The large-scale destructiveness he has previously wrecked upon public and private property (including entire cities), Michael Bay visits on the human body in Pain & Gain, a pulverizing steroidal farce based on a bizarre-but-true kidnapping-and-murder case. Suggesting Fargo by way of the Three Stooges, Bay’s latest certainly proves that the Transformers auteur does have something more than jacked-up robots on his mind: specifically, jacked-up muscle men who will stop at nothing to achieve their deeply twisted notion of the American dream. With a very fine ensemble cast recruited to play an array of overtly despicable characters, this unapologetically vulgar, sometimes quite funny, often stomach-churning bacchanal will surely prove too extreme for great swathes of the multiplex crowd. But the marquee value of topliners Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, plus the pic’s reportedly modest $25 million pricetag, spells more gain than pain for Paramount’s box office pecs. more »
If you loathe Transformers-Michael Bay but have a soft spot for the Bay who made not one, but two Bad Boyses, then the first trailer for his true crime pic Pain & Gain is going to push all the right buttons: Beefy macho men, fast cars, a slick Miami setting, Mark Wahlberg hitting that Dirk Diggler sweet spot of dumb overconfidence, and everyone's favorite muscleman, The Rock... it's enough to make the truly disturbing real life saga of a gang of bodybuilding thugs-turned-killers who bungled their way through unspeakable acts of torture and murder into a feelgood American Dream antihero tale!
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Mark Wahlberg: The new Shia LaBeouf? Michael Bay and Paramount announced Thursday that Wahlberg, who stars in Bay's real life crime pic Pain & Gain, will lead the franchise sequel Transformers 4. "An actor of his caliber is the perfect guy to re-invigorate the franchise and carry on the Transformers’ legacy," said Bay in a statement.
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A surge of intrigue rippled through the blogosphere this week when a rumor hit, sourced from the barest of suggestions (a secondhand casting breakdown), that Michael Bay's fourth and allegedly final outing with the Transformers series might revolve around the rarest of Bay creatures: A female heroine. Sad, yes — Bay's filmography is so male-driven, his portfolio so stacked with binders full of supermodel-hot leading ladies, that even the slightest move toward gender equality in Bay's work force warrants an onslaught of hopeful speculation.
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Also in Friday afternoon's round-up of mostly movie-related news briefs, Pakistan faces the deadliest day yet over riots stemming from anti-Islam video The Innocence of Muslims. The Napa Valley Film Festival unveils details for its upcoming event. And two new features are headed to theaters.
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While filming Michael Bay's next non-Transformers pic Pain & Gain, based on the bizarre, freaky real life story of a band of Florida bodybuilders who committed a heinous series of crimes in the '90s, star Mark Wahlberg put on quite the show for peeping photographers. Clad in workout gear and some very short shorts, he gave us quite the memorable first look at the modest little $20 million black comedy, as you can see after the jump.
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The Ninja Turtles Culture War just gets better: "Paramount marketing changed the name. They made the title simple. The characters you all remember are exactly the same, and yes they still act like teenagers. Everything you remember, why you liked the characters, is in the movie. This script is being developed by two very smart writers, with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles. They care VERY MUCH about making this film for the fans. Everyone on this team cares about the fans. Just give them a chance. Jonathan the director, is a major fan of the whole franchise. HE'S NOT GOING TO LET YOU DOWN." [Shoot For the Edit]
After begging and pleading with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan community to please, please not engage in preemptive flame warfare over the rumors and vagaries surrounding the reboot of their beloved franchise, I now recognize the futility of my attempts at diplomacy. This comes after the film's attached director Jonathan Liebesman — also of this week's Wrath of the Titans and last year's eminently regarded (ahem) Battle: Los Angeles — only complicated matters with his comments about the kerfuffle. And then there's the movie's reported name change.
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I don't ask a lot. I don't really ask anything. Absurdities come and go. I roll with what I can and let the rest fade away. We're similar in that regard, aren't we? We won't agree on everything, but we're adults who ultimately respect each others' tastes and accept — resentfully or not — that in this destabilized, hyper-reductive cinematic climate, even such fare as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot has a place in our culture. It's big enough for all of us! So with this in mind, and in light of the vicious media sparring currently underway among the TMNT establishment, can we please, please just lay down our nunchucks and let this skirmish go?
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Speaking with MTV, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura confirmed general details on a fourth planned movie in Paramount's Oscar-nominated Transformers series, which will indeed see Michael Bay returning behind the camera. (First, however, he may finally shoot his bodybuilding crime pic Pain & Gain.) Though it's expected we'll see main robot characters like Optimus Prime return, summer of 2014's Transformers 4 -- Trans4mers? Tr4nsformers? -- will be a reboot, di Lorenzo says, because of course we need a Transformers reboot already. Of course. [MTV]
Yes, I just wrote the words "Transformers Oscar campaign." Sigh. It's time we come to terms with the fact that each installment in Michael Bay's robot action series has technically been nominated for one or more Academy Awards -- deservedly so, really, given the technical achievements these CG metal-on-metal bashfests have under their belt, even if everything else in these films are aggressively, brain-numbingly mediocre. But Paramount aims to take home one of them statuettes this year, by god, and so they've created an awards campaign to break through to Oscar voters in the most effective way possible: Through their TV sets.
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In a career spanning three decades Michael Biehn has notched a number of iconic roles in beloved genre fare, from future freedom fighter Kyle Reese in The Terminator to Corporal Hicks in Aliens to one of his personal favorites, Tombstone villain Johnny Ringo. And that work has borne him witness to his share of tense, chaotic sets under some of the strongest personalities in the business. But no shoot of Biehn’s was as intense as the friction-filled production of this week’s The Divide, Xavier Gens’ bleak horror tale about strangers trapped in a basement after the apocalypse, which Biehn says was fueled by the “hatred” and “bitterness” of combative actors turning on each other under claustrophobic conditions.
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Piranha 3DD may have been pushed to 2012, but the new teaser trailer suggests that the quality and spirit of the franchise hasn't been diluted. How could it have been, with returning fish survivor Ving Rhames dropping lines like, "Bring me my legs!" before gunning down the waters, Cherry Darling-style? Or with Baywatch's own lifeguard-slash-private eye extraordinaire, Mitch Buchannon, policing the bouncing bloodied bosoms fleeing from their piscine predators? All this and more -- "Double the terror, double the Ds" -- in today's Buzz Break!
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According to Variety, Christopher Nolan tops the shortlist to helm Warner Bros.' Twilight Zone reboot, but he's not alone on the list of potential candidates; Michael Bay, Alfonso Cuaron, and Rupert Wyatt are also in the mix to direct the big-budget, single-story version based on Rod Serling's original sci-fi television series. Nolan may have an in with producer Leonardo DiCaprio and the studio that released his last five films, not to mention the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. But should he get the gig?
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While accruing billions of dollars at the box office for his Transformers franchise, director Michael Bay has also gained somewhat of a reputation for his aggressive, dictatorial style of directing. Former Transformers star Megan Fox called Bay a nightmare who aspires "to be like Hitler on his sets." Other Transformers actors have agreed, claiming that a day on a Transformers set is like a day on the battlefield with General Bay shouting commands for explosions, choppers, Blackhawks, appleboxes and instructions to ignore lunch. But is there a softer side to Michael Bay that the public does not know about?
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