Review: "The Place Beyond the Pines"

This review was originally published in my weekly column at Towleroad

Handsome Luke at the Fairgrounds

The opening shot from THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, is a stunner. And not only because it starts with a view of a well-muscled and inked masculine torso. The camera follows the man (we don't see his face) as he paces back and forth, plays with a knife and then walks through a fairground where he turns heads and prompts amateur snapshots. Finally the camera catches his face. It's "Handsome Luke" (Ryan Gosling), a daredevil motorcylist about to defy death and gravity in a round metal cage. As soon as we've seen 'Handsome Gosling,' though, Luke throws a motorcyle helmet on depriving us of his Movie Star mug and enters the cage to perform miraculous stunts. As I recall there aren't any edits in this shot and I have no idea how it was filmed unless Ryan Gosling moonlights as a stuntman in addition to his many many other talents (like naming his body parts, and inspiring hilarious fandom and popular internet memes).

This lengthy continuous shot with its 'now you see him, now you don't' movie-star tease is a pretty apt description of the movie to come which is something of a bait-and-switch with a prominent throughline. [more]

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Take Three: Eva Mendes

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: Eva Mendes

Take One: Live! (2007)
Building on her dramatic work in We Own the Night the same year, Mendes took on another (semi) serious role, one deviously tinged with delicious black comedy, as TV executive Katy in Bill Guttentag’s Reality TV mock-doc Live! Perfectly styled in sharp attire and a coffee ‘to-go’ in hand, Mendes' Katy is ambitious, ruthless and most likely hollow on the inside. She has grand ideas. One of them kick-starts Live!’s plot: six members of the public will play Russian roulette live on air; the sole survivor is the winner. Her flippant excuse, while delicately biting into a strawberry:

Hey, I didn’t invent the game, I’m just making it hip again.”

Katy’s the kind of person who thinks that if all of life – including death – isn’t caught on camera it’s not worth living. And she doesn’t want ratings lower than her morals - to her it’s not lives at stakes but viewing figures. She’s the kind of corporate cannibal who caresses a hefty golf club whilst listening to her staff’s TV pitches. But also, quite ironically, has a poster for La Dolce Vita behind her office desk. She’s a vile creature of business, hungry enough to have Sigourney Weaver’s Working Girl Katherine Parker in Working Girl for breakfast and Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen in Network for lunch. (Apparently Network is personal favourite film of Mendes’, one which served as her inspiration for this part.) Mendes’ Katy is essentially the dark centre of this goading morality exercise. It’s a performance so exactingly played, so attuned to the film’s intentions and compulsively watchable, that Mendes’ dramatic capability can’t be called into doubt. Does Katy get her way? Or does she get her comeuppance? Tune in to find out...

Two more takes after the jump...

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MTV Movie Awards ~ The Live Blog of Indifference

9:00 Black Swan and 127 Hours and Kings Speech jokes. oh my. My television is a time machine. Or MTV is. Jason Sudeikis made a joke about the set being Lady Gaga's bedroom. But I think... no... this is more like how I imagine Spider-Man Turn off the Dark set to look like.

Eva Mendes has been Teem Edward the whole time.

9:12 They've already told four Team Jacob / Team Edward jokes? That's like one every 3 minutes.

"My heart says Jacob. But my weiner says Edward. My balls are indifferent."

I'm scared to ask but...

poll by twiigs.com

9:13 Best Male Performance goes to Robert Pattinson who doesn't even do a good job of acting "indifferently cool / bemused". Jesse Eisenberg could act that while acting 7 other emotions simultaneously with an undercurrent of self loathing. These awards are always stupid.

9:27 Three people we like at once on MTV. It's kind of a rare occurence!

Crazy Stupid Indifference To This Awards ShowSteve Carell made a joke about horny dolphins. Emma and Ryan are both so naturally funny that

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