At Deadline today, Editor In Chief Nikki Finke has an extensive report on the contract negotiations for The Avengers 2, with a particular focus on Robert Downey Jr.’s quest to earn himself a bigger payday in the wake of Iron Man 3. She writes:

I’ve learned he’s already made $35 million from the actioner, which grossed $680 million worldwide in its first 12 days. He should exceed his biggest payday to date — that $50M from The Avengers which I’ve learned was more like $70M-$80M now that the film is all in. But it’s really Avengers 2 where he’ll clean up big-time — if he wants to reprise the role. He’s hinting to some media it may be time to retire Tony Stark. And saying to other outlets that Marvel better show him more money for Avengers 2. ”I don’t know,” he said on The Daily Show. ”I had a long contract with them and now we’re gonna renegotiate.” (“You are Iron Man! You are!” cheered Jon Stewart.) I’ve learned that Marvel and therefore owner Disney are going to run into big trouble on that sequel because the upfront pay, backend compensation, break-even points and box office bonuses aren’t pinned down yet for several big stars and castmates. This is major hurdle that Walt Disney Co Chaiman/CEO Bob Iger hasn’t even mentioned to Wall Street or shareholders though he’s already been hyping Avengers 2 for more than a year now.

First and foremost Marvel does not have Downey in place yet. ”They need him, and they don’t have him. He’s got a lot of leverage,” one insider tells me.

Whether Marvel needs Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man from a business perspective is one matter. Whether they need him for creative reasons is another one entirely.

Iron Man, released in 2008—a relatively recent date, though one that feels positively ancient given the changing role of superheroes in popular culture in general and Marvel’s dominance of this dominating genre in particular—was the first movie in Marvel’s current exercise in multiple-movie, multi-genre long-form storytelling. That didn’t necessarily mean that the character of Iron Man, inveterate tinkerer and playboy Tony Stark, had to be the cornerstone of that story. But he worked, in part because the funny, self-absorbed Tony allowed Marvel to run a wet rag over the very crowded chalkboard of prior movie superheroes. Rather than a blandly noble guardian in the mold of Superman, or a campy guy in a cape, as Batman was all too frequently on screen before Christopher Nolan got to him, Tony was a reluctant, self-interested hero, someone was more enamored of the badass nature of his trauma-acquired powers than interested in how he could use them for the greater good, who frequently made himself a target and ventured into the fray only when his interests were directly threatened.
Read more

Reporter Stacy Lambe captured this terrific moment from the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala, in which Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence jumps into the frame of cameras taking pictures of Sarah Jessica Parker, who, in keeping with the event’s punk theme, wore a daring, mohawked Philip Treacy headpiece to the Ball. Marion Cotillard is caught in the .Gif laughing, and we laughed with her. It’s the perfect distillation of why Jennifer Lawrence has become a Hollywood sweetheart—and why so much contempt is heaped on actresses like Anne Hathaway and Gwyneth Paltrow:

What’s striking about Lawrence in this image is the gap between her decorum and her self-presentation. She’s being goofy, and to an extent, she’s even making fun of one of her fellow attendees at the Met Ball. She’s displaying an awareness that there’s more than one way to win the Met Ball, and more than one set of observers watching the event. While Parker is posing for the credentialed photographers on the red carpet, Lawrence is disrupting their shots and mugging for us. It’s a savvy act of complicity, an acknowledgement that the event is ridiculous.

But it’s also one that lets Lawrence have it both ways. She’s at the Met Ball, after all, rather than staying home because she’s rather be doing something else, or out of active protest at the dog and pony show. Not only did Lawrence attend, she did so in a Christian Dior dress and a birdcage veil that wasn’t exactly in keeping with the evening’s punk theme. Maybe it’s less conformist for Lawrence to rock Hollywood glamour than to hew to the directions she was given for the night, but it’s not as if she was taking any risks to her image by rocking a ball gown, either. But unlike Anne Hathaway, who puts on a prim-and-proper demeanor to match her Prada (nice girls wear it as well as the Devil), Lawrence is careful to obscure the extent to which she cares what anyone thinks of her in a layer of quotations about going to see New York theater phenomenon Sleep No More and going to Walmart.

Ultimately, Lawrence is playing out an old game in a new medium. She’s a screwball heroine come to life, a woman whose behavior breaks the codes of her class and gender without ever becoming genuinely challenging or disconcerting. Sometimes that characters is annoying, a la Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. And sometimes she’s incisive and cutting, like Barbara Stanwyck’s con woman in The Lady Eve, who, in a famous speech about high-status women who are falling all over themselves to be introduced to her mark, a brewery heir played by Henry Fonda, is effectively serving up the same critique of women who play by the rules that Lawrence’s photobomb did:

These figures aren’t unimportant, and their behavior and their observations can stretch the limits of acceptable female behavior. But the extent to which they play by the rules is just as important as the small ways in which they break them. Stanwyck employs the same tools that the women she makes fun of do to land the exact same man—she’s just better at it, and in her slinky, solar-plexus-baring dress, sexier than the handkerchief-dropping battleaxes who are her competition. Hepburn may be a goofball, but she’s still a rich girl who ends up resolving her romantic quandaries via philanthropy. And it’s possible to appreciate Jennifer Lawrence the same way. Whether she’s performing or not, her performance at the Met Ball and elsewhere is a lot of fun. But that doesn’t make her a genuine rebel against Hollywood norms. And as long as we don’t mistake a screwball performance for a revolution, we might as well enjoy Lawrence for what she is.

Late yesterday, we finally got our first look at the long-awaited movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s novel about the child soldiers trained to fight in a war against alien invaders. The movie looks visually impressive, and there’s no denying the appeal of its cast, which includes Asa Butterfield as potential military genius Ender Wiggin, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, the administrator of the Battle School in which Ender is enrolled, Haileen Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian, one of Ender’s classmates, Viola Davis as Major Gwen Anderson, one of Graff’s colleagues, Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine, and Ben Kingsley as Ender’s teacher Mazer Rackham. But the trailer also leaves out five key elements of Card’s novel—and the decision to exclude them in favor of action sequences gives a sense of what kind of movie Summit Entertainment wants us to think Ender’s Game will be:

1. Peter Wiggin: Ender’s sadistic older brother, Peter was the first of three attempts to breed a perfect general from the Wiggin family. Because Peter was too aggressive, and Valentine too empathetic, Ender’s family was allowed to have him as a third child in defiance of the United States’ population laws. Peter viciously bullied Ender while the two of them were growing up, and after went to Battle School, enlisted Valentine in a scheme to gain political power through an early form of blogging. He’s a painful illustration of the price of greatness, and one of the key people through whom Ender’s Game explores international politics in the wake of alien attacks.

2. The Fantasy Game: We see the children in Battle School playing with powerful simulations on computers, but we don’t get a glimpse of one of the novel’s most interesting devices: a video game that’s personally tailored to each student’s experience, and that Battle School uses to monitor their mental health.

3. Alai and Bean: Two of Ender’s best friends at Battle School are Alai, a talented Muslim student, and Bean, a younger boy who comes under Ender’s command as he rises through the ranks of students. Alai, who begins as Ender’s equal, is a reminder of how the drive for excellence can alienate even your closest friends. And Bean is an illustration of how to bring out the excellence in someone else.

4. Bernard: And just as we’re missing Ender’s friends, the trailer doesn’t show us Ender’s greatest human enemy at Battle School, a French student named Bernard. There’s no question that the advertising for Ender’s Game has to outline the main conflict between humans and the Buggers, the pejorative name for the alien invaders. But it’s losing a lot of Card’s point if the movie forgets that the conflicts between humans are just as important as space opera.

5. The Net: Much of Ender’s Game is set at Battle School, but the story back on Earth, where Peter and Valentine become powerful political commentators on the Net, Card’s version of the Internet, is equally important. The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the countries aligned under the Warsaw Pact has an enormous influence on Battle School’s commanders and the way they push Ender and pace his training. And Peter and Valentine’s very different feelings about the influence they accrue offers an important contrast to Ender’s command of his troops far away in space.

Now, I assume most of these elements will appear in the finished film that we’re going to get in November. Peter, Alai, Bean, and Bernard all are in the cast list. Major Anderson is the character who oversees the Fantasy Game. But given that much of the power of Ender’s Game comes from the fact that the war on the Buggers takes a surprising turn, and the question of whether humanity wins or loses it becomes much less important than issues of psychology and ethics. I understand why Summit feels more confident selling audiences who aren’t familiar with Card’s work on a major space war than on a meditation on empathy. But I hope that the film itself stays true to the best, most penetrating aspects of Card’s work, and the trailers are as much of a bait and switch as the one Ender’s subjected to throughout the novel.

Anyone who feels like there’s nothing new at the box office week after week will be dismayed to read this profile of Vinny Bruzzese, a script consultant and former statistics professor, who’s built a business telling Hollywood studios and writers what’s commercially viable—or at least, what past experience suggests would be commercially viable.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that the movie business is, in fact, precisely that. But it’s also worth asking whether every single movie needs to be a massive success. And even in the context of the business, we can have a conversation whether the movie business, which claims a special status based on its artistic achievements and cultural capital, can balance out the massive profits of its biggest hits with commitments to movies that push the boundaries of the medium, and explore ideas and narrative forms that are important precisely because they aren’t easy to digest, or because they don’t already have massive support. Bruzzese can help with the commercial half of the equation, but if the movie business wants to be seen as something other than a widgets factory, it would be nice if some sort of counterweight emerged to help studios and distributors decide which risks they can afford to take, too.

Beyond the question of whether this by-the-numbers approach to making decisions about which films to greenlight is bad for movies themselves, driving them towards extreme homogeneity, is whether it could lead studios to miss profitable and creatively strong outliers, and how far its categories are actually useful. “Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script,” the story reports. Except for The Big Lebowski, of course, which made $46 million worldwide against a budget of $15 million, and has had an exceptionally long shelf-life as a cult hit and the basis of a dandy little merchandising empire. “‘A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,’ one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added,” except how do you categorize them? Is Tony Stark, the industrialist-turned-superhero who is the main character of Iron Man 3, which opened last weekend to $175.3 million at the domestic box office, a cursed superhero, given the shrapnel in his chest the forced him to develop his super suit? Or is he a guardian, despite his generalized selfishness and disdain for the kind of do-gooderism embodied by Captain America (a subject Linda Holmes discusses at length in this excellent essay about Tony’s arc)?

And analyzing what’s been successful in the past doesn’t predict when audiences will suddenly tire of something they liked in the past, as they did with the Scary Movie parodies, turning what had been a profit center into a box office cliff. Nor can it predict what kinds of movies will succeed precisely because they give something new and exciting to audiences. Bruzzese’s data-crunching might be able to tell studios how to replicate a new phenomenon when it emerges. But if he discourages studios from taking chances in favor of continuing to trod well-worn paths, the hot new thing might emerge at all. And that’s bad for Hollywood, bad for audiences—and ultimately bad for Bruzzese. If studios are going to keep doing the same things over and over again, at some point, they, and the writers who work for them, will know Bruzzese’s playbook cold, and they won’t need him any more. But trying to figure out how to vary successful themes could give Bruzzese more numbers to crunch, writers more leeway to play, and audiences franchises and tropes that grow over time, rather than staying paralyzed by past successes.

This post discusses plot points from Iron Man 3 in extensive detail.

“A famous man once said we all create our own demons,” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) says at the beginning of Iron Man 3. The backlash theory of terrorist attacks on the United States and its interests has become somewhat popular in culture in recent years, most notably in Showtime’s drama Homeland, in which the death of a child in a drone strike inspires an American prisoner of war to become a suicide bomber. But Iron Man‘s extensive critique of the war on terror—a major subject of the film, along with eighties movie tropes, domestic harmony, and fan culture—takes a different and more radical tack, suggesting that the threat of violence by terrorist actors may be real, but the War on Terror is an invention that both terrorists and terrorized participate in.

Iron Man 3 begins in 1999, on a New Year’s Eve where Tony Stark’s conduct has two fatal consequences. First, he rejects a pitch from Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a brilliant but hopeless nerd whose use of a cane, unkempt self-presentation, and transparent eagerness, offend Tony’s sense of cool. “She’ll take both,” Tony tells Killian, who offers up his business cards to Tony and to Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a biologist who Tony is taking back to her room for the evening. “One to throw away, and one not to call.” In a bit of high school cruelty, Tony tells Killian he’ll meet him on the roof of the hotel, and then maroons him there, making an enemy. Killian will return fourteen years later with suits and big ideas, and the intent to go after, at least, Tony’s now-girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Second, he talks science with Maya, who is pioneering a radical new technology that allows plants to regenerate themselves, but that is encountering some problems, and then sleeps with her. The first is a rather more intimate act then the second, especially after Tony leaves Maya with part, but not all, of a solution to the flaw in her project, and then becomes the person who doesn’t call.

Both of them reappear in Tony’s life fourteen years later for reasons that appear to be unrelated to larger events. After Loki’s attack on New York, Tony is personally traumatized. But the United States is distracted by what seems like it ought to be considered a comparatively minor threat: the appearance of a human terrorist who calls himself the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), and likes to deliver pretentious lectures through hacked television signals and internet connections before bombing targets like a military church. There’s a general sense of insecurity. “The human element of human resources is our greatest point of vulnerability,” Tony’s former driver Happy (Jon Favreau), now running security at Stark Industries, tells Pepper. “We should start phasing it out immediately.” And the United States’ primary response has been the aggressive deployment of Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who in his own Tony-designed suit, is jetting around the world like the fantasy of how a drone should work, preventing American troops from harm, but still providing human judgement in targeting and decisions to fire.
Read more

It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.

In an interesting nod to Hollywood’s influence, tech titan Peter Thiel has suggested that his industry is being hurt hurt by its portrayal in Hollywood as a source of advancements with post-apocalyptic consequences:

Thiel, who made billions as a co-founder of PayPal and as an early investor in Facebook, told a standing-room only audience Monday that the high-tech industry is in “deceleration” due in no small part to movies like Avatar and The Matrix that make technological innovation seem “destructive and dysfunctional.”

Hollywood keeps making movies where “technology is going to kill you,” Thiel complained at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. He said the “Star Trek retread movies” are an exception. Thiel said other factors — like government regulation and a “risk-averse” business culture — also are hampering the tech industry, but it will be a “very good sign” when Hollywood stops making movies about scary new technologies.

I think this calculation is a bit off. Hollywood tends to portray technology in three broad categories: as a source of miracles and certainty in day-to-day life, as an industry that has large concentrations of smart, if socially awkward, people, and as a force that operates independent of its creators. Those first two categories are almost uniformly positive. And I think that the real damage would be done if science fiction suggested clearer connections between the current state of science and the possibility of future developments gone terribly wrong.

Technology really is everywhere in pop culture depictions of contemporary life, and almost uniformly portrayed as a source of good or an extremely useful tool. DNA matching is presented as so reliable on televised crime shows that it affects how juries view evidence, and how lawyers decide their cases. And it’s hardly the only technological miracle to make regular appearances on crime shows. Bones, a procedural I enjoy quite a bit, features everything from the Angelator, a computer simulation tool that can recreate all sorts of crime scenarios, crack codes, match faces, and pour through data, to the inventive experiments of Jack Hodgins who’s presented as a genius at analyzing particles and organic materials. And that’s just in the matter of biological science. Pop culture has adopted rapidly from presenting computers in and of themselves as magical portals—an early Veronica Mars episode treats the Internet Movie Database as if it’s something of a miracle—to treating them as tools that ordinary people can achieve wonders with, whether they’re empowered by blogging or tweeting (or sleuthing through social media), or hacking publications, databases, or processes, be it for good or evil. These are all tools that can be used for any number of ends, be they cruel or kind, but the capacities of technology are firmly under the control of the human beings who employ them, rather than independent entities with wills of their own.
Read more

Jason Collins may be the first man to come out of the closet not just to people in his immediate circle, but to the country as a whole, while still actively pursuing a professional career in Major League Sports, but he wasn’t the first man out in baseball. That was Glenn Burke, who in the seventies was out to both Dodgers management and his teammates, and who came out nationally after his retirement. And apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis and her production company have been trying to get an adaptation of Burke’s autobiography into production, and are hoping the momentum of Collins’ announcement might help them make it happen. As Deadline summarizes the story:

Drafted by the Dodgers and touted as a potential star, Burke got off to a flying start when he became the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series. Burke also took credit for inventing the high-five in 1977. Waiting on-deck at Dodger Stadium, he was first to congratulate teammate Dusty Baker with that up-high slap, after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the season. While his adversity was nothing compared to what Dodger predecessor Jackie Robinson faced when he broke baseball’s color barrier, Burke’s decision to come out of the closet probably hastened his demise. In his autobiography, Burke wrote about how Dodgers GM Al Campanis offered to pay for a pricey honeymoon if Burke would get married in a Rock Hudson-like charade, but the ballplayer wasn’t going along with the sham. Campanis later was fired for appearing on Nightline and making outlandish racist remarks. Burke’s stats show he did not live up to the potential expected of him, but he seemed at peace with his decision to not hide his off the diamond life. “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it,” he said. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died a year later at age 42.

One of the most important things movies can do is get under-acknowledged history to a mass audience. Milk, for example, mattered so much precisely because it introduced a mass audience to the idea that the gay rights movement was, in fact, a long-standing effort, and one that involved heroes and martyrs who fit into conventional narratives about sacrifices for social progress. A biopic of Burke could similarly help combat the idea that sports were a previously heterosexual zone that was somehow colonized by gay people, reminding mass audiences that there have always been gay athletes, even if they didn’t choose to share that fact with fans, or if fans weren’t astute enough to pick up on it.

And I’m also excited about the possibilities of a Burke biopic precisely because the audience would come to it with few assumptions and expectations. One of the things that I found deadening about 42, and what ultimately would have sucked the air out of any Jackie Robinson biopic was how familiar everyone was with the story. It’s mandatory to have set-pieces like Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson or Leo Durocher’s dressing-down of the Dodgers who didn’t want to play with a black man, no matter how well or how human each of those moments has the potential to be. But with a story about Burke, nothing will be mandatory. Everything will be new. And as a result, the movie can be more human and relaxed, less stiffly conscious of history, something that serves good art, as well as humane arguments for equality.

Over at NPR, Sami Yenigun has a story that points out while the debate over whether popular culture inspires real-world violent actions is far from settled, there is one concrete link between the entertainment industry and the gun industry: product placement in films and licensing of gun images in video games:

Last year, Call of Duty earned half a billion dollars in a day. That same game features the long barrel and angled cartridge of a .50-caliber sniper rifle that’s a virtual copy of a real Barrett gun. According to Vejay Lalla, a lawyer who works with clients to clear brands in video games, that’s very much intentional. “Game developers essentially want to make sure that games are as realistic as possible,” he says.

So if the makers of Madden NFL want to use, say, the New England Patriots in their video game, they have to strike a deal with the NFL; and if the makers of Need For Speed want a bright orange Camaro in their game, they’re going to have to talk to Chevrolet.

Lalla hasn’t personally brokered any deals between gun companies and video game companies, but he says product placement for guns works the same way. Video game makers use realistic, brand-name weapons, and then depending on how the brand is portrayed, they decide whether to license the name. “If the gun is instrumental in the game or visible or used often, then typically there is a clearance process involved,” Lalla says

Obviously, the use of guns in video games, movies, and television, and the use of other implements of mayhem, including fists, have their own distinct appeal. Hand-to-hand fighting lets a character in film or television demonstrate their toughness in myriad ways, from their ability to take a punch to their willingness to inflict damage on someone else in a direct way—The Americans has done an excellent job of this with Elizabeth Jennings character, whether she’s fighting back against an attacker in training or beating Claudia, her handler, and an older woman, in retaliation for Claudia ordering Elizabeth and her husband interrogated. Similarly, fighting games let players step into someone else’s body and take on someone else’s capacities. And fist fights can be a way of making entertainment violence more visceral and more personal, closing the physical gap between combatants, or between assailant and victim. Or it can abstract, showing characters who have the capacity to take inhuman amounts of damage and keep going. But whatever they do, they can’t really burnish the image of or encourage the purchase of a particular product. We all have fists already.

If the entertainment industry wants to distance itself from the gun industry and from real-world violence, there are a couple of things they could do that would improve their range of storytelling as well as cleaning up their consciences. They could stop licensing images of specific weapons and, in products that aren’t live action, design their own weapons. Directors could change the way they shoot weapons as aesthetic objects. Writers and directors could vary the ways that guns are used and cause harm, including incidents where they’re brandished but not discharged, their use in suicides, and accidental gun deaths, rather than portraying them as objects that are only associated with heroic competence. The Good Wife‘s first-season episode “Bad,” for example, did a nice job of exploring a range of feelings about gun possession ranging from Kalinda’s ease to Diane’s discomfort—the episode didn’t deny that guns can be used effectively in self-defense, but it acknowledged that Diane wasn’t comfortable using a gun that way and that she had a perfect right to stay as far away from guns as she wanted to. And Lord of War, one of the more underrated elements of Nicolas Cage’s ouvre, did an extremely effective job of parsing both our fascination with guns and our revulsion with what they can actually do to human bodies and human beings. Like any story-telling element, guns can get monotonous if they’re used the same way every time. Acknowledging their power and mixing up their use could be a path to creative revitalization, and to giving Hollywood a stronger position than pulling episodes of television shows in the wake of disaster does.

Pain and Gain, the action-black comedy hybrid about a team of Miami bodybuilders on a violent crime spree that’s baed on a true early 1990s case that opens this weekend, is an impressive chronicle of the persuasive power of American dumbness. That it’s directed by Michael Bay, a man who’s amassed a considerable fortune by purveying the kind of dumbness at which he now takes cockeyed aim does nothing to diminish the considerable, sick charms of the movie. In between the movie’s engagement with male body image and entitlement, its portrayal of the way the American dream can deform like candle wax, crackerjack performances by Mark Wahlberg, Dwanye Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shaloub, and Rebel Wilson, and the rather provocative question of Bay’s level of self-awareness, Pain and Gain may be the smartest dumb movie of the summer.

The story follows three Miami-based bodybuilders, Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who work together as trainers at Sun Gym, and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-convict who’s chosen Miami, of all places, to try to maintain his sobriety. They turn to crime when Lugo, who’s obsessed with the results of self-improvement if not precisely conversant with the means of achieving it legitimately—he served time on an investment scam—decides that one of his clients, a businessman named Victor Kershaw (Shaloub) , is living the life that ought to be Lugo’s own. “I didn’t hate him. I just thought it would be cool to see France,” Danny explains to us initially. But his resentments harden into a kind of entitlement, one based in part on the disparity between the amount of time he spends working on his body and the time Kershaw devotes to his own physique. “We’re supermen,” Danny tells Adrian. “Don’t you think we deserve better? Because I do.” After recruiting Paul to their cause, the three men kidnap Victor, lock him up in his own sex toy distributorship, and proceed to torture him until he signs their assets over to them. But while the movie’s plot is a crime story, its themes are self-delusion, incredulity, and their related consequences.

Everyone in Pain and Gain is obsessed with the movies, and one of the film’s running jokes is the way people take the wrong lessons away from their favorite movies. “Michael Corleone didn’t become the Godfather by following rules,” Daniel insists, missing the point that Daniel’s transformation into the Godfather is a tragedy that upsets generations of planning, rather than his actual goal. “He did it by keeping a gun behind the toilet and knowing what he wanted.” “I knew the only place a woman like me could be appreciated in the United States,” says Sorina (Bar Paly), a stripper at the club where the gang likes to hang out. “I saw Pretty Woman.” But her assessment of that movie is that Julia Roberts got a shopping trip by showing Richard Gere her vagina, rather than that she got her way out of poverty and sex work by being appealing and emotionally open. Sorina gets her shopping spree, in part because she doesn’t know to want anything else. And they collapse the distinction between the movies and reality on a regular basis. When Danny wants to reassure Paul that his ideas for kidnapping and extortion are viable, he tells the more naive man “I watched a lotta movies, Paul. I know what I’m doing.” Pain and Gain, to be clear, serves up many of the same vulgar pleasures that have lead its characters astray, from gorgeous, unclothed women, to the sick joke of a small dog chomping down on a dismembered toe, but in a movie that’s partially about about the power of such provocations, it’s hard to accuse Bay of hypocrisy—he’s telling us what works, and challenging us to distance ourselves from our enjoyments.
Read more