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Crime
Pain and Gain, or "Did Michael Bay just do something
kind of awesome?"
Overall: 7/10
 |
| This was the first poster and nobody knew what the hell this movie was going to be about. Fitness? Body Building competitions? You don't look at this and think Dark Comedy Crime Drama. |
I think
Michael Bay has been unfairly demonized by an ungrateful movie audience. He has a distinct visual style, knows what to
imitate from other directors, and tends to have really strong casts for the
movies he is making. I find people
bitching about "Transformers" to mostly be simpletons. "Transformers" was always garbage,
and I say that as a huge fan on the original series, and I would go so far as
to say "Beast Wars" is one of my favorite cartoons ever in spite of
the aged computer animation from the 90's.
Michael Bay took a toy commercial, and made a schlocky, immature, alien
invasion disaster movie and it became one of the most commercially successful
franchises of all time. That being said
the man has the sense of humor of a 6 year old who just discovered adults laugh
when he says the word, "Poop."
He is not really an artist, he makes movies that are 'effective,' easy
to market, easy to consume, he is the $200 Million McDonald's trip for 100
Million people. Very tasty garbage.
"Pain
and Gain" is exactly the kind of movie Bay should be making, it is about
psychopathic emotionally retarded meat heads committing violent crimes. It in no way glorifies what they are doing,
but you definitely understand their motivations. It moves at a good clip. It is funny.
It has a lot of color and action that keeps each scene visually
interesting. In different hands this
movie could have been totally different, I can easily imagine the Coen Bros
doing this sort of thing in the style of "Fargo" or "Burn After Reading". It also has stuff taken
right from the "Inglourious Basterds" style guide, as quick asides
through the story inform you of what is happening and why, or text appears on
the screen to clarify something. The
best moment of the film happens when the most outrageous aspects of this whole
criminal enterprise have hit new levels and text pops up reminding the
audience, "This actually happened".
Dwayne Johnson is a head case that is slow to violence and needs to be pushed the
whole way, which considering he looks like a gorilla covered in tattoos adds a
level to his character. Marky Mark is
surprisingly good in this, far better than his turn in "2 Guns" using
his charisma to nefarious (or as nefarious as a thug can be) ends, rather than
being the character getting taken for a ride for nearly the whole movie. Not as many tits as I would have expected. Especially compared to "The Wolf of Wall
Street", but I am guessing that Scorsese has a lot more clout to get such
things put on screen without an NC-17 rating getting slapped on, Bay would
probably get burned at the stake by the MPAA.
This movie
is definitely worth seeing. It is
retarded fun.
The Wolf of Wall Street, or "I think they went a little
far in some places."
Overall: 8/10
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| Lot of microphone felatio in this movie too. |
This movie
and "Pain and Gain" have a lot in common. Based on actual events, happens in roughly
the same era (the early 90's), and the protagonists are drug addled
psychos. The difference here being these
monsters are not low class violent thugs taking what they want through force,
instead they are slick conmen getting rich to the point of godhood via
exploiting the painfully broken game that is the American financial sector.
Let me be
clear, if I were a murderer, these are the people I would kill. I had, unironically, a serious conversation 4
months ago about how capitalism is great at producing TV, media, and lots and
lots of cultural flotsam, but is plagued by middlemen and money managers that
do not in anyway produce, build, or create anything but have huge sums of money
from moving columns of hypothetical numbers.
This movie starts with the flipside of that conversation, with the
mentor of evil telling the main character that stock brokers get rich and
contribute nothing. The movie explicitly
tells you these people are evil.
Leonardo DiCaprio continues to be my favorite actor, able to yell, laugh, narrate, and
be on drugs convincingly. And Jonah Hill, while getting way too much time to adlib, is really good in his
role. The supporting cast all gets good
scenes, and there are too many very quotable lines to mention, though my
favorite is, "I AM NOT GOING TO DIE SOBER!"
Actually
this movie could have been a 10/10 but there are a lot of scenes that had me
going, "cut... cut... CUT".
There are scenes with powerful speeches that go on past the point of
them being powerful. Scenes of slapstick that are hilarious, but could have been cut in half. There is one Jonah Hill scene in particular
that I could tell was a metric shit ton of improv and needed to be cut down, it
went on and on with increasingly annoying bullshit... Like an Aristocrats joke. The movie is really long and scenes that are
too long make you feel the length of the movie.
Should also make note of the truly herculean amounts of nudity in this
film, full frontal of multiple women, the most notable of which is Margot Robbie... Maybe the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in a movie (she is
also 5 years younger than me, so I feel incredibly old).
Also
totally worth seeing. Might have worked
better if I had watched it in two parts, or if it had been an HBO series, like
an amped up "Mad Men".
