The Nice Guys: Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe, and Heterosexism

I was not in a good mood yesterday.  Two books arrived from Amazon.

1. The Strange Library, by Haruki Murakami.  "A charming, surreal story."  "It had me enthralled."  "A wry metaphysical play."

It's  a 5000 word novella about a little boy held prisoner by an old man who intends to eat his brains.

And a beautiful girl.  Who kisses him. And helps him escape.

Same-sex relations are always destructive, heterosexual romance is salvation, got it.

2. A Brief History of Manga.   A tiny book, about 1/10th the size I expected, with a few words of text and a lot of photos on each page.  Altogether maybe 5,000 words.

And the photos:  naked women.  Bare breasts on nearly every page.  Leafing through it, I felt like I needed a shower.

I threw them both in the trash.

And a Netflix movie arrived in its red package:


3. The Nice Guys (2016) starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, a "stylish neo-noir mystery set in 1970s Los Angeles."  I like the 1970s, and I used to think Ryan Gosling was hot, so ok, let's give it a look.

A teenage boy named Bobby (Ty Simpkins) steals his parents' porn magazine in order to masturbate to photos of porn star Misty Mountains.  Suddenly a car crashes all the way through his house. He runs out to see the porn star in the flesh, dying.  Naked.  Bare boobs.   We never see Bobby again.

Meanwhile, failed cop-turned-private dick Holland March (Ryan Gosling) -- is that the name of a gay villain out of a 1960s thriller, or what?  -  is hired by Misty's aunt, who swears that she's still alive.  He begins searching.  One of his leads is a girl named Amelia.

Meanwhile hired muscle Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) beats up a guy who has been having an affair with a little girl.   Then another little girl, who I thought was the same one but turns out to be Amelia, hires him to beat up a guy who is stalking her.  Guess what?  It turns out to be Holland March!

Later on Jackson is interrogated by two thugs (Beau Knapp, Keith David), who demand to know the whereabouts of Amelia. 

Healy approaches March and suggests that they work together to try to find Misty.

Wait -- what about Amelia?

Did I mention that they meet at Holland's daughter's birthday party?  13-year old girls everywhere, piling around, eating, bowling, grabbing at Holland to take photographs.

I'm getting weirded out.  What's with the young girls in every scene?


Holland and March go to a protest held by Misty or Amelia's anti-smog activist group, and convince a guy named Chet (Jack Kilmer, left, with boyfriend Dylan Sprouse) to take them to Misty or Amelia's boyfriend's house.

It's burnt out, so they convince a boy on a bike (Lance Valentine Butler) to take them to see...I don't remember what.  I got distracted when the boy offered to show them his dick for $20.

Out of nowhere.

That's even worse than the screensful of 13-year old girls.  I like looking at dicks, but...WTF?

Is it supposed to represent the decadence of 1970s L.A.?

Turns out that Amelia/Misty and Dean were making a half-porno, half-air pollution documentary financed by Sid Shattuck.

Meanwhile, Holland's daughter Holly (that's right, Holly Holland) starts investigating on her own, and gets into trouble with...

That was enough.  I went to bed, leaving Bob up to watch the rest, and Wikipedia to summarize the plot:  There's a big porno racket going on, and Amelia, as the daughter of a high-ranking government official, was threatening to blow the whistle on it, so Shattuck has hired a hit man (Matt Bomer) to kill her.  Detroit car companies are involved, and Chet plays some role.  I don't know what Misty's mountains had to do with it.

To the film's credit, neither Healy nor Holland get girlfriends.  I'm not even sure if they display any heterosexual interest.  They walk off into the sunset together, one of the main criteria of a gay subtext.

 But you have to wade through a lot of scenes involving little girls to get there.

See also: Michael in the Boys' Room with Cole or Dylan Sprouse