Update: the film is out and ourThe Nice Guys review sings its praises: “Along with a knack for perfect pacing and tight, smart dialogue, Black has an uncanny ability to put the action just where it needs to be — and in just the right amounts — to keep a film balanced and moving along at just the right speed for his audience.”
If you were a fan of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black’s off-the-wall crime comedy that pairs a private investigator (Val Kilmer) with a thief masquerading as an actor (Robert Downey Jr.), there’s a good chance you’ll like The Nice Guys, Shane Black’s off-the-wall crime comedy that pairs a private investigator (Ryan Gosling) with an unscrupulous, skull-cracking hired gun (Russel Crowe). The latter isn’t a direct sequel to the former, but has been labeled as a “spiritual successor,” and provides the same sort of riotous, tongue-in-cheek-y action.
Set in ’70s Los Angeles, the film centers around the suicide of a porn star in the twilight of her career, a death that blows the lid off of a sprawling conspiracy.
On Friday, the studio released the first red band trailer for the film, and it looks like a rip-roaring good time. Bones break, guns fire, cars crash, and no fewer than three people plummet from the top of tall buildings. Both lead roles seem very well cast and the new spot packs plenty of comedic punch. Here are a few of the highlights:
At 1:05 Gosling threatens Crowe with a gun but is repeatedly thwarted by a temperamental bathroom stall door; at 2:03, people are dying left and right, faster than you can turn your head; and at 2:35, Gosling takes a unplanned high-dive into a pool, while whoever is falling alongside him isn’t so lucky.
Like Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, and other wacky action romps, The Nice Guys doesn’t appear to take it self too seriously, adding a pleasant drizzle of comedy on top of the brutal action. Fans of the Lethal Weapon franchise should also have this one on their radar, as director Shane Black wrote the screenplay for the original and also worked on the first of its three sequels.
You can check out the full red band trailer above (NSFW), and you can catch the film in theaters on May 20, 2016.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?