The forgotten movie Ryan Gosling needs everyone to see: “It’s gold”
Most of us have a film, usually from childhood and involving some kind of magical animal, that we can’t quite remember but we know existed, and it’s always impossible to get the name of it right, and it’s quite possible the whole thing was a fever dream. Well, in Ryan Gosling‘s case, that film did actually exist, and it starred his future wife.
Some examples of the kind of movie I’m talking about would be Harvey, the 1950 James Stewart film about a drunk man whose best friend is an absolutely enormous and fairly terrifying rabbit, or perhaps Mac and me, the 1988 ET rip-off about a boy in a wheelchair and an escaped alien. We know these movies happened; sometimes we watched them when we were at home sick from school, which adds to the whole surreal nature of them.
Gosling’s effort doesn’t hail from his childhood however, and he no doubt names it solely to take the piss out of his wife Eva Mendes who stars in it, and that film is called, brilliantly, My Brother the Pig. While we challenge you to have ever heard of it, let alone have seen it, Gosling describes the project with a faint, knowing smile as “gold”, and while we don’t entirely trust him, a quick glance at the trailer reveals he may be right.
Now, usually a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes would be cause for excitement for many reasons, but this one ticks literally none of those boxes. Possibly the strangest thing about this film is that it looks, sounds and really should have been made at least a decade earlier than it was. For one, It starts with that jaunty orchestral music that opened all the 1980s comedy movies like Home Alone or Mrs Doubtfire.
Then, despite the film having been made in 1999, you get the same guy who did the voice-overs for all those trailers, and if that weren’t enough, here’s archetypal 1980s actor Judge Reinhold. Then, to put the icing on the cake, here’s the plot involving a child inadvertently swapping places with a pig due to some kind of unexplained “ancient magic” curse because he didn’t behave very well, probably due to ADHD who knows.
Somehow, astonishingly, the second minute of the trailer is even better; you get a sense of just how abysmal the special effects are, the guy doing the voice over practically shrugs his shoulders as he reveals the family have to go and see “a mysterious old woman” while avoiding the nefarious attentions of “a bacon loving bad guy” who presumably wants to capture and eat the poor neurodivergent child.
You also, as if “all” of that weren’t plenty, get a shouty American kid doing an impersonation of Short Round from Indiana Jones and/or any one of the Goonies, plus several scenes lifted wholesale from Home Alone, plus one of the children from Home Alone 3. Obviously, it looks dreadful, and there’s absolutely no chance we are sitting through the whole thing, and you don’t need to either, just watch the trailer.
Aside from picking out films that are best left in the past simply to annoy his wife, Ryan Gosling is about to be seen in Project Artemis. That’s a big deal because it’s from the author of The Martian, which was an excellent adaptation starring Matt Damon, and also because “lots” of very online people enjoyed the audiobook and so are ready to completely tear it to bits if it isn’t faithful to the original.
For some reason, the trailer for that movie is about eight minutes long and pretty much spoils what the film has in store completely, so instead, let’s just focus on the ‘weirdly ten years too late’ majesty that is My Brother the Pig, shall we? OK, good.
