Is This Cinema?

Rating: 3/10 (30 November 2018)

Poor Ryan ... I admit that the first time I saw him, he passed me by unnoticed, although not the movie. I have always remembered Craig Gillespie's «Lars and the Real Girl», but now I realized that the man acted so well, that he is diluted in the story, as an integral part of the story of the country boy who falls in love with a doll. It was Nicolas Winding Refn who pointed me to Gosling as if saying, "Look at this Canadian, he's a very good actor." Then we had to put up with his dancing, singing, whining, whistling, directing movies (the most notable "Lost River", if you did not see it, you blinked) and committing sacrilege with «Blade Runner»... That is fame. Ryan Gosling is a face and body for mega-products, as good as Colin Farrell or Tom Hardy. However, did Little Ryan make his homework and read «First Man» script well? It seems he did not, but well... he wanted to be king, he has to throw kisses! You'd better be more cautious than he was, and look the other way. «First Man» is a bad, dull, overlong and propaganda illustration of NASA official reports, that were adorned (with no good results) with technical data, a big dose of Biopic 101, a bit of fairy tale and too much domestic/jingoist melodrama. So the "first moon landing" or whatever that was, ceases to be a polemical issue and becomes a compilation of close-ups of shoes, sand and stairs against dark landscapes: of course, this meant that the filmmakers could not even think of using the controversial film that some people say Stanley Kubrick did. Look, I am going to give you a little advice: better watch Georges Mélies' «Le voyage dans la Lune». It is shorter and more fun. But, of course, Ryan's fans are fools, so we go to see him and we find this mammoth of shuddering metal, stunned sounds, allusions to the Cold War and a 141-minute lament for a lovely child that died in the first 10 minutes. We deserve it for being fools.