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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, August 14th, 2006 - Comments Off on Gosling's Tuxedo Shirt Conceivably the Only Thing Wrong with His Work on 'Half Nelson'
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Gosling's Tuxedo Shirt Conceivably the Only Thing Wrong with His Work on 'Half Nelson'


Pound for pound, I don’t know if there is a better blog on the Web than Drunken Stepfather. It is totally pseudonymous, tasteless, fearless, juvenile and consistently funnier than anything else I read, but its oversexed proclivities toward anything but New York cinema leave few opportunities for me to ever feature editor Jesus Martinez’s discriminating insights here on The Reeler.
So imagine my eye-bulging joy at this new revelation citing Half Nelson‘s Aug. 2 premiere in Tribeca (with star Ryan Gosling pictured at right). I admit I am throwing you right into the deep end of the cesspool here, so consider yourself warned. And then admit that at the end of the day, the guy kind of has a point:

Ryan Gosling….you are not a conformist, we get it. You are one of those guys who decided that you would never give into society by wearing a suit in your life. You became an actor so you could live the bohemian life with a lot of money in your bank and you let everyone know this by wearing a Tuxedo T-Shirt to all the black tie events you attend. You are subtle in your irony. We get it. But I would rather you be obnoxious in your irony. Instead of rocking the gayest fucking t-shirt ever manufactured, I’d like to see you hire the dirtiest looking crackwhore you can find. One who smells of piss, shit, vomit, rotten cunt and semen with no teeth and a stained party dress, a pair of mismatched shoes and who is coming down from a 3 week meth binge. That would be a better way to give the big “FUCK YOU” to the black tie events you are asked to attend. It’s much more effective than the passive aggressive “Fuck You” in the tuxedo shirt approach. What I am trying to say is that I am like this Ryan Gosling motherfucker. I don’t wear suits or like suits. I rock an old pair of jogging pants, a stained t-shirt and I don’t shower daily, but if I was asked to attend some sort of function, I would suck it up and put on a shirt and tie. It’s called having a little fucking decency. If I wanted to make a fucking statement, I would do it the right way. I hope this met your standards my reader.

Find more of Martinez’s painstaking cultural criticism and fashion advice you-know-where.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon