Is it only because I've never seen The Notebook that it's unfathomable to me that Ryan Gosling is a romantic hero? Any guy who did this to me on the bus, and then had the following conversation with me, would make me think he was a seriously screwed up person with boundary issues:
This just feels very hipstery and self-conscious to me, down to Gosling's accent and the deliberately offensive joke Williams tells at the end, it's the scruffier, up-front nastier flip side to (500) Days of Summer.
I know it's only a single scene, but as meet-cutes go, it's not exceptional cute, or even really appealing, and I can't tell if the uncomfortableness of it is intentional or not. I always hesitate to declare, for example, anything so totalizing and idiotic as "a woman would never have written this." But I know that I, as a woman, would have conceptualized this differently: Gosling could have sat across the aisle from her and the moved over into the seat once they started talking, for example. Watching this, I feel like Williams' character is physically and socially boxed in, stuck with Gosling even if he ends up kind of charming by the end. Physical discomfort and inappropriate boundaries have their place in movies, but they should be there intentionally, not as an accident of something the writer and director (in this case, both guys) think is charming.