Shhh. Don’t talk to the beautiful pony meme man. He is throwing a no-hitter. Don’t sit next to him in the dugout. Don’t touch his sunflower seeds. Don’t walk up next to him and say, “By the way, I thought The Ides of March was actually pretty entertaining, and, while I have you, will you autograph my forehead?” Don’t do any of that. Ryan Gosling is dealing. Let him deal.
Let’s go over the Decade of Gosling. Blue Valentine (incredible), All Good Things (fine, gave us The Jinx, though), Drive (iconic), Crazy, Stupid, Love (bad movie, great performance, secret La La Land prequel), The Ides of March (fun, junior varsity Sorkin), The Place Beyond the Pines (see below, also one of the low-key best movies of the decade) …
Gangster Squad (that’s why I put the asterisk up there; even no-hitters have walks), Only God Forgives (even no-hitters have psychosexual, Freudian bloodbaths set in Thailand), The Big Short (see below) …
The Nice Guys (one of the best performances of the year; imagine if Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye looked like 1970s Ron Cey), La La Land (Chicken on a Stick).
Is Ryan Gosling taking 2017 off to spend time with his family and do charitable works? Never fuck with a winning streak. He is apparently in Terrence Malick’s next movie, Weightless, which stars everyone and is about love triangles and indie rock, set in Austin. But we can’t count on that because, for all we know, the finished product could find Gosling with one scene where he talks about grace and peels the label off a bottle of Lone Star.
No, if the no-hitter is to continue, it’s in the hands of Denis Villeneuve and Ridley Scott, with the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi totem, Blade Runner.
JFC, nobody does trailer squelches like Villeneuve (shout-out to the Nine Inch Nails–as-whale-mating-call in Sicario). This is Blade Runner 2049. The fact that Gosling’s new protagonist tells Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard that “things were simpler then” suggests this new film is going to be VERY COMPLICATED, because no one in the history of movies or human history has ever described the original Blade Runner as simple.
Blade Runner 2049 is out next October (damn it), just in time for the World Series. Where Ryan Gosling will be pitching.
