If Raising Arizona starred Ryan Gosling

So I finally did it last night: I showed my younger son my favorite movie of all time.

If you read this post, you'll remember I showed the whole family the first ten minutes of Raising Arizona on my birthday last year, almost exactly six months ago, though of course my wife had already seen it multiple times. (And congratulations to RA on its tenth tagging on my blog. Double digits baby!) 

The only one out of the two kids who showed any interest in a full viewing was my younger son, then 11, now 12. In fact, he had mentioned it again when the movie came up for other reasons, without me prodding him or forcing the issue for my own benefit. 

And in truth, maybe there was a little trepidation on my part about completing the full viewing. When you show someone your favorite of anything, you are exposing yourself to their ridicule if they inevitably don't like it as much as you do, though even if he hadn't liked it, my son is sensitive enough that he surely would have cushioned the blow. 

In fact, his response might have been a cushioning. I have no reason to think he didn't like it, but during the credits I did have to ask what he thought, without him volunteering it. He said he thought it was good, with that little uplift in your voice that suggests the statement is genuine, but maybe only to a certain extent. He did make some interesting follow-up comments, even an analysis about whether Leonard Smalls is supposed to be H.I. McDunnough in the future, given that they have the same tattoo. This led to a discussion of symbolism vs. realism in films, which is the sort of conversation I want to have with my kids about film, if they'll have it.

The other thing that caused me a little trepidation about the viewing is stupid. In linking back to one of the other times I tagged RA on this blog, I had been on a coincidental streak of watching my favorite movie almost exactly every four years, which had been pretty organic to that point. Left to my own devices, I might not have watched it again until 2028, as those four year stretches were aligned with presidential election and summer Olympics years. This viewing caused me to deviate from that, but really, I want any of my viewings to be organic and not to think too much about them. There was no point to wait another two years to show my son Raising Arizona, not when he had already asked about it more than once. 

The thing I thought was interesting enough to write about today, though, was what he asked me about Nicolas Cage very early in the movie, during the opening ten minutes he'd already seen, in one of the shots when H.I. is lying on his prison bunk, thinking about Ed. 

"Is that Ryan Gosling?" he asked.

At first I thought this was pretty funny, though my response did not illustrate that. Although I knew my son didn't know the exact year Raising Arizona was released, he had to know, just by looking at it, that it was not a recent movie. I said "No, Ryan Gosling would have been about five when this came out." (Actual age: six.) 

"Oh right because it came out in like 1980," he responded.

"1987," I said. Gosling himself was born in 1980.

But then I got to thinking how interesting it was that he had seen Gosling in a then 23-year-old Nicolas Cage. (And how weird it was, in retrospect, that the Coen brothers had seen it appropriate to case a 23-year-old in this role, considering H.I. has already served a half-dozen sentences and been paroled a half-dozen times. Wouldn't they at least want someone over 30? Holly Hunter is about six years older than him, so I guess they're both playing her age in this movie.)

Especially since he has become primarily a comedic actor, there's something about Gosling's physicality that indeed does recall a young Cage. Thinking particularly about films that required considerable physical comedy from him, such as The Nice Guys. 

Since my son had asked this question early enough in the movie, I started seeing Cage's performance through the lens of decisions I could see Gosling making as an actor. And this little bit in particular seemed like a perfect Gosling moment:

Can't you just see Gosling doing that?

I was, of course, inclined to do a modern recasting of Raising Arizona, though I suppose it wouldn't really be "modern." Although Cage seemed too young to play H.I., I don't think we want him being played by a 45-year-old Gosling either. 

But actually, if you look at Gosling in Project Hail Mary, he's still wiry and physical. And I think maybe the themes of Raising Arizona are more resonant with actors who are at least in their mid- to late-30s, who really are staring a childless existence in the face, and really can't afford to wait for any hypothetical medical breakthroughs that will allow them to conceive. At 45, Gosling can certainly play 37.

So let's do this. "Let's go get Nathan Jr.!"

Sorry. Let's recast Raising Arizona with Gosling in the lead. And let's be a little flexible with the ages. There's going to be a little "first thought best thought" here too. I can't sit here all day and think about this. 

So we start with H.I. obviously. I think these pictures are an even better indication of just how Gosling fits in this role. They both wear the Hawaiin shirt well, of course, even though my favorite clothing worn by Cage in RA is the shirt he wears during the lunch with Glen and Dot. I realize I've got to filibuster a bit here so that I can align the photos with the text. So this is me doing that. I think I've got it now. 

Ed could be played by Kathryn Hahn. She's actually a couple months older than I am, which means she's 52. But let's not tell Kathryn Hahn she can't play 37. She can do anything, so playing 37 certainly qualifies. These photos are not particularly flattering to either Hahn or Hunter, but I've chosen them to illustrate why I've cast Hahn here. We need an actress who can go big but is also capable of a genuine emotional connection with the audience, and I think that's Hahn. 

If looking for bounty hunter Leonard Smalls, our mind should automatically go to the physically largest presences we have out there. And so in this case I thought of Jason Momoa. I think the thing that makes Randall "Tex" Cobb so scary in this role is that we don't get even a whiff of sympathy from him as an actor; he makes a great evil incarnate. I do think it would be hard to ignore the jovial associations we have with Momoa, who has almost always played a good guy. But I think Momoa can do it. Let's not typecast him and limit what he can bring to the screen. 

Next up is Nathan Arizona. The huckster furniture salesman and bereft father is one of the movie's true comedic highlights, so we need someone pretty funny here too. I struggled with this one, and have no idea if I came up with the right answer. For some reason, Shea Whigham popped into my head and wouldn't leave. I don't actually know how well Whigham does comedy, because that's not how he's usually cast. But looking at how Trey Wilson was cast before RA, I'm not seeing comedies in there either. It could be a Leslie Nielsen thing, that once they discovered he could do comedy, there was no turning back. I can see that path for Whigham. 

The final four characters of note come in pairs, so let's look at them that way.

For jailbirds and bad influences Gale and Evelle Snoats, I'm thinking David Harbour and Michael Pitt. These are based on physical matches, of course, but I also think Harbour has the expansive personality necessary to step into John Goodman's shoes -- or rather, his muddy boots fresh from cutting into the sewer line. With Michael Pitt, I'm seeing the same baby face as William Forsythe, though I really have no idea if Pitt can be funny -- and I should say, traditionally he has not been a favorite of mine. Fortunately, he has less work to do in that regard than Harbour. Although my friends and I have some Evelle Snoats quotes we love -- "You hear that? We usin' code names" is one example -- the heavy lifting here is from the older brother, the alpha, Gale. So Harbour can carry the load and Pitt can follow his lead. Forsythe is the least essential of these actors in establishing RA's tone, and so I think Pitt can fill that role here. 

Lastly we get to Dot and Glen, the swingers, absentee parents and crass idiots played by future three-time Oscar winner and Joel Coen wife, Frances McDormand, and the lesser heralded Sam McMurray. And let's just finish off with a couple of SNL alums. We already know Kristen Wiig can do the high volume and wild gesticulations of McDormand's Dot. Jason Sudeikis hasn't in his career played as zany, generally, as McMurray is here, but there's something about the eminently more sympathetic Ted Lasso that shares DNA with Glen. Ted is obviously more intelligent and less selfish than Glen, but they both have a sort of bumpkin gregariousness that makes them appear less intelligent than they really are. (Yes, I think there's intelligence to Glen, in that he sees through H.I. and Ed's lies about how they acquired their infant boy.)

If you're curious about a previous time I did this exercise, check out this post on Glengarry Glen Ross. (Speaking of Glens.) 

And I only just now realized something truly astonishing:

That recasting post was also inspired by Ryan Gosling.

What the hell? I swear I didn't know.

But yes indeed, that post was inspired by seeing a similarity between Gosling and another actor about Nicolas Cage's age, Alec Baldwin. (Baldwin is six years older. I said "about.") Truly astonishing coincidence there.

Does this mean Ryan Gosling is the greatest cinematic chameleon of our era? Because I don't think of Cage and Baldwin as very similar at all. 

Probably not, but does it mean I love watching him?

Hells yes. 

Hiding Sydney Sweeney

You know how when you've got a guilty conscience about something, something always seems to come along to thrust that thing into the forefront of your thoughts?

I've got a little thing for Sydney Sweeney. I don't mind admitting it to you, dear reader. I might not like to admit it to my wife, but she is not one of my readers so we can just discuss it among ourselves. 

It's nothing to be ashamed about, really. To consume popular entertainment is to come into regular contact with people you find attractive, none of whom are realistic romantic partners for you because a) you will never meet them, and you are probably 20 years older than they are and far less attractive than they are, so they would never go for you anyway; b) they may not even be compatible with your sexual identification. I identify as heterosexual but that doesn't mean I dont also have a thing for Ryan Gosling.

So yeah, Sydney Sweeney has turned my head the past few years. I can't deny it.

The thing is, I don't really want it to be obvious to the people who share the same streaming accounts. And that's just what feels like has been happening by the refusal of Sweeney's movie Reality to leave the front page of our Amazon Prime account.

Now, when I saw Reality in December in order to rank it for 2023, I had to rent it from Amazon, because it never popped up on iTunes. I don't have a preference for one place to spend $4.99 over another place to spend $4.99, but I do generally consider iTunes to be my first port of call. Perhaps HBO, which produced Reality, has a friendship with Amazon that it does not have with Apple, because I checked just now and it is still not on iTunes.

I can assure you that I watched the whole movie. It's only 82 minutes long. I don't specifically remember how it ends, but that was a busy time of my viewing calendar. I wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of even movies I liked more than Reality -- which ended up ranked 34th out of the 168 movies I ranked in 2023 -- because some of that late-game viewing period is always a blur.

Amazon, however, does not think I finished watching. And therefore, Reality has stayed in my Continue Watching queue ever since, the big accusing eyes of Sydney Sweeney staring out at me every time I come on the service. 

I may have switched devices halfway through the movie, which is the only explanation I can think of for this state of permanent paralysis that resulted. I've definitely started watching a movie on, let's say, Netflix on one device, and finished it on another. When I return to the first device, Netflix will still think I should resume the movie from where I stopped on that device -- even though it already resumed it from the correct spot on the other device. This usually clears itself up over time, but with Reality on Amazon, it was not doing so.

This would be an annoyance with any movie. With Reality, it was an actual problem -- or so my guilty conscience told me.

And the problem is this: There was no way to clear the movie from Continue Watching.

You can't click in to it try to play out whatever part of the movie it thinks you haven't watched. This was a rental, so if I wanted to try to do that, I'd have to pay the rental price again. And though Reality was my 34th favorite movie of 2023, I'm not in a hurry to see it again, especially not this soon. My conscience isn't guilty enough to pay the rental price just to clear it.

After a couple months it became clear that this movie was going to still be on my Continue Watching on into the next decade, so I looked up online how you can clear something from this queue. And there is a way that's easy enough, so the next time I logged into Amazon on our TV, I did as instructed: I did a long-press on the play button on our AppleTV remote, and was presented with three options of what to do with this movie, one of which was to hide it.

That worked. 

But now I am "hiding" Sydney Sweeney, which is even more damning, perhaps, if it is ever discovered. Amazon tells you that the title will no longer appear in Continue Watching, but you can still find it by searching for it.

So, it'll probably never come up.

But one day, years from now, Amazon will offer an easy way to show you everything you've been hiding, and my wife will stumble into that area, only to see the single title that my secret shame forced me to consign there.

Maybe I ought to hide a Ryan Gosling movie as well, just to be on the safe side. 

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. 

Ryan Gosling looks like a young Alec Baldwin

You may recall I watched Glengarry Glen Ross last Saturday night in appreciation of Alan Arkin. Well, I had an observation from that viewing that had no place in my remembrance post for Arkin, and then I went out of town and forgot to write it up separately.

And I don't really need to tell you what that observation was because the subject of this post has done it for me. 

I didn't glean a lot from Glengarry that I hadn't on previous viewings, in the movie itself, but I do have a perspective on it that I wouldn't have had, at least not to the same extent, the last time I watched it in 2011.

In 2011, Ryan Gosling was still a relatively new presence in our lives. Oh his "breakout" role -- to the extent that you can call such an independent film a breakout -- was ten years earlier in The Believer, after which he started getting roles with some regularity. And I had definitely already seen a half-dozen of his movies by 2011. 

But maybe Ryan Gosling wasn't so ingrained in my head that seeing the merely 34-year-old Alec Baldwin in Glengarry was enough to remind me of him.

That version of Baldwin sure reminded me of Gosling this time, though.

I spent about three agonizing minutes -- and his one outstanding scene isn't much longer than that -- trying to figure out who this version of Baldwin reminded me of. It wouldn't have been an older actor, I figured, and when I realized it was someone younger I landed on Gosling relatively quickly.

Of course, I'm not the only one to make this observation. Although I created the side-by-side images above myself, the internet had some other ones to share as well if I hadn't wanted to do the work, such as this one:

The similarity here might be even more striking, but that's an even younger Baldwin, and besides, I wanted the Baldwin from Glengarry.

It isn't just the appearance, either, but the mannerisms. I could easily see Gosling doing that same bit Baldwin does where he mocks the salesmen, pretending he's them throwing back an invisible drink at a bar, complaining to anyone who would listen about how sales is a "tough racket." Gosling would nail that.

Naturally that got me thinking who else I would select if I were going to recast Glengarry Glen Ross with doppelgangers 30 years later.

Now, finding actual doppelgangers for Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce isn't going to be a cinch, so I think I'll go easy on myself and choose actors would look sort of similar, but also do similar things with their craft. And so as to not spend too much time on this post I won't agonize over my choices too much. 

I'll start with the easiest:

Ricky Roma - Oscar Isaac has felt like the heir apparent to Al Pacino throughout his career, so I'm not going to look any farther for my new Roma.

Shelley Levene - Possibly the inspiration for Gil the struggling salesman on The Simpsons, Shelley "The Machine" Levene is a little harder to cast because Jack Lemmon was a true original. However, the name that came to mind is Brian Cox. Now, without even seeing Succession I know that Cox has often played men who dominate or are very much self-actualized, which does not describe Shelley. But Cox could do Lemmon's profane rants and is certainly more than capable of playing desperate.

George Aaronow - Here's Arkin's character. I can't help but look for somebody tall and skinny with a bald head, and for some reason Matt Frewer keeps coming to mind. He may not work a ton these days but I think he could do the character's neurotic, doomsday energy.

Dave Moss - I couldn't think of a good match for Ed Harris so I cheated a little bit on this one, googling "Ed Harris lookalike." However, the photo result I got was a false positive that actually led me to my answer.  A photo came up for Harris and Viggo Mortensen appearing at a promotional event for the movie Appaloosa, which I haven't seen. I checked on IMDB and they don't play the same characters at different ages, or even related characters. (And I just realized they are also both in A History of Violence.) But I was surprised at how much alike they looked and I think Mortensen could equal Harris' intensity.

John Williamson - We don't want to spend any time thinking about Kevin Spacey these days, but for this exercise we're going to have to. Who's our best example today of a smarmy, menacing creep? It's probably not Jude Law, but for some reason that's the name I keep coming back to. Law likes to take on challenges and has a sinister quality to him that I think would work. 

James Lingk - The naive, gullible client who probably wanted to be Ricky Roma's best friend more than he wanted to buy real estate from him was played there by Jonathan Pryce. I'm having a real hard time thinking of someone to play this mousy and timid character. However, for some small similarity of appearance and the fact that they are both British, I am going with Jim Sturgess. Why not?

I hope no one makes this movie because it would be terrible.

Another Hollywood disappearing act

I wrote yesterday that Channing Tatum seems to have returned to the spotlight after four or five years where he basically wasn't heard from at all.

Well we're now going on about that long for Ryan Gosling.

It has occurred to me before that I haven't seen Gosling in anything lately, but it didn't occur to me exactly how long it had been until I looked it up on Friday night.

The occasion to look it up was Murder by Numbers, a 2002 detective movie that was among Gosling's first, which I stumbled across while scrolling through Netflix, on the rare occasion of having no idea what I want to watch on a Friday night. This one jumped out at me not for Gosling, but for Sandra Bullock, who I had mentioned in yesterday's post. (Yes, I wrote yesterday's post on Friday. It's a thing that happens a fair amount.)

It was only Gosling's fourth professional credit, and first since he had his breakout (among independent film fans, at least) the year before in The Believer. He would have been 21 during much of filming, still young enough to play a high school kid. And all the Gosling charm, moves, and gift for some unknowable sort of menace, were present from the start.

We haven't seen any of those things for a while.

Gosling's last credit on IMDB is in Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), where he plays my uncle Neil Armstrong. (Not really my uncle.) As that was the sort of dedicated performance in which Gosling was surely striving for an Oscar nomination -- fruitlessly, as it turned out -- it seems strange to think that it was his last to date. 

Rather than something arduous about that shoot appearing to have caused his ensuing absence, it seems that the reasoning was somewhat similar to Tatum's: fatherhood. According to what he and partner Eva Mendes -- who also no longer makes movies -- have said, they wanted their daughters to grow up outside the spotlight, and may have actually moved to Canada, Gosling's native land. Gosling has also made cryptic comments about movies being "not his favorite way to work."

Well, like Tatum, it looks like Gosling couldn't stay away either. 

Gosling has about the same number of projects in the works as many other busy stars, which is notable in his case for the total absence of them since 2018. The one that's in post-production means that we're sure to get it, which is The Gray Man, set for release this year. The rest are three projects that are in pre-production and one that's announced. He'll appear in another Wolfman remake (currently titled Wolfman), which is another collaboration with Derek Cianfrance. He's supposed to play Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, which should be a hoot. Then there's also The Actor and Project Hail Mary.

It shouldn't take a hail mary for Gosling to get back in the game. Like Tatum, he was fully entrenched in the A list, but unlike Tatum, Gosling was always thought to have real acting ability, not just the charisma to make certain roles work. Gosling's appeal crossed over -- nay, crosses over -- from discerning cinephiles to your average viewer, both of them appreciating his craft and swooning over the way he furrows his brow.

Tatum and Gosling make for an especially interesting comparison as they are both 1980 babies, both 41, though Tatum turns 42 next month. Gosling has another eight months of being 41. 

I have more hope for Gosling's return to form than Tatum's, but the movies will definitely welcome them both back. Let's just hope that their returns are for good reasons, that they've figured out ways to make their work compatible with the parts of their lives that prompted them to give up Hollywood in the first place.