Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling = young Brando. It's partly the voice and the smoldering sensuality and the way he rocks a white undershirt, but there's something else too. I just learned of him, though he's been in many things in recent years. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Half Nelson. He's in Drive and Ides of March, in theaters now. He was also in Blue Valentine and the quirky Lars and the Real Girl. He won an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss for The Notebook. I expect he'll win this award again for the kiss in Drive.

By the way, if you're thirsting for old school movie editing, with loooooooong shots, you want to see Drive. It's amazing how much fun you can have waiting for someone to blink.

Update 10/18/11 9:55 pm: Of COURSE I wasn't the first person to notice Gosling's similarity to Brando. See, for example, Gina Picallo writing at The Daily Beast:

Gosling is the most conspicuous of this latest bunch [of actors influenced by Brando]. As a boy, he deliberately disguised his Canadian accent to give it a little Brando bravado. Then there he was last month on the cover of New York magazine wearing a sexy frown, a tight white T-shirt and a toothpick, a la Stanley Kowalksi. In his harrowing relationship drama Blue Valentine, Gosling’s young working class romantic Dean would have fit right in on the docks next to Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

“You can’t help but be affected by him,” Gosling recently told The Daily Beast. “I think all of us are.”

And Michael Giltz writing at HuffPo.

And Robert Butler, movie reviewer for the Kansas City Star from 1977-2011, writing on the Senior Correspondent blog:

Ryan Gosling is the new Marlon Brando.
I feel not even a twinge of nervousness about that statement. It’s as obvious as saying that Earth circles the sun.

I am as late to this party as I was to the White Stripes party.