The God is played by Vithaya Pansringarm who is also a good singer. Rhatha Phongam gave a good and confused performance of a girl with her own complexities. And apparently she had to masturbate in front of Ryan Gosling for one scene. I saw an interview where she described the experience.
It is a very well acted movie. It is almost entirely holds on acting. Ryan Gosling portrays his womanizer character so well that it is insane. And the interactions he has with Emma Stone are pure cinematic gold.
The movie also has a surprising amount of good music. There are two insane dance sequences. But one is just so good it got stuck in my mind. I almost forgot that Ryan Gosling can sing. But he is so good. He needs to record more music. He has one album that he recorded before that. There should be more.
It was very nice to have a marathon of Ryan Gosling movies, because I stumbled upon this unique masterpiece. Lars and the Real Girl is a story about a sad relationship. About a man named Lars and his girl named Bianca who is sick and getting worse and worse with every passing day. The twist is, Bianca is actually a live sized sex doll.
The movie is a dramatic love story set in the world of crime. The main protagonist ( played by Ryan Gosling ) is a criminal. He finds a girl who he really loves, but she is married to another criminal. And more criminals want that other criminal to pay them, so the protagonist needs to help the husband of his girlfriend to do a job which goes very wrong.
Writing-wise the movie suffers from the new trend of sincerity avoidance. You know how in the older films if a character is sad, we should also feel sad with the character. Michael Bay was consistent with his sincerity for the most part in his older movies and even in Ambulance. But since 6 Underground is starring Ryan Reynolds there is a lot of joking around people feeling things. Even though he still tries to get the core idea of the film to be sincere. Which is that people are more important than the mission. Ryan Reynolds's character was brilliantly cast to be the guy that challenges the idea of sincerity. Perhaps there is another layer of complexity to this movie that I didn't see because of the all of booms and butts.
I was fascinated at that point with the story about the making of Dunkirk, the 2017 Christopher Nolan movie about World War II. It was rated PG-13, while everything else about this subject matter was rated R and a lot of people got upset that Christopher Nolan was afraid to show guts. But Nolan himself explained that in preparation to the filming, he watched Saving Private Ryan ( a very violent Steven Spielberg film about that war ) and saw that other people tend to close their eyes in moment of absolute horror. So they don't actually see the movie. And they miss on tension, immersion and ultimately they are not scared in the end. So to scare the audience about the war, he needed to show death and suffering without the death and the suffering being unpleasant to look at on the screen. And for that kosher approach he got the PG-13 rating.
Look at The Post. A movie about an article in the newspaper. Like, how can you make this interesting? The movie has no action scenes. Oh wait... There are actions scenes! It's Steven Spielberg we are talking about. He cannot bloody live without action. The movie starts with a war scene in Vietnam. It's not as gruesome as the one he did in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, but it bloody damn good and has a very similar feeling to it.