Aussie Super-Team Tackling Gay Conversion Therapy

by Jason Adams

This weekend you can stare into the wonderful sad eyes of Joel Edgerton onscreen via the small-scale emotional assault of It Comes at Night (I just reviewed it over at MNPP if you're interested) but today he's announcing his next adventure in familial distress, this time behind the screen, and it sounds pretty amazing - he's signed on to write and direct Boy Erased, an adaptation of Garrad Conley's memoir about his time spent suffering in "gay conversion therapy."

Have any of you read the book? Conley was the son of a Baptist minister and was accidentily outed at the age of 19 to his parents - they then forced him into a "Pray Away the Gay" program (basically mental abuse via scriptural brainwashing and isolation) as an ultimatum between everything he knew and explusion.

The film's lining up quite the cast - Manchester by the Sea star Lucas Hedges will play Conley, and in supporting roles Edgerton's supposedly calling in some fellow Aussies... ones that go by the glossy names Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. Maybe you've heard of them? One assumes they're playing the parents, but Deadline doesn't specify.

Anyway with religious whack-job Mike Pence one Twitter breakdown away from the Oval Office "gay conversion therapy" is a real hot topic these days, so this could turn out to be a scarily timely story. But it could certainly also be a moving one either way, especially with such a talented group of folks dedicated to giving this real world horror emotional life on-screen. It's definitely a tale in need of telling.

Review: The Nice Guys

It’s Eric, with thoughts on the new Gosling/Crowe comedy, The Nice Guys.   

I’ll bet this project looked amazing on paper.   Bring writer/director Shane Black back to the comic buddy picture world where he started with 1987’s Lethal Weapon.  Set the film in the disco-cool world of 1977 Los Angeles.  Hire two accomplished dramatic actors, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, to play the leads, two low-life losers on the fringe of detective work unexpectedly uniting to hunt for a girl involved in a series of murders in the porn industry.  Throw in a cute daughter for Gosling’s character for some sweetness.  

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The One Thought I Had While Staring At The Nice Guys Poster

Manuel here. I was making my way through recent casting news, and trailers dropped, and posters revealed to see what I should share with you all this morning when I found the new poster for the Russell Crowe/Ryan Gosling buddy action comedy The Nice Guys and well… I was hypnotized by one specific detail about it.

Did you spot it? I can’t unsee it and I keep going back and forth on whether it’s an intentional flourish on the part of the marketing team (if so, thank you Concept Arts, you know your Gosling audience well!) or just an inadvertent consequence of the period-appropriate attire the Shane Black flick is going for (it would also mesh well with the cheeky tone of the film's very funny trailer). Either way, I had to open it up to the TFE readership at large: will you be watching the film to see if this VPL is a key plot point in the film?

Oh, yeah, I guess we should talk more about the film's plot which pairs a bumbling private eye (Gosling) with a no-nonsense er, "enforcer" (Crowe) to solve a missing person's case (Kim Bassinger's daughter in the film; oh, did I bury the lede that Bassinger is in this? Wait til you hear Matt Bomer is in it too!). The film definitely feels well within the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wheelhouse but that's not a complaint since I very much enjoyed that 2005 film which, we have to admit, paved the way for the Robert Downey Jr. renaissance we all thought might never come to pass. Pre-Iron Man RDJ—remember that? Seems like a lifetime ago. And yes, that's also a reminder that Black is fresh off directing Iron Man 3 which makes his return to more off-kilter filmmaking a welcome change (oftentimes you just lose directors to the sequel/blockbuster-making machine, you know?)

Feel free to watch the trailer and let us know which way you’re leaning.

3 Hateful Links. 16 Nicer Ones.

As you may have heard The Hateful Eight expanded a smidge early today into nearly 2000 theaters after the success of its roadshow weekend. So here are 8 links about the movie because we're feeling masochistic...

Variety The Hateful Eight is leading current movies in spending the most for TV ads
Deadline an interview with Hateful Eight's costume designer Courtney Hoffman. (Everyone knows I hate the movie but I actually liked her work in it a lot!)
Awards Daily Sasha struggles to suss out what Tarantino is doing with Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Hateful Eight and tries to make sense of the many journalist opinions on whether its an inherently "misogynist" work. I'd love to defend Tarantino on this front personally but I have to face facts. He hasn't written a good female character since Inglorious Basterds. He's lost that particular skill. But I don't think he's misogynist so much as betraying his ultimate misanthropy with his ugliest most masturbatory movie.

Escape From Minnie's Haberdashery (for more hospital climes)
Gothamist Russell Crowe throwing tantrums again -- this time about hoverboards 
Guardian I'm eager to hear what our resident Australian Glenn thinks of their choices for best Aussie films of the year 
Gawker "the year in Gay"
Empire first look at Michael Fassbender in Assassin's Creed
Vanity Fair picks the best new TV characters of the year from series including Daredevil, Empire, UNReal, Fresh Off the Boat and more
Antagony & Ecstasy Tim's razor sharp review of 45 Years is a must-read but then so is his...
Antagony & Ecstasy ...review of Carol. Basically he continues to be one of the web's most underappreciated frequently inspired film critics.

Meanwhile on Jakku...
Variety Carrie Fisher on her body shamers 
imgur "how BB-8 works"
NPR Nigerians are getting excited about Star Wars... in large part thanks to John Boyega 
i09 going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time? i09 has a list of 23 things to watch out for
LA Times talks to the designers of Mad Max, Star Wars, and Mockingjay sequels on their dives into genre work
LA Times and here's a dissenting voice on the cultural phenomenon if you're not feeling the love 
Reverse Shot has an amazingly insightful lengthy review of The Force Awakens that grapples with the film only speaking its own Star Wars language and impatiently exploiting old adventures to venture out on new ones.  

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are "Nice Guys" - Movies are make believe! 

2016?
We're so not ready to go there. It's not really our practice at TFE to look ahead to the following year before the Oscars wrap (the true end to the film year) but I have bookmarked this article "61 Original Movie We're Dying to See in 2016" because it's cute on the rare occasion that people realize that non-sequels exist. The Guardian has no such anti-sequel slant in their "75 films we're excited about" and they go full in for any movie that drives traffic so say hello to the superhero films even the ones that are daring us to agonize over how bad they might be like the scowl-a-thon of Batman v Superman. 

Familiar Faces: The Ridley Scott Players... do any exist?

Ridley & Giannina on the red carpet last yearThe Film Experience recently had the chance to sit down with director Ridley Scott, currently enjoying one of the warmest receptions (great box office and reviews, of his career, for The Martian. We'll share that interview later in the season but here's one detail up for discussion right now that you won't get elsewhere.

We've always been fascinated at The Film Experience by the familiar faces that pop up in the filmographies of famous auteurs. The average moviegoer knows, for example, that De Niro and DiCaprio are Scorsese pets and that Tim Burton has trouble leaving his bed if it doesn't involve putting a camera and weird makeup and Johnny Depp. But do we really think of any particular faces when we think of Ridley Scott? His tightest collaborations are behind the scenes. The editor Pietro Scalia, and the production designer Arthur Max, both of whom he started working with on G.I. Jane (1997) have worked on most if not all of his films since that Demi Moore military pic. Costume Designer Janty Yates won an Oscar for their first collaboration on Gladiator and she's costumed nearly ever picture since. Ridley's cinematographer of choice at present is Darius Wolski who has shot every feature since Prometheus (2012) but he switches DPs from time to time. He switches casting directors even more regularly which could also contribute to the lack of "familiar faces" that we like to point out in this intermittent series of course. 

I asked him about this in our interview and he quickly cited his most well known collaborations (Russell Crowe and Sigourney Weaver) but shrugged the lack of general repetition off, diplomatically, as a matter of timing. If he made smaller pictures, he explained, he'd jump at the chance to work with actors he enjoyed the first time around again. Before we switched topics he name-checked Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender as happy repeats. Perhaps as a result of the scarcity of examples, any repetition of actors in his filmography feels like something of a happy accident to we moviegoers rather than an intentional choice. 

Let's look at Ridley's repeat actors after the jump... who would you like to see him work with again? 

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