Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both wonderfully talented comedic actresses in their own right (Fey best known for 30 Rock, Poehler for Parks and Recreation), first worked together on Saturday Night Live and more recently they have become known as a cheeky double act presenting awards ceremonies.
Michael Bay’s fleet-footed, queasy crime-comedy stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie but the less you know, the more you might like it. This is because the more you know, the less it seems an acceptable source of entertainment. Not that Hollywood and movies in general have any qualms about morality, ethical behaviour or what constitutes "entertainment": we shouldn’t laugh at the cry of “She’s in the attic!” when discussing an actress’s bad performance as Ann Frank, but, unfortunately, we do. Terrible stories often grip us the most.
So, let’s get the true horror out of the way first. Pain & Gain is based on a series of articles written by Pete Collins and published in Miami New Times in 1999. (In 2013, Collins wisely timed the publication of his book on the case around the film’s release date.) He tells of a gruesome crime – torture, kidnapping and murder – by some bodybuilders at a particular gym in Florida. The real story is pretty horrible. Look it up if you must.
Shalhoub is completely compelling if not totally heartbreaking
However, the film itself is a bright, breezy, cartoon-like take on cruel and stupid things people do to get rich. Three hapless bags of muscle (Wahlberg, Johnson and Mackie) want more out of life. Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) is whipped into an idiot’s frenzy by the great lifestyle enjoyed by Victor Kershaw (Tony Shaloub, pictured below), one of his new personal training clients. So, naturally, Lugo decides to extort all of Kershaw’s wealth. Accomplices are Adrian Doorbal (Mackie) a 'roids-impotent bodybuilder and Paul Doyle (Johnson), an iron-pumping Christian ex-addict ex-con who reluctantly becomes part of the threesome after he beats up a priest.
Botched tries at kidnapping Kershaw culminate in a horrendous attempt to kill him. He survives, but having already signed his money over to the criminals. As the police don't believe him, he engages Ed Du Bois III (Ed Harris) for justice. Meanwhile, the trio have blown all their money and decide to do this whole thing all over again to a phone sex magnet and his wife… You can see where this is headed, only now there’s dismemberment, accidental death and more. This story is so bizarre it almost seems normal because anything goes in crime comedies. Besides, we know all the actors.
Pain & Gain is funny. The cast is wonderful. Shalhoub’s Kershaw is completely compelling if not totally heartbreaking. Johnson is absolutely adorable as the chunky, tried-his-best-but-not-quite overgrown manchild. Mackie is tremendous too, with a nervy, crazy energy, lopsided logic and comedy chops we haven’t seen before. Supporting cast includes Ken Jeong and the omnipresent Rebel Wilson. Bay's pace is so dizzying it's almost nauseating: will this bizarro-world story ever end? Pain & Gain is painful, mad and sad - an enjoyable yet guilty pleasure.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Pain & Gain
Oddly, there is quite a cinematic sub-genre starring killer whales. The killer’s first (and worst) lead role was opposite a hammy Richard Harris in Orca, a shameless attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to ape the success of Jaws. Then came Free Willy, which in three icky instalments repositioned killers as essentially cuddly. That image took a dent in Rust & Bone after Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer spent much of the film without any legs courtesy of a captive orca.
As a parable on the dissolution of the American Dream, the story of self-made billionaire David Siegel is almost too good to be true. Much like another recent documentary – Bart Layton’s spellbinding The Imposter – Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles, broadcast last night in BBC Four's Storyville strand, lays out the kind of story that could only be told by a documentarian, because coming from a screenwriter it would sound both too neat and too far-fetched.
J + K = zzzzzzz in this snooze-inducing latest instalment of the once-fun Men in Black franchise, which finds Tommy Lee Jones looking as pained as Will Smith does fretful, and who can blame them? Long in the making but limited in terms of rewards, Barry Sonnenfeld's film doesn't display much conviction for the story it wants to tell (and certainly has no reason to go the all-too-ubiquitous 3D route).
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time.
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) may be the great idealiser of American smalltown life, but many of his paintings took their cues from Dickens, and they thus have an English tang. None more so than Merrie Christmas (pictured below), which Rockwell painted for the cover of 7 December 1929 edition of the Saturday Evening Post: Tony Weller, the philosophising coachman father of Mr Pickwick’s manservant Sam, is shown cracking his whip with one hand and doffing his holly-spiked hat with the other.
