League of Ordinary Gentlemen Podcast Episode #543 - The League Vs. The Nice Guys (2016)

The League returns to take on The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe and our crush, Ryan Gosling, and a young lady. A porno young lady. Dursin swears he watched it.Set in 1970s Los Angeles, The Nice Guys is Shane Black's criminally underrated neo-noir comedy that somehow never got the blockbuster love it deserved. Clay and Dursin break down the buddy dynamic between Crowe's bruiser Jackson Healy and Gosling's gloriously incompetent Holland March — including the falls, the screams, the toilet gun standoff, and every moment Gosling commits so hard to physical comedy that it borders on performance art. They also get into why the film's satirical jabs at the porn industry, the Detroit auto lobby, and Nixon-era corruption still land fifty years later.Beyond the slapstick and the sleaze, the guys dive deep into the film's cult status and why a proper sequel to this masterpiece remains one of Hollywood's biggest missed opportunities. They look back at the incredible breakout performance of Angourie Rice as Holly, the sharp-as-a-tack script that perfectly blends dark detective tropes with laugh-out-loud absurdity, and how Shane Black managed to capture lightning in a bottle by pairing an old-school tough guy with a master of modern comedic timing. Clay has questions. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in a swimming pool with Richard Nixon.