STAR TREK INTO DERPNESS: WHY NAKED FAN SERVICE SEEMS CYNICAL WHEN YOUR SERVER ISN'T A FAN

(via screenslam.com)

(Note: even though none of the information divulged spoils anything about the movie, hypersensitive spoiler decorum decrees that a spoiler alert is necessary.)

This is not, I assure you, going to turn into one of those “lone film writer standing bravely against the current, exhorting you all to see the light” bits of fuckery where I tell you you're wrong for liking Star Trek Into Darkness. You're not wrong. We just disagree. Hell, I'll even grant that it's no worse than a standard modern blockbuster, with a number of real bright spots:

—The design is spectacular, in particular the splendidly plausible way they add three centuries to London.

—The cast is just right, and all totally believe in it; there's no “look at me slumming and being better than this” that one occasionally finds.

—Above all else, it's still Star Trek, and you can fuck Star Trek up any number of ways and it'll still be fine on at least one level simply by being Star Trek. Even if it only is in the most superficial sense.

Added to all of these is JJ Abrams' steady-as-she-goes competence as a director. He's never going to make anything transcendently great, and he's never going to make anything truly worthy of being called awful, because he's got a firm grasp of that middle lane, and—barring a statistically improbable sudden decision to get whacked out of his dick on cocaine—is pragmatic enough to keep on as he has been, making big expensive pop movies (and TV series) and marketing the bejesus out of them, guarding their every mundane secret like the Kremlin.

But that right there is a huge thing that bugs me about his stuff. Abrams is now synonymous with years-long marketing campaigns where everything is shrouded in secrecy with the implication being that even the slightest, most seemingly insignificant tidbit would blow the whole fucking thing wide open and ruin a life-altering moviegoing experience. Which, no. We've been around the block enough times with him now to state definitively that this is all a pile of bullshit.

Cloverfield—which he produced—was so secret he didn't even want us to know the title until it “accidentally” leaked and was “grudgingly” confirmed. Super 8—which he directed as well as produced—was another one; the title was only divulged under great (apparent) duress, and details withheld assiduously. The former was a pretty solid monster movie told in then reasonably novel fashion of pretending to be found footage of a catastrophic attack on NYC by a big nasty-ass monster that came out of New York Harbor looking to rip shit up. The secrecy meant we didn't get a look at the monster until after we'd seen the movie, so those kinda beside the point but still lingering questions like “how the fuck did something that big just emerge from New York Harbor undetected?” went unasked, to the movie's advantage. Because all monster movies require a bit of suspension of disbelief right from the start, and Cloverfield was good, good enough that even if people had been like “derp, where'd that monster come from, New Jersey?” beforehand, it probably wouldn't have been affected much. (One love to Matt Reeves.)

Super 8, on the other hand, might have found itself in slightly dicier ground, being an unabashedly sentimental homage to the most unabashedly sentimental period of Steven Spielberg's career, the E.T./Goonies 80s. I fell for it like a ton of bricks on first viewing, I freely admit (and have been abjectly terrified to revisit it ever since, lest I cringe at the praise I lavished on it), but the question lingers whether the year of Internet hype leading up to it led me (and others) to confer event-movie status on something that might not have earned it on its own merits. Super 8 was competently put together, to be sure, but whether there was anything there beyond the craft is hard to say.

This is a huge problem with Star Trek Into Darkness, which is a completely standard-issue blockbuster (essentially a not-very-good remake of The Wrath of Khan) with no surprises warranting all that secrecy, unless Abrams et al were ashamed that all it is is a not-very-good remake of Wrath of Khan. His first Star Trek is the best thing Abrams has ever done, with a brilliant textual excuse—time travel leading to an alternate timeline; don't ask how, science fiction, that's the fuck “how”—to depart from existing canon, perfectly cast (holy shit Zachary Quinto as Spock), and it successfully elided all the things that didn't quite hold up under scrutiny, none of which really mattered anyway. The sequel considers all the character development done in the first as being sufficient, and doesn't do any. Which is fine, everyone saw the first one; it made shitloads of money in theaters and Trek fans subsequently watched it zillions of times on DVD/Blu/their phones/whatever. But aside from those initial points I mentioned up top, some familiar character names and a few non-narrative moments of “Hey! Remember this thing from the show or one of the movies? You like this, right? Well here you go!” before it gets back to being a nearly completely generic modern blockbuster, it's a completely generic modern blockbuster, and some of the ways it goes about being that thing betray a shocking tone-deafness to what Star Trek actually is.

Let us once again, as in the introduction, make clear that I am not doing the thing that William Shatner famously twitted Trek fans for doing in that “Get a life!” bit, obsessing over minutiae like a redshirt getting hit in a non-vital organ with the wrong color phaser or Sulu steering the Enterprise from the console on the wrong side of the bridge, or Uhura speaking Klingon with a Romulan accent or any of that fuckin shit (let us also make clear that I pulled all three of those things out of my ass). No, this is not nitpicking. There are fundamental things way the fuck wrong with this movie, in terms of being Star Trek:

—In spite of noting, at length, in the first few minutes, that morality is an essential aspect of decision-making, the good guys cavalierly let a whole bunch of people die, including a “Sorry I'm not sorry/Hey, here's a disingenuous apology-cum-wisecrack!” moment where Scotty shoots a “bad guy” (who could very well be a normal Starfleet dude just like Scotty, following orders) out an airlock into space. The movie also lets us think, for no apparent reason other than to elicit a “Daaaaaaaamn” from audiences, that Spock murdered 72 unarmed, inert, defenseless people in cold blood before turning around and being like “Sike!” Great save, guys.

—You've already seen Alice Eve's two most significant character beats in the trailer: the first is in a scene with no other purpose whatsoever than to show her in her underwear. Congratulations if you're twelve and that made your year. The second is that lifeless “Okay, Alice, you're the pretty blonde girl so this is the scene where you scream” scream. That one was in response to watching her father's head get crushed by Khan, making the rote, emotionless quality of it entirely the movie's fault (no, if Alice Eve is a shitty actress—which I have no way of knowing, having only seen her in things where she plays a blonde object—then it's Abrams/Lindelof/etc's fault for casting her in the first place, not hers). She also immediately gets injured and has to be carried around by dudes the second action starts happening, because LOL girls can't take a punch, amirite?

—Uhura does not fare much better, playing Spock's nagging girlfriend for the whole movie with the exception of the one scene where she talks Klingon to the Klingons (who show up for one sequence and then vanish, speaking of annoying misuse of Star Trek text) and then has to be saved because LOL girls can't fight, right fellas?

—I mentioned Khan in passing, so let's talk about Khan for a second. Benedict Cumberbatch. You know him. Every straight woman between the ages of about 25 and 40 that you have ever met has at least a fan Tumblr devoted to him. And don't let her tell you she doesn't. And if it's you who think you don't, trust me, you're Tyler Durden-editing a Cumberbatch fan Tumblr when you think you're asleep. (Or you're a closeted lesbian; look, I don't make the rules.) Dude's a cult icon. Hell, I even wrote a huge long, glowing thing anointing him the greatest screen Holmes (even though I'm Team Martin Freeman, because I'm not a straight woman). Benedict Cumberbatch fucking rules. And he does plenty of rad shit in this movie. But here's the thing. There's a very complicated thing with Khan Noonien Singh. (Trigger warning: shit's about to get nerdy, get your helmet.) When he was introduced, in the fan-favorite TOS episode “Space Seed,” played by Ricardo Montalban—hold that thought—Khan was emblematic of the kind of shit society had transcended by the time Starfleet commenced its five-year mission to study space. He was a genetically-engineered soldier who, along with others of his kind, overthrew their original masters and became genocidal warlords in the Eugenics Wars before disappearing and floating around with a bunch of his buddies in suspended animation before the Enterprise found them. He then proves to be a gigantic handful, and Kirk just barely gets rid of him, talking him into starting a new kingdom on this little dipshit out-of-the-way planet where he hopefully won't do any lasting damage. Problem is, Khan gets pissed when his wife dies and he blames Kirk, leading to the elaborate revenge plot that makes up Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Wrath of Khan fucking owns, largely due to the Montalban realness, from which Khan's iconic, Hall of Fame villain status derives.

NOW. Important point. Khan Noonien Singh is, textually, South Asian, even though Ricardo Montalban was not. But a character described as being genetically perfect being an actor of color was secretly kind of a big deal at a time, as “Space Seed” was, three years removed from the Civil Rights Act (i.e. “Fisher Price My First Bulwark Against White Supremacy”). This supercedes the “fuck me, not another POC villain” thing, I would argue, because the entire conception of Khan, as scripted, is that he requires you to conceive of a person of color being the physical and intellectual apex of human genetics. This is important (important enough for John Cho to make a pointed comment about it on the Press Blitz Into Darkness), because this is what Star Trek was about: hopping around from planet to planet learning lessons about life on Earth through interactions with various funky-looking aliens. After Kirk had sex with them.

So. Maybe Montalban, as a non-Asian, playing Khan in the first place upfucked the entire point about race. And maybe my casting idea—backing up the money truck to Aamir Khan's house and pouring cash out til he says when—isn't feasible. And maybe Cumberbatch is the white guy, the capo di tutti capi (which is manifestly possible; he sure has a lotta fangirls). But he's still a white guy, which makes it kinda dumb that he's playing “Khan.”

And thus. Is this a big deal? Not really, in itself, because as much as I might think the good outweighs the bad in Khan's fundamental POC-ness, I'm still saying that as a white person, which means if a POC takes the “a POC villain? Again? Fuck” side, they win, I lose. And as the prophet who transcribed Chris Tucker's gospel “Behind every crime, there's a rich white man waiting for his cut” into the Evil White Guys In Suits Theory, I really should be like, “Send Cumberbatch to Savile Row before he even thinks of setting a foot on this set.” Life is complicated, what can I say.

The Khan thing is thorny, but it itself is not the problem, merely a symptom. Star Trek Into Darkness is, in every regard, a movie that could have been written by a computer program that left the proper nouns blank for Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof to go in and fill in “Kirk,” “Spock,” “Klingon,” “Khan,” etc. And, onto the generic-as-shit sci-fi action template, toss a whole bunch of references to shit they know fans will get, making the whole thing kind of feel like a rewrite of Wrath of Khan by someone who didn't actually watch it. One can picture them sending their assistants to take notes only the assistants were busy networking with each other trying to get better jobs in the industry and so their notes were a little vague, so Orci/Kurtzman/Lindelof were like, “Oh, well, no one's going to care that we never fucking watched Wrath of Khan because Abrams doesn't even like Star Trek and as long as we write a Tribble into the plot the fans will be like 'yay Tribbles' and we'll all make millions.”

I know a lot of Star Trek fans, some of them massive Star Trek fans, who like the movie. I don't want any of them thinking that any of the above is telling them they're wrong to like Into Darkness. Matter of fact, up til an undefined point somewhere in the middle when everything started getting loud and JJ's shitty framing started annoying me and one too many apocalyptically derpy things happened, I was digging it myself. But there just came a point when Star Trek Into Darkness being a normal run-of-the-mill blockbuster just wasn't enough. I think it's when people started just getting killed like whatevs, no bigs, just a bunch of extras eating it.

You can argue poetic license and adaptation all you want, but that's not Star Trek. I'm not talking about the thing I was fucking with comic book geeks about in my Iron Man post, either, because I really liked Abrams' first Star Trek picture. It was fine. Abrams not giving a particular fuck about Star Trek didn't get in the way there, because his indifference to canon led him to focus on the characters as human beings, and their relationships. Ironically, the thing that makes the sequel go tits up (for me, anyway) is the ineptitude of the fan service; it's like Abrams and the writers read the Star Trek page on Wikipedia and were like, “Oh, okay, here's Carol Marcus, which means, yeah, the bad guy'll be Khan, everyone likes Khan, oh, and sure, let's give them a Tribble. Everyone likes Tribbles, yeah?” but all these gestures seem rote and hollow.

In a way, though, I'm kind of glad Star Trek Into Darkness turned into a transcript of its own pitch meeting halfway through, because at least that's honest about the way studios view pictures like this:

“Oh, yeah, Star Trek, the nerds'll flock to it. The last one made a mint—hey, get it, JJ? that's a Super 8 joke for ya, buddy—so we're good with this one. Dig up something from the show or something. Hey, what's that part where Bill Shatner goes 'KHAAAAANNNNN!!!'?”

“Oh, yeah, that's . . . yeah, my assistant Googled that, it's from Wreath of Khan . . . no, wait, 'wrath,' Wrath of Khan.”

“Yeah, so maybe do that, but a little different.”

“Maybe I could have Spock say 'KHAAAAANNNNN!!!' and have Kirk be the one who dies at the end.”

“Whoa whoa whoa. You can't have Kirk die in the end, what about the fuckin sequel, JJ?”

“Yeah, I know . . . that's why he's not really dead, they bring him back to life.”

“Sounds great! Okay. Make us rich, buddy.”

"YOU'LL NEVER SEE ME COMING.": SHANE BLACK, IRON MAN THREE, AND WHEN TO CHEERFULLY IGNORE CANON IN THE SERVICE OF MAKING A MOVIE THAT DOESN'T SUCK

Oh, hello.

I recently took advantage of New York City's deep and rich repertory cinema options to take in a small art film in search of a wider audience: Iron Man Three. Because it barely even grossed $175 million its opening weekend, I'm sure the filmmakers and cast will appreciate the exposure I'm giving it here, so, y'know, you're welcome Shane Black/RDJ/Gwyneth Paltrow/Guy Pearce/Ben Kingsley/James Badge Dale/et al. Hope this helps.

So, yeah. There's probably been enough written about the Iron Man pictures and the Avengers solo movies and the much ballyhooed Whedonized team-up one from last summer, and there's definitely been enough if you're a curmudgeonly fuck like me who sprains his balls sighing whenever a new comic book movie gets greenlit. It's not that I don't like comic books. I liked them a lot when I was in junior high, and I still like them a bit (in theory, mostly, it's been a while since I actually bought one). I respect what comics as a form afford artists and writers creatively: the possibilities of interplay between visual art and text are endless. Even the traditions of comics, literarily tied to the pulps as they are, are in some regards more liberating than they are restricting, because comics writers are restricted only by the limits of their imaginations.

BUT. HOWEVER. ON THE OTHER HAND. CONVERSELY. The annals of comic book history are home to a lot of really stupid shit. And the orthodoxy of comics fandom leads to a lot of that really stupid shit being regarded with a reverence based more on the fact that it already exists than on its actual merits. And every time a new comic book movie comes out, we have to sit through months of bullshit about whether x fleeting image in y teaser trailer bears sufficient resemblance to z thing that appeared in a comic book forty years ago. This brings us to my single favorite part of Iron Man Three, a lovely little fuck you to fandom derp, which will require spoilers to discuss in any kind of detail so forewarned is forearmed and all that jazz, but in general speaks to the picture's deft balance between totally being an Iron Man movie in all the important ways while not slavishly adhering to a bunch of silly bullshit.

Oi, tha's Trevor Slah'ery, innit?

As we who have seen the movie recall (that should be most of us still reading at this point, with some notable exceptions; hi, Mom!) there's a rather large revelation about midway through Iron Man Three with regard to Ben Kingsley's character, The Mandarin. He's established as a villain of sufficient (belief-suspending) badness and skill as to make a worthy adversary for Tony Stark: replete with more Osama Bin Laden signifiers than you can shake a stick at, The Mandarin claims credit, via video, for a series of bombings featuring untraceable blast devices that burn at extraordinarily high temperatures. When Tony, after braving the destruction of his house and almost all his shit (and, for long stretches, not having access to an Iron Man suit that works), finally tracks down The Mandarin . . . he finds out that the dude with the beard is a junkie actor, playing a character created by sinister fucko Guy Pearce (who makes for a smashing Evil White Guy In A Suit, by the way), the true bad guy.

This twist infuriated Iron Man comics purists, who'd been kvetching ever since the first trailer that The Mandarin, Iron Man's traditional archenemy in the comics, was being played by a white actor (Ben Kingsley is actually half-Asian, albeit south Asian, not east Asian, per “Mandarin,” but still). The principal sources of the nerd rage surrounding Iron Man Three's central twist were two: that the movie's Mandarin was not the comics' Mandarin, and that the movie essentially gave the character two middle fingers with its dick out while blowing a lip fart.

Both of these things are true, and moreover have a great deal to do with why Iron Man Three is actually good. The character of The Mandarin, in the comics, is part of a tradition of pulp villains dating back to Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and the slew of imitations thereof, whose exploits collectively constituted the Yellow Peril subgenre in pulp. Now, you're never going to believe this about something called the “Yellow Peril,” but this was massively racist toward east Asian people. And this you're especially not going to believe: just because someone wrote something in a comic book forty-five fucking years ago does not mean a filmmaker in 2013 has to photocopy it.

The misdirection of having The Mandarin be a fictional construct to mask the sinister doings of an Evil White Guy In A Suit is an acknowledgment of the actual world by co-writer/director Shane Black, and a really pretty brilliant one. The age when comic book villains' exoticism was part of their sinister mystery is gone. Belief in an Other in this day and age requires a willful ignorance of information available about the world and its people. The great irony of this time is that mass media does such an effective job of enforcing ignorance. The “Mandarin” switcheroo in Iron Man Three reinforces the power of media to distract (a nice bit of irony in a big-budget Hollywood movie about flying robots), and serves as reminder (as if any has been necessary since 2008 at the very latest) that few, if any, things on Earth are as dangerous as an Evil White Guy In A Suit.

As well as serving as a rebuke to the racist origins of the character, the willingness to fuck around with existing text in the service of making a good movie should be applauded. Shane Black has been screwing with genre his whole career, a tendency only emphasized in the two features he's directed. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang took a Brett Halliday novel and turned it into a wild bit of genre-bending lunacy with Robert Downey Jr. breaking the law and the fourth wall left and right and, aside from a creaky final third, was great fun. Iron Man Three is less overtly batshit structurally, but it has plenty of RDJ walking around being fucking awesome and yet serving as a walking critique of masculinity and heroism.

While, in terms of sheer fun, RDJ calling the cute kid a pussy rates about a 30 on a scale of 1 to 10, the fact that the movie's central conflict boils down to Tony Stark doing battle with a guy who could basically be him (except not as good at getting laid) is an extremely effective, if not terribly subtle, way of taking a look at exactly what heroism is in its given world, something any heroic narrative (let alone a “super”heroic narrative) has to at the very least address. And the most interesting thing about Tony Stark—and, by extension, the world he inhabits, if story is dictated by character—is that he, somehow, is a superhero, in spite of being a hair's breadth away from being a seriously evil motherfucker. He's a fucking billionaire arms manufacturer.

The previous two Iron Man movies played with this idea as well, pitting Tony Stark against a Stark Industries executive gone bad in the first one and crazed-Russian-with-a-beef-against-Stark-Industries Mickey Rourkeovitch Bugfucksky in the second. Some suitably crazy comic book shit happens in these movies—Guy Pearce and his James Badge Dale-led retinue of glowing red lava monsters falling squarely under that heading—so it's not like they're some beacon of naturalism or anything. But all the baggage with The Mandarin, both racial and political (the introduction of the character was right smack in the middle of the Cold War, when Mao was running things in China), even more than shit like his ten alien rings, would have been a distraction in 2013. So, what better than taking that problem to its ultimate metatextual conclusion and having The Mandarin literally serve as a distraction, as his actual role in the text?

Anyway. The larger point is, Iron Man Three was a lot of fun. It benefits greatly from not having a bunch of stupid racist bullshit just to placate the “everything needs to be exactly like it is in the comics even if it's at the movie's expense” crowd. In order for a comic book movie to succeed (especially a superhero movie), it needs to work on both comic book and movie terms. In neither regard does anything benefit from blind, overly literal fidelity to source material. That kind of literalism is just as stunting an addiction as Ben Kingsley's Trevor “The Fake Mandarin” Slattery has to smack. Cook that analogy up in your spoon and shoot it.

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

SITTIN' ON THE COCK OF THE BAY: A TIP OF THE HAT TO PAIN & GAIN

Before we begin discussing Pain & Gain, an anecdote about the time in which it's set: the years 1994 and '95, a fairly prominent period in my own development, thus one I remember vividly. Among other things, it was a time when I was sorting out sex stuff. On the one hand, there was Brad Pitt in that Interview With the Vampire/Legends of the Fall period in his career before he dirtied himself up for Se7en and Twelve Monkeys so he didn't get stuck being pretty his whole career, which wouldn't have been a particular chore for anyone except him, but hey, it's his career. On the other hand, there were lots of cute dark-haired girls at my high school (the black and Asian girls, of course, but all the white girls were Jewish or Italian, this being Bensonhurst, making blondes and redheads rare), and because as much shit as one, as a white guy, would catch dating a non-white girl—and lemme tell ya, it was severe—dating a guy or even appearing to be someone who would was worse.

Still, one day around when the final act of Pain & Gain takes place (we're getting to it at some point, bear with me), I was in one of those New-Age-y, “sit around a circle and say something about yourself” classroom things, and lobbed the Molotov cocktail “I'm bisexual” into the center. It's a term I no longer customarily use because the whole either-or binary is dumb, but, the point is, I introduced a concept that Bensonhurst high school kids had a hard time grappling with.

It was a climate when things were just progressive enough (and there was Rickie on My So-Called Life lighting the way; by the way, if you're analyzing why all my LGBT reference points at the time were pop-cultural, here's the answer: there were no out dudes at my high school. At all) that someone like me could be like “Hi! I part to a degree from the commonly-held societal expectations about gender and sexuality!” But it was also a climate in which there was a heavy backlash against the kind of societal permissiveness that led to people like me using forums such as that for proclamations such as those. There was, as cartoonish as today's iteration might seem, an even more absurd kind of end-of-the-empire hypermasculinity that arose from a sense that “political correctness” (which, let's keep it real, under all but like one or two kind of ridiculous circumstances, wasn't anything more than people saying “hey, maybe we shouldn't be racist, homophobic, or misogynistic”) was threatening The Way Things Ought To Be. So, to overcompensate, and because there hadn't been enough societal infrastructural change to shame this kind of thing into stasis, there was more dick-grabbing bullshit than you could possibly imagine.

Thus it was that one day, when I was trying to get a girl to sleep with me—y'know, heterosexually and stuff—that I was suddenly pulled aside by five gold-chain wearing greaseballs (one of whom I think had held hands with the lady in question once when they were twelve or some shit) and roughed up a bit. Not knowing what was going on, I asked “what the fuck?” or some such and was told, “Leave my girlfriend alone, faggot.” Because I'm an inveterate wiseass, I replied “Don't you see the cognitive dissonance in that?” And they got mad because I used big words and stepped things up a bit. I let them do it, without any more bright comments, figuring eventually they'd get bored and stop. And fortunately, because we were on school grounds (and they were pussies), they took it relatively easy on me; my glasses didn't get broken, my clothes didn't get ripped or anything. All in all, not a bad deal, though I was a bit achy. I made the executive decision to cut the rest of the school day, go home, take a shower, listen to some Pearl Jam records, and move on. I never snitched the kids who beat me up, because Real Men (even “faggots”) didn't snitch. No one had any idea anything had happened to me that day until years later when I started discussing it in this no-proper-nouns fashion, except maybe the girl, because we never went to bed even though we were, I say with as little caddishness as possible under these circumstances, totally about to.

So, at long last, to the point. Michael Bay's transition from enormously successful director of advertisements to even more enormously successful director of feature motion pictures was underway at this exact point in history (Bad Boys opened April 7th, 1995, within a month, at most, of the above events). His first three features all made pots of money, and while each was shittier than the previous, and none had two brain cells they could rub together to make a spark, they all possessed something that, ineffable though it might be, is Bay's principle auteurist signature: a near-perfect tonal replication of what it feels like to be high on testosterone. Or, any number of other stimulants that mix with same to re-create that heightened, purely physical rush. What it says about Bay's worth as an artist that his most uniquely quality is invisible and intangible, I don't know (though his haters, no doubt, can snarkily point to that and be like, “well there you go”), but his more concrete signatures, like the low-angle 360 degree shot around the heroes, and robustly, hilariously, waving American flags and shit, are crucial components adding up to that kind of jagged, fasten-your-seatbelts Bayism.

Now, just because something's unique, does that make it good? Of course not. Michael Bay has made a lot of shitty movies in his career. The number of fucks he gives about the script beyond what page the next explosion is barely perceptible by modern science (in fact, that was what the search for the Higgs-Boson was really about, it being the same size). This is why all that casual racism, misogyny, and homophobia sneaks into his pictures, not because he's proactively racist, misogynistic, or homophobic, but because he doesn't give a fuck. His priorities are on full display in this (admittedly sublimely perfect) precis from a few years back:



This doesn't let him off the hook for anything, keep in mind. There are ways to make viscerally exciting cinema that isn't totally fucking brain-dead (Steven Spielberg, early-career Kathryn Bigelow, and the top percentile of the late Tony Scott's work are but three examples, without even stacking the deck by getting into the more cerebral types, your Scorseses, late-career Bigelows and Michael Manns—Michael Menn?). But this is a state that's eluded Michael Bay, with a few isolated exceptions that never lasted the entirety of a movie, until Pain & Gain, which is, at long last, a story—and a good one—perfectly suited to Michael Bay's particular set of skills.

Pain & Gain is a story about very stupid people who do colossally stupid and ugly things in the pursuit of an extremely distorted, and media-metastasized, vision of the American Dream. Michael Bay is, in a real and not patronizing sense, the poet laureate of the big, loud, fast, and stupid, and particularly in Armageddon and the Transformers pictures (Pearl Harbor is best left out of the discussion even though it arguably qualifies) committed to film some of the most transcendentally schmaltzy Americana extant. It's so heightened it barely even qualifies as patriotism, it's kinda like doing an eight-ball during a Frank Capra marathon and then fapping to (but not, please note, on) an American flag. Yeah, that's vulgar. But he's a Vulgar Auteur, both in terms of the nascent (and controversial) film-crit movement and in the lower-case sense that he's a director with a recognizable style who's just fucking vulgar as fuck.

Beyond being, thematically, a near Platonic ideal of subject matter (weight lifters kidnapping a rich fuck so they can steal all his shit) and director (a guy who, I can guarantee you, heard that synopsis and replied “Awesome”), Pain & Gain is almost a gender-flipped take on this year's other Florida-set crime picture, Spring Breakers, a dreamy, druggy, free-associative take on the American Dream, another facet of the pursuit of happiness. But where Spring Breakers sashayed through its running time not giving a fuck with a joint in its mouth, Pain & Gain blasts forth in a sports car railing pounds of blow before smashing into a concrete abutment in a flaming fucking wreck.

And yet, it still has its moments of beauty, one of which is in the picture's opening sequence, one of the finest Bay's ever achieved, opening with a manic Mark Wahlberg doing sit-ups while hanging upside down against a wall. One of the angles used to build this sequence appears to be mounted on Wahlberg's frantically in-motion body. Then, we see what's got him so agitated: the cops. Wahlberg grabs his shit and runs. Some lovely slo-motion shots ensue, but while the slowed-down motion lends a sense of serene beauty, Wahlberg's face is contorted in a really unflattering, ugly expression, an un-romanticized dumbass whose time is up. And we slam to the opening title. This is as clear a thesis statement as you're ever going to see, and it's courtesy of Michael fucking Bay.

From there we find out just who Wahlberg is: Daniel Lugo, an earnest personal trainer and ex-con (some dodgy bit of business relieving old people of excess funds) who regards bullshit motivational speaker sound bite shit like “Be a Do-er, Don't Be a Don't-er” like it's something he heard falling off his fucking donkey on the way to Damascus. Even dumber than him is his co-worker at the same gym, Adrian (Anthony Mackie), whose pursuit of physical perfection has led him to roids, which have led to his dick and balls shrinking (which leads him to a genuinely kind of sweet romance with nurse Rebel Wilson, who just thinks he's the dreamiest thing on two legs, even if his third leg is a little lacking).

Daniel eventually gets the idea to rip off rich asshole Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), who comes into the gym all the time talking about how rich he is and what assholes everyone else are. Once a new arrival, born-again ex-con Paul (The Rock) arrives at the gym looking for work, Daniel quickly enlists him into his plot against Kershaw. This of course goes totally smoothly, and the movie is over in thirty-five minutes.

Nope. Just kidding. It's a clusterfuck. The story of the movie (which is not to say the actual story, but more on that in a bit) sees the protagonists somehow managing to prevail, to shocking degrees (if temporarily), over their utter idiocy. It sounds like I'm being mean, but holy shit. These guys are fucking stupid. As if that's not enough, Daniel has a mean, condescending streak. Paul is introduced as a frighteningly uptight homphobe. Adrian is the least overtly asshole-ish of the three, but he's still dumb as a box of rocks, and him being a born follower who just gets fucked over no matter what isn't something that elicits empathy so much as it does pity, and a particularly ugly variety. So these guys aren't likable in any traditional sense, or indeed in any other besides their mark being a tacky nouveau riche douchebag who's a bigger asshole than all three of them put together. In fact, his being such a fucking asshole is the only reason they don't immediately get caught and sent to jail forever.

Michael Bay movies are frequently (okay, invariably, if not always entirely) themselves stupid, but Pain & Gain flips that dynamic, instead presenting a reasonably clear-eyed, darkly amused “holy shit, dude, you are not gonna believe this story” tale about stupid people. What keeps the picture from descending into point-at-the-freaks condescension, which is boring as well as being shitty, is the best artistic decision Michael Bay has ever made in his entire career: he plays it totally straight. That choice makes it look, at times, like he's honestly putting forth Daniel, Paul, and Adrian as heroic, incredibly muscular holy fools. But, really, playing it straight just lays bare how astonishingly dumb they are, and how absurdly entitled. Their perverted notion of the American Dream is that one is owed riches simply by desiring them. And for all their talk of “hard work,” the only actual work they do is that profoundly masturbatory pastime, bodybuilding.

How much credit Bay is to be accorded for this unsparing portrait of muscle-headed fuck-ups largely depends, I guess, on the observer. To me, his sense of the place and time the movie takes place is entirely too vivid to be accidental. The mid-90s were a time when a lot of things were in cultural flux. It manifested in some positive ways, like the rise in popularity of independent music and film. It manifested in some neutral ways like a rising cynicism about traditional heroism (some would call that a negative, but I say sacred cows make tasty cheeseburgers, figuratively speaking). And, following this progression to its logical conclusion and the fountainhead from which Pain & Gain springs, the most negative manifestation was in the pervasive cultural sense that everything was fucked and that because everything was fucked, every one was a law unto him/herself. The erosion of stifling conformity is a good thing, but a complete lack of belief in any standard other than that of the self is not. In all levels of culture, navel-gazing bullshit ran rampant. And if there was any point in history where some pumped-up doof would decide, having watched Scarface one too many times, to realize the American Dream by stealing some other guy's shit, with no conception at all that any of this was a bad idea or had consequences, it would be the mid-90s. Considering Michael Bay's organic connection to that time—he rose from its cultural soil, sprouting leaves and a big thick phallic trunk—him directing a movie about the 90s is, on paper, a perfect fit. And he does not disappoint, capturing the era in all its dumbfuck, solipsistic, pop-culture-saturated finery.

Pain & Gain is also notable for being the first instance in Michael Bay's career, where if you squint reeeeeeeeally hard you can see some signs of self-critique. I admit it's a stretch, but the protagonists of this movie, more than any others in Bay's career, even the Bad Boys pictures, are the kind of guys who would probably fucking love Michael Bay movies, if they already existed. The idea of an introspective, contemplative Bay is probably a little utopian, especially considering he's off to jerk off the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and make Transformers 4, but hey, just because it wasn't lasting doesn't mean Pain & Gain wasn't a temporary moment of lucidity.

The greatest support for the idea of Pain & Gain being the work of someone who knew exactly what the fuck he was doing was the diabolically clever touch of totally making most of his “true story” be absolute bullshit. A lot of the cops and lawyers and surviving witnesses and shit are really pissed about the changes Michael Bay and the writers made, which were mostly in the service of making it more like a Michael Bay movie. One of the ones that particularly irked was the Anthony Mackie character actually being a real sick sadistic fuck in real life, but being inevitably kind of sweet and Anthony Mackie-an in the movie. And a bunch of details, including there being a few other dudes involved in the kidnapping scheme, were altered for the purposes of streamlining and making it make sense as a movie story.

But, then, the question is posed: “Why is he basically just fucking lying about it being a true story?” Well, the American Dream itself is a lie, if you're talking about the idea that someone can start from nothing and with hard work alone ascend to the top. If you start out near the top you can ascend to the top. If you start out in the middle you can ascend to near the top. And if you start out at the bottom you can ascend to the middle. But bottom-to-top ascent is bolt-of-lightning, lottery ticket shit. True, a lot of other places any upward mobility at all is impossible, but let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet, America. Michael Bay, all the flags and shit in his movies aside, has a firm grasp on this (this concept, not his dick, but now that you mention it . . .)

He's not given credit for the intellectual nuance necessary to be both “fuck yeah America” and “unless you've already got it you're probably not going to get it,” but that's a hell of a lot more plausible a reading than positing Pain & Gain as a Marxist critique of American greed or some shit. I think his conflicting impulses between being able to get behind the protagonists' goals—the Scarface troika: get the money, get the power, get the woman—and needing to tear them a new one for being entitled dipshits are what give this movie its artistic life. Of course, there being anything at all beyond explosions and car chases going on in a Michael Bay movie immediately leads to it being graded on a curve in this regard, but still.

Pain & Gain is really an astonishing movie, more so because it isn't any revolutionary change for Michael Bay, it's a pure distillation of what he's always been, a guy who makes movies where shit goes fast, and blows up, and the guys have big muscles, and the girls are hot, and everything is like it's filmed on location in a fourteen year old straight cis white dude's id. That's more a buyer beware than an ipso facto bad thing though. As long as one is aware that something is a specific thing rather than mistaking it for a universal, or good, thing, it's possible to appreciate, on an anthropological level, what it is. As someone who had his problems with the kind of macho tough guy heteronormative bullshit Michael Bay movies embody as a platonic ideal, they can be a little ugly for me at times, particularly with the gay panic stuff that pervades (like The Rock beating a guy half to death for coming on to him in P&G for one wince-inducing example). It's important to remember, though, with all things, that depiction is not endorsement. Michael Bay can't be completely let off the hook for the homophobia in his movies (nor the racism or sexism), and I would never dream of telling someone who couldn't get past it that they were wrong. You can call it hair-splitting all you like, but I think what he does is a celebration of testosterone, as opposed to a condemnation of non-testosterone; yes, privilege is unquestioned in his movies, and there's lot's of immature shit in there that a guy in his forties should be kind of ashamed of, but there is more than that. Pain & Gain might go down as his only complete beginning-to-end good movie, but the fact that he had this in him is a sign that Michael Bay's movies, ridiculous as the CG robots and all that fuckery might get, kind of need to be watched with an open eye. There is there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, than whom I can think of no better instrument to conclude a hat-tip to Michael Bay.

"THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT HOPE."

Since Soderbergh has given his permission to have this shown, now, here it is. Watch. It's absolutely essential.

TV BY BOWES

Sure been a long time since dem days....

This week, Indiewire published a series of five essays I wrote about the changes in television, on all levels from programming to the technology we use to watch it, in the last two decades, as part of a promo for the Sundance Channel's new series Rectify, which premieres Monday, April 22nd, at 9pm. They were kind enough to ask for only one rewrite, and it actually made the essay in question better, so I can say as people with lots of money go, this bunch were swell, and thus their show should get watched.

With that out of the way, here are the essays:

1) How ER Was The Last Great Drama In Which The Show Itself Was The Star
2) How The DVR Changed Our Relationship With Television
3) How HBO Paved The Way For Television To Be Taken Seriously
4) How Cable Opened Up The Television Landscape To A Chorus Of New Voices
5) How Television Has Caught Up To Film In Terms Of Quality And Ambition

Enjoy! These were fun to write, and hopefully fun to read as well.

ENGLISH CAN'T CUT IT: A REVIEW OF TERRENCE MALICK'S TO THE WONDER

To The Wonder

There's a tendency, with Terrence Malick films, for writers to spill much ink tearing their hair out and rending their garments about how difficult they are to parse, which is why it was a pleasant surprise indeed that To The Wonder, his latest, was as accessible as it is. Told in Malick's sui generis elusive/allusive style with little dialogue and mostly voiceover but total clarity, To The Wonder follows a couple, played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, through a passionate but troubled affair. Along the way, contrasts between male and female are explored, as is the earthly and divine, with the latter seemingly tangentially explored through a priest (Javier Bardem) struggling with the apparent absence of God, before that thread rejoins the “main” part of the movie.

Talking about a Terrence Malick picture having a story in any conventional sense is a bit off the point, since his movies are more about opening all three eyes to the vastness of the universe than they are abecedarian sequences of events. A portal to infinity is a different beast than something with three acts and an inciting event thirty minutes in and all that quotidian bullshit. With the specific focus on romantic relationships here, the scope is a little less overwhelming than it was in Malick's previous outing, The Tree Of Life, which was—literally—about the entirety of existence of life on Earth. It's necessarily a little less profound, but even that is as pointless a contrast as comparing one cloud to another.

Another thing that becomes difficult is talking about the acting in normal ways. Malick's actors are mostly—but not exclusively—there as photographic subjects. Though, interestingly, for as unlike his pictures are to the typical, “naturalistic” mainstream, the way Malick shoots (that's a great read for when you have a sec; peace, Bilge), stressing spontaneity to be captured rather than staged, allows for actors to be realer, and more present in the given moment, than they would in something with more conventionally shaped scenes with traditional dramatic beats. This is how Affleck ends up being so effective; he has almost no dialogue and is more a presence than a traditional character. His blankness here, letting audiences project their previous experience with his career onto him, ends up rendering him a kind of ur-leading man, generic in a good way, in the interests of universality. If anything he'd have been more effective in his peak B-Fleck days, when he literally made movies called Paycheck, but now in his respectable “I'm a director now” post-Argo period it's like, “Yeah, you fuckers can't call me B-Fleck anymore, I'm an ar-tiste” and that's fine, especially since what makes him effective in To The Wonder is actually his greatest limitation as an actor in most movies, to wit his inscrutable side-of-beef-ness. (Again, the disclaimer I always need to put in when talking about B-Fleck: I like the guy. I swear. It always sounds like I'm running him down, I know, it just comes out that way.)

As for the other central presence (since “character” is, as above, a little reductive, this being a Malick picture), Olga Kurylenko, here's the only way I can describe how amazing she is: when I was pretty young but not too young to know I was in the presence of greatness, I saw (and, of course, heard) Leontyne Price at Carnegie Hall, and she was so awesome opera queens kept randomly blurting stuff out in Italian because English just couldn't cut it. That's Olga Kurylenko in To The Wonder. You could be like “she's a vision” and rhapsodize about the exquisite balance between physical fragility and emotional power in her very presence and talk about how Malick's camera can't help but constantly frame her in the context of the whole wide natural world because it can't bear to consider the world without her in it, but really? English can't cut it. She's that good in this.

As for the movie in general, I'm actually kind of surprised that I liked To The Wonder as much as I did. It's male-gaze-y, sure, but I am male and it's a good movie, so that's okay. The religion thing would be immensely problematic for me because my usual response to art about the struggle to look for God is an eyeroll + jerkoff motion because there's no such thing, but Malick's conception of the divine is just cosmological enough, and just related enough to human beings, and so deeply personal, that I don't really mind at all. The best example in To The Wonder is the way in which he eroticizes the act of communion, framing Olga Kurylenko kneeling before Javier Bardem to receive the wafer in very similar fashion as she kneels before Ben Affleck to undo his trousers.

That kind of linkage between the earthly and the divine keeps happening throughout To The Wonder, conveyed with exquisite, proudly singular filmmaking. Terrence Malick is entirely his own entity, making cinema entirely unlike anyone else's, a pure form unlike anything that came before it, and, as evidenced by Shane Carruth's ambitious but frustrating Upstream Color, hard to emulate (which is not to say Carruth wasn't informed by other sources as well, just saying, this is harder than it looks). Auteurists can sometimes extend their reach beyond their theoretical grasp, or ascribe singularity to the generic when it's something they happen to like, but if all else fails, there will always be Terrence Malick, pointing a camera at something/someone gorgeous, murmuring about God.