CineNerdle but you haven't yet played Puzzle #469, this is your SPOILER WARNING.

The spoiler is: Neither of the movies was La La Land.

With an average worldwide score of 4.1 out of 5 for this particular puzzle, that told me that on average, players were getting better than four of the five movies. But I could only conclude one of the two movies that this clue ended up applying to, that being Crazy Stupid Love.

I ultimately did the desperation move that you do when you don't know the answer, where you start randomly moving around tiles until you get the yellow indicator that you have three in a row and only need the fourth. As it turned out, I got the three in the row on the first try so easily ended up solving the puzzle, even though I had not seen the movie in question.

That movie was Gangster Squad, which I still haven't seen even though I have actually written about it before on The Audient.

Anyway, the takeaway was that not only have these two actors already appeared together three times in their careers, but that in each of those three movies they were in a relationship.

Should we begin thinking of them as the modern-day Hepburn and Tracy?

Probably not, but I did find it interesting that they have this sort of professional relationship, because we don't really talk about them as actors who are known for appearing together more than once on screen. I guess people don't really talk about Gangster Squad much in general. (I only talked about it when anticipating its release, wondering whether we'd get the good version of director Ruben Fleischer that we saw in Zombieland, or the bad version that we saw in 30 Minutes or Less. I obviously never bothered to find out.)

I did a quick run through the rest of Gosling's filmography on IMDB and concluded that Stone wasn't in any of his other movies, and since I did Gosling I didn't need to do Stone.

I did wonder, though, who they could have played in each other's movies over the years, while still meeting the requirement of being in a relationship.

Stone could have been:

1) A Barbie, though after Margot Robbie there wasn't really any room for other A-list actresses, and Stone would never have been cast as Stereotypical Barbie;

2) A blow-up doll that Lars falls in love with, though that would have required even better acting skills than even Emma Stone has;

3) Micelle Williams in Blue Valentine (best fit, probably);

4) The Ana de Armas hologram in Blade Runner 2049, or

5) Neil Armstrong's wife.

Honorable mentions: Carey Mulligan in Drive, Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the Pines

Gosling could have been:

1) Duncan Wedderburn, indulging in his fondness for comedy by playing a foppish rake;

2) Jonah Hill in Superbad;

3) Bradley Cooper in Aloha (best fit, probably);

4) Spider-Man, or

5) Joaquin Phoenix as a stand-in for Woody Allen? (Irrational Man)

Honorable mentions: Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight, Andrea Riseborough in Battle of the Sexes?? A cartoon caveman in The Croods or its sequel??

Anyway, this has been fun. 

19 days of Emma Stone

Actors are not always as busy as we may think they are. Sometimes it's just a timing issue.

We tend to think that if an actor or actress has a couple movies coming out in quick succession, it means he or she was a real workaholic about 11 months earlier. When in reality, movies just have different gestation periods from principle photography to final cut. An actor may work on these movies at different times, and seeing them all come out around the same time is just a coincidence.

Which has just happened with Emma Stone. If you're a Stone fan, you've had reason to be thankful the last three weeks.

First she appeared in a supporting role in Friends With Benefits, which came out July 22nd. A week later she had one of the leads in the ensemble romantic comedy Crazy Stupid Love. Now 12 days after that, she's out with The Help today.

This kind of thing can actually be sort of damaging to an actor, if it leads to perceptions of overexposure. (Actually, all overexposure is a function of individual perception, so I guess that statement is redundant.) Instead of getting our Emma Stone spaced out throughout our year, we get a big dose of her all at once. Some people might say "She's in this movie too? She's in everything." Disillusionment soon sets in.

I hope that's not happening with Stone, because she is simply fantastic. I've sung her praises before -- four different times, actually, according to a quick search of my blog. So I won't contribute more print on why she's so great today.

However, I do start wondering when she's going to finally graduate from her status as "an up-and-comer" or "a face you recognize, but name you don't know." I thought we were past that with Stone, but then she did the cover of the August Vanity Fair:

If you can't read the fine print under her name, it says: "You may not know her, but given she's got three big movies between now and the end of August -- including The Help -- you will!"

Stone must think, "Jeez, what do I have to do for people to 'know' me?"

Let's consider some of the titles from which a person might "know" Emma Stone, even before this summer:

Superbad
The House Bunny
The Rocker
Zombieland
Easy A

And if you're a geek, you know she's been cast as the romantic lead in The Amazing Spider-Man. I wouldn't think it would take a blockbuster like that to give her the credit she deserves, but you never know.

All five of the comedies mentioned above had a decent amount of prominence, and Superbad and Zombieland were downright phenomena. Plus, didn't she get a Golden Globe nomination for Easy A? Confirmed. She did. Maybe it's just the older-skewing Vanity Fair audience she needs to be introduced to. Still, I tend to think of her as the opposite of forgettable, so it's very discouraging that Vanity Fair takes the implied position that people keep forgetting who she is.

Well, I've sat out the 19 days of Emma Stone so far, despite great reviews for Crazy Stupid Love and the strong likelihood that Friends With Benefits is better than No Strings Attached, which I did not like. As for The Help, I don't actually know much about it despite a decent amount of hype. More than anything, I'm glad to see a studio get behind a period piece that addresses the issue of racism. It seems like an anomaly in 2011, especially in the summer landscape.

And maybe, if it crosses over from Stone's familiar realm of "mere" comedy, it'll be a big Help in people finally learning Anna Stallone's name.

Step aside, Baron Cohen

I haven't seen Bruno, but I have the sense it could be the beginning of the end for Sacha Baron Cohen.

It seems to be liked by only a small percentage of the people who liked Borat, banking less than half of Borat's $128 million box office and quickly dwindling with only $3 million and change this past weekend. He doesn't have any more guerrilla personas left to play. And let's be honest -- he's a bit too weird-looking to play just "regular roles" in the movies. How many of his characters do you remember that don't have five-letter names starting with B?

Well, who needs Sacha Baron Cohen when you have Russell Brand?

When I first started writing this blog, I envisioned a periodic feature called "In praise of ..." and then the name of some film personality (most likely an actor or actress) who I was feeling particularly jolly about at the moment. The first one was to be "In praise of ... Emma Stone," and was to have hyped the co-star of The House Bunny and Superbad, the spunky young talent who's like an intelligent version of Lindsay Lohan. But that was right at the start, when I had a million other fertile ideas (or ideas I considered to be fertile -- not the same thing). This hypothetical post got pushed too far away from my viewing of House Bunny to seem time sensitive.

Well, even though I'm not calling this "In praise of ... Russell Brand," it's going to function as the de facto first in that series anyway.

Now I should say that I'm not exactly breaking fresh ground by praising Brand. In fact, I have a feeling he's already been through a couple praise cycles -- praised, then hated for awhile, then praised again, and now maybe hated again. I don't really know. I understand he's been a "love him or hate him" host of the MTV Video Music Awards. And that he made some kind of prank phone calls that got him kicked off the BBC.

Whatever. I'm here to praise his movie work. Not only was he the perfect final ingredient to push Forgetting Sarah Marshall over the top, but he just added a much-needed spice to Bedtime Stories. Well, he didn't just add it -- but I just saw the movie tonight, so I thought I'd write a little something about him. (Could that just be because I have two longer features I'd like to write before Friday, and can't summon the energy/organization/research for them now? Perhaps.)

Is he really very similar to Baron Cohen? Probably not. They're both lanky comedic personalities from England who like to push the envelope, especially in terms of staging elaborate stunts. Though Brand is known for marketing his own persona, whereas Baron Cohen is famously a chameleon without a knowable "self."

But I will say I've been enjoying him better at the movies than Baron Cohen.

Let's take his role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Given that he plays a foppish, uber-hip rock star from England who steals the hero's girl, nine scripts out of ten would have also made him a total prat. But not this script, and not this performer. Sure, he's got some unendearing qualities, but overall, Brand's Aldous Snow is as likeable as anyone else in the movie -- I'd say more likeable, except that one of the most commendable things about the script by Jason Segel and Judd Apatow is how they give sympathetic dimension to all the film's characters. (Sarah Marshall herself is more insecure than insensitive). Instead of amassing artificial jealousy for his rival, Snow reaches out to Segel's Peter Bretter and befriends him. But not in some gooey way, either -- he's a beguiling mix of glamorous artifice and insightful forthrightness, a space cadet with his head screwed on correctly. And boy does he have style and personality.

Bedtime Stories is a lot more of a standard script -- Brand plays a hotel employee who's the best friend of Adam Sandler's character. And yes, his scenes feel a bit shoehorned in for additional comic relief. But Brand can make a bit about his character having night terrors funnier than that standard material would suggest. A lot funnier. And then there's the part of him -- his Brandness, you might say -- that you can tell has to be an improvisation from what was written for him. In his strangely-not-annoying sing-songy British accent, he weaves intelligently goofy and wry observations about the world, and pushes laughter out of us, just with his turns of phrase. My wife and I needed a pick-me-up tonight, and we both started smiling as soon as he sauntered on screen.

So what if I'm out of synch with the praise cycle for Brand. Maybe I'm supposed to hate him right now. I don't know. These "controversial" figures fall in and out of our good graces at the drop of a hat. Maybe I'm supposed to be "so over his shtick." But I'm not.

This is my blog. I can praise whoever I want.