A Love Like Yours Will Surely Come My Way

Year: 2018

Director: Michael Sucsy

Cast: Angourie Rice, Justice Smith, Debby Ryan

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

These days, YA novel adaptations are about as common in movie theaters as sticky floors. But if there's one thing I could think of to spice up the dime-a-dozen slate of forgettable trifles like If I Stay or Paper Towns, it's author David Levithan. One of the best modern YA fiction writers, and certainly the best mainstream LGBT author for teens, he has a facility for language and inclusive storytelling that is boundless and exciting. Every Day is the first of his solo novels to be adapted into a film (he co-wrote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Naomi and Ely's No-Kiss List with Rachel Cohn), and I can't think of anybody more deserving.

Throw in Angourie Rice from The Nice Guys and I couldn't be more sold.

So Every Day has the kind of high concept that makes it impossible to explain without sounding like a lunatic, but makes perfect sense within about five minutes of screen time. Every day (hey, that's the name of the movie!), a consciousness named A wakes up in a different body. It's always somebody A's age, and always pretty near to wherever the last body was at midnight. Whoever's body A is in, they try to live life as that person (they have access to the person's basic memories, so it's not too hard), but living lives for others doesn't leave a lot of time to live life for oneself. Whatever oneself happens to be.

Enter Rhiannon (Angourie Rice). She's like a cat in the dark, and so forth. One day, when A is inhabiting the body of her loser boyfriend Justin (Justice Smith), she captures A's attention and thus begins a very confusing romance for both of them. A must come to terms with the way their actions affect the lives of the people they inhabit every day, and Rhiannon must realize that love must be pretty damn blind, if she's going to be with someone whose body and even gender is literally never the same twice.

Though they're mostly always cute, so the struggle isn't TOO real.

The interesting thing about a story like this, from a technical standpoint, is that all the responsibility for maintaining a consistent chemistry within this relationship falls on Angourie Rice. Seeing that it's hard enough for certain actors to maintain chemistry between just the two of them, this is another acting feat that proves Rice to be the real deal, even if the role - being a bit of a cypher for teen girls - is less showstopping than her Nice Guys character, which showed she could hold her own against heavy hitters like Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe.

But that's not to diminish the talents of her many, many, many co-stars (no fewer than a dozen different people play A, including Spider-Man: Homecoming's Jacob Batalon and It's Owen Teague). Justice Smith especially is kind of a revelation. We first meet him as inhabited by A, where he pours on the charm and sells that first, brilliant spark between them and Rhiannon. But once that spirit leaves him, he completely transforms. He's more different than if he had acquired a different body too, all spiky, surly physicality and tentative teen awkwardness. It's a physical and vocal shift displaying a skill and confidence that's stunning in somebody so young.

Oscars, keep an eye on these people.

Every Day really does have an interesting concept, and it does make a point to at least reference the diversity of the teen experience: A is fat, skinny, male, female, blind, trans, gay, straight, and everything in between. It's too gentle of a romance to dig into any of these experiences with the emotional depth it probably should have (save for a terrific scene about the responsibility of saving a suicidal teen), and like the equally gentle Timer, it's obsessed with exploring the ramifications of this particular high concept sometimes at the expense of finding a universal truth about human beings outside of the concept.

But it's impossible to dislike a movie this sweet. It's warmly funny when it wants to be, the picturesque Maryland settings get plenty of awe-inspiring landscape photography, it's primly, politely genderqueer in a way that's transgressive in a way so subtle you might not even notice, which is honestly the way we should be treating gender in modern teen movies. It's an Instagram-filtered approach to moviemaking that gives everything a pleasant glow, and while it's not a life-changing experience, it's overwhelmingly kind and delightful.

TL;DR: Every Day is a sweet high-concept romance, but it feels a little too light for its own good.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 791

Cool To Be Kind

Year: 2016

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If you pretend that Shane Black was never courted by the Marvel universe, he’s the least prolific, most exciting genre-bending pastiche artist in Hollywood today. He’s obviously written classic action flicks like Lethal Weapon and Last Action Hero, but today I’m largely concerned with his directorial output: He burst onto the scene (which he then immediately burst off in a puff of smoke) in 2005 with the sharp neo-noir mystery comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film I utterly adore. 

But he’s finally back after a frustratingly prolonged radio silence. I haven’t seen his Iron Man 3 all the way through (though I have seen the opening scene half a billion times while babysitting a toddler with a short attention span), so I have no opinion on it, but if his 2016 effort The Nice Guys indicates any sort of pattern, I look forward to a decade from now when he knocks out yet another crime-comedy masterpiece.

Although I certainly wouldn’t complain if he picked up the pace a smidge.

It’s the 1970’s. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a thug for hire, beating up people who have done bad things. One of said people is Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a widowed private detective who shoulders easy cases for batty old women in between (and sometimes during) getting sloshed. He has been searching for Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who may be the missing link in the case of a murdered porn star, Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio). Amelia pays Jackson to get Holland off her case then disappears, leaving them to join forces to find her before it’s too late. Tagging along is March’s plucky tween daughter Holly (Angourie Rice), who – in typical Hollywood fashion – is far more capable and clever than her ne’er-do-well dad.

Though she doesn’t have quite as magnificent a moustache. 

Playing on TV in the background of a certain scene is an episode of Get Smart, a show which certainly informed the comic ineptitude of our very own Mr. March. If it hasn’t been made clear already, let it be known now that – while The Nice Guys is a solid mystery pastiche, it is first and foremost a character-driven comedy, pitting two buddy cop archetypes against one another in a realm of sophomoric, clever, sometimes intimidatingly intricate humor.

If there’s one thing that Shane Black (co-writing with Anthony Bagarozzi) does best, it’s grafting comedy onto an utterly alien genre framework, and his two stars serve him well. Crowe is excellent as the surly straight man who powers the film’s emotional throughline, but Gosling outdoes himself here, undermining his typical ultrasuave pretty boy act. Holland march is a real loser, and Gosling isn’t afraid to embrace that, painting a weak-willed character with girlish shrieks, fumbling blocking, and a sorely misplaced confidence that unequivocally earns that comparison to Maxwell Smart. He just goes for it, and he’s a surefire success at being a failure.

But let’s not downplay Angourie Rice, who plays against the big boys with aplomb. The virtually unknown Australian actress (unless you’re a rabid fan of Walking with Dinosaurs 3D) gives a consummately professional, sharp performance that shows she actually is as clever and alive as her role, instead of just reciting a script. It takes real talent to purposely layer that kind of childlike naïveté over a naturally smart character, a talent that should have taken decades to develop. She’s frustratingly good, to the point that I’ve rethought every single decision that led me to being 21 years old and not yet a massive movie star. 

This chick is a lead in a major motion picture. At 13, I was still drinking Tang and leveling up my Ivysaur.

It’s a funny cast so it’s a funny movie, though the script is so solid that it would still be the most laugh-out-loud movie of the year so far if they had cast Dane Cook and Larry the Cable guy. There is an astonishing level of control apparent in this screenplay, hammering out joke after joke that are all funny in their own right, but turn out to be setups for third act surprise punchlines that explode your gut like land mines. This is a movie that manages to imbue comedy into both dialogue and action sequences, wave intricate layers of jokes in the moment and the long term, and on top of that have time for a fiddly little structural joke on the sidelines: recurring imagery of birds and bees, presumably meant to evoke the film’s salacious subject matter.

It’s a snappy, clever film that’s a relentlessly entertaining thrill ride, though there are certain jigsaw pieces that don’t quite fit. A couple of character details (especially between March and his daughter) don’t get any payoff, leaving some emotional loose ends. Their connective tissue is presumably slowly bleeding out on the cutting room floor. However, these infractions are very slight. The Nice Guys tells the story it wants to tell with verve and audacity, and if it’s not one hundred percent pristine, that’s not really its problem.

Plus, although Shane Black the director tends to stay out of the way of Shane Black the writer, there are some neat visual gags during action sequences that make great use of the frame’s background to paint a complete tapestry of carnage. The visual style isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s kinetic and knows how best to serve its comedy, which is the one true reason it exists.

Is The Nice Guys quite as perfect on the first viewing as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? No way. But I can’t stop thinking about it, making it easily one of the best movies of the year. If this flick doesn’t land in my December Top 10, then this might just be the best year Hollywood’s ever had.

TL;DR: The Nice Guys is an excellent crime comedy, and a worthy followup to the director’s terrific debut feature.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1007