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Tai Chi is a martial art form, but it’s not primarily about ass-kicking. It’s a highly disciplined spiritual rite or practice that’s about seeking, nurturing and serenity. Obviously this trailer for Keanu Reeves‘ Man of Tai Chi is about trying to deliver more Neo thrills. The cries and whoofs as feet and hands go thudding into bodies…later.

I’m finally seeing Michael Bay‘s Pain & Gain (Paramount, 4.26) on Monday night. Pain is Bay’s first modestly-scaled (costing a relatively frugal $26 million), character-driven film ever — a “gimmee” that ansty Paramount execs let him do because he’s made them so much money with the Transformers films. Half of me wants to like Pain & Gain going in because it seems to signify that Bay is at least trying to deliver a little more nutritional value. On some level he’s also trying to atone for his sins.

In today’s Miami Herald, in fact, Bay has literally apologized to critic Rene Rodriguez for the frame-fucked, machine-gun cutting of Armageddon. Rodriguez wrote the interview after speaking to Bay during a recent Miami Beach press junket.

“I will apologize for Armageddon,” says Bay, “because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.”

Rodriguez notes that Pain & Gain is “atypical” for the hyperkinetically-inclined Bay in that he “actually holds on shots and characters faces for longer than two seconds, giving you time to take them in.”

“People have always given me a hard time on my editing,” Bay admits. “But if if you could do a graph on my movies you would see how my editing has slowed down over the years. Bad Boys was my first movie, and we cut that quite fast. Back then it was very new for action. Now you see a lot of that imitated. Call it what you will. Yes, critics have given me shit about it. But when you watch the Bourne Identity movies, they are cut way faster.”

Bay is mainly referring, I think, is the second Bourne film (or the first one that Paul Greengrass directed)– the cutting in that one was absurd. When I first saw it at the WGA theatre a woman threw up.

Four years ago I wrote a piece called “Bay of Lost Hope.” It opens as follows:

“There was a movie-theatre moment eight years ago when I thought Michael Bay might one day grow into a semi-mature film artist. Maybe. To my delight and surprise the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor began with Hans Zimmer‘s music playing for nine beautiful seconds over a black screen — a semi-overture, I thought at first. But the black gave way to a shot of World War I-era biplanes cruising over cornfields during magic hour — a middle-American nostalgia scene. But that black-screen opener was still…well, mildly impressive.

“I asked Bay about the blackness at a press conference the next day. He talked about how he had to fight hard to begin the film this way, especially since it meant not starting this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film with the traditional highway-tree-lightning Bruckheimer logo.

“It wasn’t much of an artistic call on Bay’s part but it was at least something, I felt. I came away from Pearl Harbor half-convinced that if Bay ever wanted wanted to move beyond shallow whambam blockbuster movies that he had the potential to do so.”

I was inspired to write this after reading Kim Morgan‘s recent review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She also suspects that Bay has more in his quiver than he’s commonly given credit for.”

Exhibitors at Cinemacon were down on Pain & Gain and maybe there are reasons for that. I’ll figure it out soon enough.

“If you watch Pain & Gain with an open mind,” Rodriguez comments, “you will see Bay is stretching, regardless of whether you like the movie.

“Of course, he’s making Transformers 4 next, so we’ll be back to the same-old. But I really liked the vibe of P & G. It is so Miami (which I know means nothing to people who don’t live here, but still). And they stayed true to the real story, with only a few exceptions. It’s an unpleasant, pitch-black comedy but it fucking works…as long as the viewer isn’t all PC-sensitive.”

When I first saw Thom Andersen‘s L.A. Plays Itself at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival (or was it 2005?), I decided that one day I’d see this fascinating cultural-geographical movie-fantasia again with a hip L.A. audience. Here it is six or seven years later with Andersen’s doc playing the American Cinematheque tonight. I have to go. The big screen makes all the difference.

From five or six years ago: “Daniel Plainview (a.k.a., Matthew Wilder) has criticized documentarian Thom Andersen as an ‘inexplicably revered megasnob.’ He also raps him for having said that Point Blank “was liked only by people who hate L.A.” Wilder is alluding to a quote from Andersen’s L.A. Plays Itself, but that’s not the phrasing. The exact line is ‘people who hate L.A. love Point Blank.'”

Reactions? A fairly cool concept but no girlie action unless…well, I guess Ryan Reynolds could conceivably find himself a dead girlfriend. A little too Men in Black-y? Bridges overdoing the shitkicker accent?

Like almost all Bluray critic-columnists, DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze likes or respects almost everything he sees, and if he’s less enthused about this or that Bluray he’ll always phrase his concerns with the utmost tact and delicacy. He wants those freebies to keep arriving in his mailbox. On top of which Tooze is a notorious grain-worshipper. He actually gets off on that covered-in-digital-mosquitoes effect. The swarmier, the better.

All to say that Toooze’s rave review of the new Champion Bluray (Olive Films, 4.23) has to be taken with a grain of salt.

“What a huge improvement!,” Tooze declares. “Everything is superior about the new Olive Films 1080P transfer. It shows textured grain, there is a lot more information in the frame, contrast is significantly more layered and [the] detail naturally rises, [and] quite dramatically. My words are less-impacting than simply looking at the screen captures below. The sound is lossless mono and also improved — notable in Dimitri Tiomkin‘s powerful score. As typical with Olive, there are no extras. We still give this Blu-ray a BIG thumbs up!!”

I was reminded during the Shane aspect-ratio brouhaha that the Bluray websites are mostly if not entirely about servicing Bluray distributors and averting their eyes from controversy at all costs. (Home Theatre Forum and Bluray.com are the occasional exceptions-to-the-rule.) The Shane thing was a fairly major story, but if you had been only reading DVD Beaver, Digital Bits, High-Def Digest and DVD Talk you wouldn’t have known it was even happening. The people who run these sites are avid Movie Catholics but they have next to no balls when it’s time to man up. They’re basically in business to get along.

I’m looking for a PDF of a ’70s National Lampoon article about the dumb, vulgar and unfunny dirty jokes that kids share when they’re nine or ten or eleven. You can find this crap all over the net but the NatLamp piece re-told these jokes with just the right tone. You know the kind of material I mean. A mother standing on the front stoop and calling for her son to come home — “Johnny Fuckerfaster! Johnny Fuckerfaster!” And one I remember from when I was eight: Q: “What did the kitchen cupboard say to the toilet?” A: “I’ve seen more cans than you have.” The worse, the better.

There are few things more numbing than reports about the latest blockbuster (in this instance Oblivion) earning serious coin on its opening weekend. Oblivion is a bothersome but moderately decent time-killer with a fine performance from Tom Cruise, and (as I said earlier) is less annoying than Prometheus. But reporting that X millions of Eloi heard the sirens and were persuaded to walk into the Morlock caves and fork over whatever amounts of money…it doesn’t matter.

Okay, it matters to those who are profiting — director-writer Joseph Kosinki, Cruise, the producers, Universal Studios, exhibitors, popcorn industry. But what’s in it for me? I wasn’t in pain when I saw it, and now I’ve already begun to forget it. I won’t buy the Bluray, I can tell you that.

What matters, as always, is what happen attendance-wise during the coming week and especially next weekend, but that’s my standard Saturday mantra.

I like this 4.19 N.Y. Times Magazine riff about Cruise from Taffy Brodesser-Akner:

“How odd that our shiniest celebrity, the man whose image once flashed most easily into our heads when we thought of the words ‘movie star,’ a man who, throughout his career, has grappled with all sorts of questions of privacy and secrecy and image control and damage control, has somehow emerged at this late date as the movie world’s most unlikely symbol of old-fashioned authenticity.”

A 4.19.13 quote from George Stevens, Jr. has been posted on Bob Furmanek’s 3D Film Archive site. It’s part of an intro to a definitive Shane aspect-ratio piece that will be posted soon. Here it is: “Dad’s definite preference was to have his films screened the way he shot them and framed them. He simply accepted the tradeoff to have a bigger screen in the competitive release climate in 1953.”

And yet on 3.15 Stevens, Jr. wrote me the following in an email about the forthcoming Shane Bluray, which Stevens Jr. had helped prepare: “Given the choice of having a 1:37 version placed in the center of a horizontal television screen with bars on each side, or a carefully configured 1:66 to 1 version that filled the screen, I am confident George Stevens would subscribe to the latter.”

The Discovery Channel’s All the President’s Men Revisited, airing on Sunday, is “a look at the [Watergate] scandal that toppled Richard M. Nixon and made Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein famous,” writes N.Y. Times columnist-critic Alessandra Stanley. “But the documentary gives almost as much credit to Mr. Redford for making a movie about Watergate as it does to The Washington Post for sticking with the story.

“That’s probably because Mr. Redford, who not only played Mr. Woodward in the film but also bought the rights to the Woodward-Bernstein book ‘All The President’s Men’ and was instrumental in getting the film made, is the narrator and executive producer of this documentary. And in his telling, the true story and the movie version are so closely linked that when Dustin Hoffman, who played Mr. Bernstein, says, ‘And Bob did something that was brilliant,’ he means Bob Redford, not Bob Woodward.

“All the President’s Men Revisited is nonetheless well worth a look, less because it is so well made than because the subject is still so captivating.”

5:43 pm Pacific Update: “It’s over,” an MSNBC source is saying. “The suspect [19 year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev] is in custody and alive. A medic has been called for.” Another source confirms same.

Bloody “Johhkar” Tsarnaev after being apprehended by law enforcement officials.

4:25 pm Pacific: News reports are indicating that the second Boston Marathon bomber, 19 year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, may have possibly been hit in a hail of gunfire and is possibly bleeding to death in the back of a boat in somebody’s backyard in Watertown.

I’ve just seen an amateur video of a very recent shooting in Watertown, and the gunfire (presumably from the police) was pretty intense. 40, 50 rounds at least. It went on for ten or twelve seconds. The finale of The Wild Bunch, the bank robbery sequence in Heat.

5:20 pm Update: The boat is on fire?

How long can it take to confirm yea or nay? Send shooters into the area, surround the guy, bring it to a close. The guy was reportedly shot and bleeding ( a woman found a blood trail in her back yard) and was probably hiding in the boat all day.

I’m not advocating this for obvious reasons, but in my heart of hearts I’d like to see the action covered via three or four helmet-cams. I know this sounds intemperate, but on a certain level this is a televised event (half Cops, half Hunger Games) with an audience that wants some level of satisfaction. Safety and security for lawmen and bystanders is paramount, of course, but I’m a little bit used to things happening in a Michael Mann sort of way and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling impatient earlier today as the hours dragged on. How many hundreds of guys on the side of the law vs. one 19 year-old kid who may or may not have an IED strapped to his chest?

“Johh-kar”‘s accomplice in the Boston Marathon bombing, older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed last night by cops.

Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt “is a small-town drama about an innocent divorced man (Mads Mikkelsen) accused of child molestation, and how all his asshole ‘friends’ very quickly fall away from him,” I wrote on 5.20.12 from the Cannes Film Festival. “And then, after torrents of ugliness, how everyone does a gradual turnaround. And how turn-the-other-cheek Mikkelsen accepts this reversal.

“The deplorable behavior and rank stupidity seem somewhat credible on one level, but on another level appallingly false. ‘Why does this movie feel so oppressively full of shit?,’ I kept asking myself. Forget the Crucible-resembling element, and the old, old story about small-town panic leading to the near-ruination of a man’s life. The bottom line is that this isn’t a satisfying story. Stupidity reigns, evil walks, justice isn’t served and a bullet slams into a tree at the very end. Zinngg!

“Would best friends and longtime drinking and hunting buddies really turn on an old friend like that, even when law officials have found a significant flaw in his accusers’ stories?

“Would a five-year-old create a ferocious fantasy because she feels faintly slighted when a certain adult neighbor tells her that kisses on the lips are only for parents and grandparents?

“Are parents so rock stupid as to completely discount this five-year-old when she recants said fantasy more than once?

“Would small-towners really descend to the level of terrified blind steers in a situation like this?

“Maybe all this has happened (perhaps even countless times) but I didn’t buy it, not for a second. Not as Vinterberg showed it to me. The b.s. meter was going off constantly….’Beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep-beepity-beep-beep-beeeeeep!”

I felt one of the worst pain sensations of my life during the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. I had a small bottle of eyedrops and a small bottle of intense cinnamon mouthwash in my jacket pocket, and in a moment of haste and distraction I grabbed the mouthwash bottle, leaned back and squeezed the liquid into my right eye. It felt like hydrochloric acid melting my eyeball and leaking into my brain. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t focus on how to find water to splash into my eye.