Some people hate Micheal Bay, and I just don’t understand that. Some of these folks I know personally, but most of ‘em are hanging out on the message boards for sites like this.* 

Fuck you Michael Bay.

Damn you Michael Bay.

Michael Bay raped my childhood.

Maybe not so much the last one, but heck, I love the man’s work and even I thought Transformers was mostly a waste of my 16 dollars. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, where a movie pretty much has to put you over the moon to be worth the cost of a ticket (and parking, and concessions, and gas/Metro).

I don’t love Bay for his taste in screenwriters, and I’m sure that there are people who would agree with me when I say that many of his films would’ve been improved by the lack of a script. Also, can we not talk about The Birds remake? Thanks.

First and foremost the man is a fantastic director. No one makes movies like he does. Each one is a spectacle of the highest caliber. These aren’t just movies – they’re fast and sleek and expensive and thrilling experiences at their best. At their worst, they’re schmaltzy Hallmark cards or macho testosterone-fests (like McTiernen on an off-day). He’s our lowbrow David Lean, our D.W. Griffith of disposable pop culture.

Still, Bay puts his cojones on the table with every helicopter, concept car, or multimillion-dollar mansion he blows to smithereens, and I think it’s safe to say that he’s doing a big chunk of it for our enjoyment. Unfortunately, much of the online fan community seems to just want to put their cojones in his mouth.

In a series of clips from the summer movie edition of AMC’s interview show Shootout, Bay opens his mouth and something comes out – anecdotes that reveal a bit of the thoughtful director that sometimes gets overshadowed by the killer meteors, huge explosions, fast cars, sexy women and giant pissing robots of his movies. See? What’s not to love?

 
Here’s one to get you started. The rest (along with interviews with fanboy favorite Brett Ratner and some guy named Jon Favreau ) can be found at AMC’s Shootout site.

* perhaps not specifically this one.

If you need any more proof that I’m one of the main cinematic tastemakers of the 21st century, I draw your attention to the audience awards at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival. Three films that I have been championing for months took home trophies from the fest that proudly proclaims ‘Audience is King.’

The Wackness – still the best film of 2008 – won the audience award for narrative filmmaking, while the wonderful and funny and moving Anvil! The Story of Anvil won the award for documentary filmmaking. Man on Wire, the inspiring documentary about a Frenchman who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974, won for best foreign film. All three of these movies were films I saw at Sundance and have been so excited about ever since. It’s incredibly gratifying to see these movies continue to make an impact on audiences, and to hope that these sorts of awards open them up to more people. One of the hardest parts of my job is knowing that so many of the films I champion will never play anywhere near the majority of my readers – continued successes like these make it more likely that more people in more places will have a chance to see the films.

So congrats to everybody. The Wackness is opening this weekend (look for an epic interview with director Jonathan Levine here soon) – be sure to support the little guy by going out and seeing it.

I feel as if I’ve written a lot about Mark Wahlberg recently; unfortunately little of it has been good. Between The Happening and his comments on Max Payne and possible Departed sequels, he’s been an easy target. Guy’s just like a little mechanical duck. So this is a nice change of pace. The Fighter, his boxing biopic to be directed by Darren Aronofsky, should be shooting in October.

“I’ve been training for two years now. I’m ready,” Wahlberg told MTV. “I want to look like a champ, not a chump,” he said, while fingering a medallion featuring the head of M. Night Shyamalan.

The Fighter is about “Irish” Mickey Ward, a Lowell, MA fighter who (with his half-brother Dicky, to be played by Brad Pitt) found unexpected success in the ring.

“I want to do him proud. The guy did everything I wish I could have done. He came from nothing, went on to win the world title with all the odds stacked against him. Did it with his mother and his brother,” and statements like that might be the reason Google and Firefox don’t like us right now. Wahlberg says that Ward will be on set every day watching the actor work, so hey, no pressure.

This fall HBO will bring Jason Schwartzman into the pantheon of fake private detectives currently chaired by The Dude and Harry Lockhart. In the series Bored to Death Schwartzman will play a drunk Brooklynite who publishes an ad for investigative services, then wackily solves and ruins cases. The kid is a big Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet fan, which means that pretending to be a detective is just another form of masturbation. Rakish hats and wingtips optional.

Bored to Death is one of two pilots HBO is working with; the other will be Hung, to be directed by Alexander Payne. No cast notes have dropped for that yet. Schwartzman will also bring stubble to Judd Apatow’s Funny People.

The trailer for Hotel For Dogs is embellished with so many wonderful details that I’m overwhelmed by their combined might. The doggie vending machine doesn’t even register; the fact that dogs get to shit in the Sloth victim’s room from Seven does. The director has the same name as my genitals: Thor Freudenthal. With the appearance of Emma Roberts there’s proof that nepotism doesn’t truly rule Hollywood. The appearance of Don Cheadle proves that god does hate all of us, Don Cheadle most of all.

The trailer is running in HD at Apple, so you can freeze-frame the moist, delicious moment when a bag of dogshit falls onto a conveyor belt, more specifically approximating the sensation of plopping down to watch the film than any other trailer is likely to capture this summer.

It turns out I’m gay. At least in the movie Observe and Report,
starring Seth Rogen and directed by Foot Fist Way helmer Jody Hill.



The movie’s a real change of pace for Rogen – instead of playing a laid
back stoner, he’s a tin pot dictator of a mall security guard (his only
powers are, as the title says, to observe and to report) who lives in a
double wide trailer with his mother. Rogen’s character of Ronnie has a
lot in common with Fred Simmons, Danny McBride’s character from Foot
Fist, in that he’s a little man in a position of some dubious authority
who takes it all too seriously. When a pervert begins flashing
mallgoers, Ronnie has to team up with a real cop, played by Ray Liotta,
to catch the culprit. Ronnie’s incredibly jealous of his turf while
Liotta’s Detective Harrison would rather be off investigating actual
crimes, not a guy showing mallwalkers his dick.



The production had taken over a mostly abandoned mall in Albuequerque,
New Mexico* (only a department store and a Bed Bath and Beyond remained
in business, although the mall itself remained open. Anyone could walk
off the street onto the set) and turned it into their own little corner
of Americana. Fake stores, loaded with real merchandise, filled empty
store fronts, and sections of the mall had been turned into workshops
and offices. Tucked in one corner was a Captain O’Landers, the seafood
place from Foot Fist (here’s hoping Hill gets O’Landers into every one
of his movies). The illusion of a working mall was so good that the
production had to shoo potential shoppers out of the fake stores.



We did the usual interviews – Ray Liotta was very nice, Michael Pena
showed off the comic side he wants to exercise more in his work, Jody
was obviously tired but exceptionally kind and open – but Seth Rogen
blew us all away. When he sat down, former CHUD junket guy Fred Topel
offered to transcribe the interview, no matter how long it was. ‘Even
if it’s an hour?’ I joked, knowing you never, ever get the star for
longer than ten to fifteen minutes. And we did get Seth for fifteen
minutes at the official sitdown… but later, as we were hanging out on
set and as lights were being rigged and whatnot, Seth came over to our
group and spent an extra forty five minutes hanging out, bullshitting
on the record. What Fred Topel’s jokes hath wrought!



It’s important to keep in mind that Seth Rogen is actually a star
(although he did say that when he goes out with Jonah Hill everyone
wants to talk to Jonah and leaves him alone). Maybe on The 40-Year Old
Virgin it would have been a good idea for him to come over to the
visiting journalists and butter them up, but at this stage his career
has taken off and he doesn’t need to play nice with the press beyond
his allotted fifteen minutes. And yet there he was, standing around and
shooting the shit, being incredibly unguarded and answering any and all
questions thrown at him. He’s just a genuinely cool and nice guy. Later on I ended up spending a couple of
minutes chatting with Seth alone, just talking movies – he’s a
real hardcore movie nerd, and a regular CHUD reader.



Part of the set visit involved the journalists doing a little work as
extras, which is when I became gay. We were handed over to the extras
wrangler, who cherry-picked the pretty female journalists to be seen
very clearly in the frame while the rest of us were chosen to be out of
focus blobs in the background. The wrangler looked at me and Reelz
Channel’s Tom and decided that we should walk together into a fake
Container Store, directly behind the main action of the scene, which
featured Seth Rogen and Ray Liotta interrogated Human Giant‘s Aziz
Ansari about being the pervert. Hill loves to let his actors use
improv, so Rogen and Ansari went back and forth for take after take,
and each time Tom and I would reset just outside of the camera range
and walk back to the Container Store, trying not to laugh as Rogen’s
booming voice said some hilarious borderline racist shit (when Ansari’s
character said he couldn’t be the flasher because the flasher had a
white dick, Rogen responded that maybe he had a cream that would make
his dick look ‘American.’).



After a couple of takes Tom and I began to ponder our motivation. Why
were we going to the Container Store? What were we buying? It soon
became clear that the only reason two grown, handsome, virile men would
be going to the Container Store together was if they were a gay couple.
Once we realized that the extras wrangler had cast us as a loving,
committed gay couple, everything else clicked into place. By which I
mean we began trying to make the actual, paid extras crack up on
camera.  It’s weird to be doing this elaborate pantomime of ‘I’m
shopping for plastic boxes in which to store my shit,’ and it’s even
weirder when the ‘background actor’ playing the store clerk is taking
it really seriously, even when you whisper to him that you’d like to
make a trade for a crab-themed dining set – I was willing to give up
the opportunity to shave my scrotum to the man. Or my seven year old
daughter. Or a romantic weekend in a prison cell. I wasn’t able to make
the guy crack up, but watching his expression change from one of
amusment to weariness and finally annoyance over the course of six
takes made it all worthwhile for me.



I’m excited to see Observe and Report, and not just because it’s been a
lifelong dream to be an indistinct mass of color and shadow in the back
of a very funny scene in a major motion picture. This movie is going to
continue what Pineapple Express will begin – the redefinition of Seth
Rogen. There’s a darkness, a sadness, to Ronnie that I don’t think
we’ve seen from Rogen before, and it’s going to be cool when he shows
audiences that he’s not just the jolly joint smoker. I think that
between this and Pineapple, the idea of Seth Rogen as The Green Hornet
is going to be a lot less weird.



Look for the full interviews from the set as soon as the embargo is lifted.



*Again. Thanks to local tax breaks, New Mexico has become a filmmaking
mecca in the last few years. I’ve been there in the last two months
more often than I have been at the New Beverly.

The direct-to-video market has provided life support to so many dying horror franchises. Hellraiser, just to name one, has become less like a horror franchise and more like a frail old woman in a hospital bed being kept alive by medical equipment. Only now can we begin to fully understand just how significant Hostel Part II’s box office failure really was. If Hostel Part II had been a success, it would have undoubtedly spawned another sequel. The film, however, was not a success as its domestic gross didn’t even break the twenty million dollar mark. So now the series has officially been put on the life support system known as direct-to-dvd. I can’t help but wonder if Eli Roth was aware of all the risks when he decided to open the door for a potential franchise by doing a Hostel sequel. I’m sure he never imagined that the series would turn into Urban Legends so quickly.

On the bright side, there is a rumor that somebody who has worked closely with Roth on the previous two Hostel films is going to take over the ailing franchise.

According to Bloody Disgusting, Scott Spiegel (Intruder) has been tapped to write and direct Hostel Part III.

There is still no word on whether or not Eli Roth will be involved in any capacity with the film. We’ll keep you updated as the story develops.

It’s not unusual for movie studios to option books before they’re published, while they’re still in galleys. It’s also not unusual for movie studios to option every single comic book that hits the shelves. Now these two optioning habits have met, as Warner Bros has optioned Oni Press’ graphic novel Billy Smoke, which won’t be out until some time next year.

The comic, about a hitman seeking redemption by killing all the world’s assassins (surely there must be something more interesting than this going on in the pages), is written by B. Clay Moore and illustrated by Eric Kim. And they have their Billy Smoke for the movie – Matthew Fox, star of Lost and the heart of the underappreciated Speed Racer, is in negotiations to take the role.

And that’s it. I feel the need to have a third paragraph – something about our formatting seems to demand at least three paragraphs. Hope you’re having a super day!

Last week, Collider’s Steve ‘Frosty’ Weintraub was at the Saturn Awards where he got about a metric ton of video interviews with folks attending. Among the scoops he snagged was the info that the producers of 300 were interested in doing a prequel or sequel, and that Frank Miller and Zack Snyder were playing around with ideas. I don’t know if we ran the story here – if we didn’t it wasn’t because it wasn’t newsworthy, it was simply because we got a touch swamped at times.

Variety certainly thought the story was newsworthy enough – so newsworthy that they completely stole it and didn’t give any credit to Steve at Collider. They ran a piece about it yesterday, yielding essentially no new information, and the closest they come to giving any credit is the following:

Another “300” has been rumored from the start, but last week Snyder and
the original producing team stoked a frenzy online when they talked
about it at the Saturn Awards.

I’ve called Diane Garrett, the reporter who wrote the piece, to see why Collider isn’t credited – in her defense, her editors may have removed a credit – but she wasn’t at her desk. I’ll call back throughout the day to try and find out why Variety thinks it’s okay to simply steal the work of others.

Well the name’s still dumb, but…

The trailer for Quantum of Solace has arrived and it looks to continue Casino Royale‘s strong kickstarting of James Bond as a leaner and meaner brand with Daniel Craig’s sinewy and ugly/handsome avatar delivering more in the way of menace and less of the pomp and oversexed cheese that preceded [aside from the still great Dalton films and early Connery].

Marc Forster’s an interesting and bald choice to take the mantle from Martin Campbell, because despite the studio and majority of audience’s beliefs, the stuff BETWEEN the action is what makes Casino Royale a classic and by going to a director known for content it allows them to play to their strengths and allow the crackerjack second and third unit folks to deliver trailer moments.

Here’s hoping the film’s as solid as this trailer so it can pave the way for Paradigm of Contusions, Vapor Lock of Aptitude, Sinisters of Mysteriouses, and Barbecue of Glad Tidings before someone named after a vegetable makes a dumb decision.