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. 

Which Ruben Fleischer will show up?

Ruben Fleischer's first two features as a director have been one of the freshest comedies of the last five years, and one of the most rancid.

I am referring, respectively, to Zombieland, my #14 movie of 2009, and 30 Minutes or Less, my #121 movie of 2011. And to refresh your memory, I ranked only 121 movies in 2011, making 30 Minutes the 2011 movie I hated the most.

Today, the director switches genres though stays in a violent milieu with Gangster Squad, a period mob movie that is sure to have a couple moments of comedy as well as generous helpings of the visual style he introduced in Zombieland and then utilized in exactly one scene in 30 Minutes. 

Consequently, I have no idea what to expect from this movie.

You could say the fact that it was delayed from a September release, and is now coming out on the second release date in January, means that I should be very pessimistic. However, you wouldn't be looking at the whole picture. The primary reason the movie was delayed was the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which necessitated cutting a scene out of the film where hoods shoot up a movie theater full of people. Unlike last year's shooting-impacted movie The Watch, this shooting necessitated more than just a title change.

But the tone is something that's not likely to change -- something that's impossible to change, in fact. And this would have been the tone Fleischer brought in with him on the first day of shooting.

With Zombieland, it was light-hearted despite being definitely edgy enough to walk various fine lines and walk them well. Yes, almost the whole world had died in a zombie apocalypse, but Fleischer wasn't mean about that fact. 

In 30 Minutes or Less, meanness was the primary takeaway. Each character is more repugnant than the next, and those who aren't actively repugnant are at least very insensitive. This movie was a singular displeasure to sit through.

So, Ruben ... which is it? Which will we see today?

Well, not today, not for me anyway. Unless I hear it's as bad as 30 Minutes, I do intend to make this the first 2013 film I see in the theater. But not for a couple weeks. I need to lick my wounds after a particularly intense push to finish my 2012 rankings, which occurred yesterday.

There is one thing I wanted to mention today, which is completely silly, but if it weren't silly it would be a bad omen.

Look at the picture of Josh Brolin in the poster above. Now, look at the picture of Nick Nolte below:

Twins? Well, close enough anyway, despite Nolte's thicker neck. Close enough to have made me draw the comparison, anyway.

And though it's ridiculous to extrapolate the quality of a movie based on the similar appearances of actors in the posters -- so ridiculous that to even point out that it's ridiculous is ridiculous -- Gangster Squad better not be anything like Mulholland Falls, or it really will be terrible.

The year that filled up

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get in that reflective mood as the year starts to close down.

Too early for year-end lists, mind you, but not too early to start assessing what kind of year 2012 has been.

I don't think this has been a great year for movies, but it certainly has been a full one.

When was the last time you can remember hearing about four major releases that had to be shifted to the following calendar year?

Most release years include one or two movies that must move their release dates forward for one reason or another. But in 2012, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Gangster Squad and G.I. Joe: Retaliation all jumped to 2013.

Must have something to do with the letter G, though The Grey, Goon, Gone, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Good Deeds and God Bless America were all spared.

So the market is becoming more competitive but less good. What else is new?

Then again, the best part of the release schedule is still largely ahead of us. And it was from now until the end of the year that the first three of the four delayed titles were scheduled to come out.

With The Great Gatsby, the reason for the delay (to May 10, 2013) is listed on wikipedia as "delays in the production schedule." But conventional wisdom suggests that perhaps Warner Brothers didn't want to send Leonardo DiCaprio up against Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby was supposed to come out at Christmas ... which is when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, starring one Leo DiCaprio, is also going to quench our Quentin thirst.

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's long, long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men -- is cruelly having an entire year tacked on to that wait. Originally slated for the day before Thanksgiving this year, the movie now won't bow until next October 18th. It sounds like the reason for the delay is all the CG required in post. I'm reading that Cuaron is experimenting with all kinds of innovative technology, including an "uninterrupted" 17-minute take (though the article suggests that the take is done with digital assistance, unlike the long takes in Children of Men, which were au naturel).

Gangster Squad fell victim to that old problem of having a trailer containing subject matter that was rendered controversial by real-world events. The Gangster Squad trailer they were showing this summer had a bunch of baddies with tommy guns blowing away patrons in a movie theater from behind the screen. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado during The Dark Knight Rises pretty much killed that particular trailer. And not only is that scene now gone from the movie, but the whole movie was moved by four months from September to January 11th (a release date that would be a sign of very low confidence by the studio in most cases). Maybe it was reshoots, maybe it was just trying to keep a wide berth from those tragic events.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation has the most number of apparent reasons for its delay from this past June to next May. The "official" reasons are that 3G is being added in post-production and that Paramount is trying to boost interest in international markets. (Since when aren't international markets interested in Hollywood action movies?) However, the unofficial reasons include all of the following: reshoots to avoid the early death of Channing Tatum's character, after Tatum had officially become a star in 2012 (hey, it's not a spoiler if it isn't going to end up happening in the movie); a desire not to compete with Tatum's Magic Mike, which was set to open the same day (in a situation that echoes the potential Christmas Day DiCaprio double feature); and, um, that's it, but the rule of three dictates I list three things.

And come to think of it, it isn't only movies that start with G that have jumped ship from 2012. I just thought of a fifth movie that was supposed to come out this year, but didn't: World War Z. The adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel would have been part of that crowded late December release schedule had it not been for production delays and the seven weeks of reshoots that were required earlier this year. With or without those reshoots, the trailer tells me this movie might be a bigger disaster than an actual zombie apocalypse.

Of course, now that I've analyzed the reasons for the delays of five major would-be 2012 films, it seems pretty clear that none of them were delayed only because "too many movies are already coming out in 2012." In each case there seem to be other factors, even if they are as simple as too many movies by one of the movie's stars coming out during the expected release window -- not too many movies in general.

What I think this really illustrates is how over time, making movies is becoming an increasingly complicated proposition, with studios finding profit margins to be ever thinner, and the need seeming ever more paramount to fine-tune the movie until it's a perfect product released at a perfect time.

Or, maybe it's just a statistical blip.