Ryan Gosling and the “good old” movies.

credit: Drive Movie

Sometimes, to find again “good old” movies, you don’t have to follow a director. You have to follow an actor.

It’s the case of Ryan Gosling. Start with “Drive”. Then take a seven years back leap and find him again, really young, in “The Notebook”. At that point you can skip as you like, back and forth: “Blue Valentine”, “The Believer”, “All Good Things”, “Half Nelson”, “The Ides of March”, “The Place Beyond the Pines”. Always and anyway you’ll find him, Ryan Gosling, and the “good old” movies.

But what defines a “good old” movie? Honestly, this is the harder question to be answered because, in this world, not everything is easily explainable in words. You don’t take a seat and watch “good old” movies. “Good old” movies rule. When they start they grasp and carry you away. Since the first frame. They take you in their arms, they take you with strength, with a trick or a special song. Certainly, for all their duration, you are not anymore where you were before and there’s no way to come back not even for a second. “Good old” movies don’t accept you being distracted, they just make that impossible.

Your life becomes that film and when at the credits you are flung back, it’s like awakening from an hypnosis, coming back from another world. You don’t suddenly rise up, you don’t immediately remember who you were before that movie started: you stay there, running through names that seem to be made so long on purpose, to give you the time to recover without facing consequences of a too harsh trauma.

Then, when you proceed with your life, an unexplainable feeling stays inside you for a long time. With that Ryan Gosling’s face. Gosling, who above all, seems to have been taken hostage from “good old” movies, till he can’t choose something different to work in.

For this reason, if you are looking for “good old” movies, you just have to follow him. Hoping that he’ll never take a different road. At least without warning us first.