(“Yesterday we had a pillow fight and gave each other haircuts.”)

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci wrote Star Trek ($246 million so far), Transformers 2 ($201 mil in five days), and produced The Proposal ($69 mil in two weeks), so you could say they’re having a decent year.  In related news, I bought pillowcases.  Today Variety reports on their next project, producing License to Steal.

Shane Salerno (Armageddon, AVP: R) will pen the script. Project is loosely based on Marc Weingarten’s Salon.com article about the high-end repo business, in which agents travel all the world to reclaim play toys including private jets and speedboats.

I heard Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci settle script disagreements with tickle fights.  True story. From the Salon article:

For the past three decades, Nick Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialize in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton. Super repos have been known to hire swat teams, hijack supertankers and fly off with eastern bloc military helicopters. For a cut of the overall value, they’ll repossess anything.

And times have never been better. When lenders opened the sluice gates of easy credit throughout the last decade, high rollers went out and splurged on Gulfstreams and yachts. When the job goes away, the bonuses dry up and the stock market tanks, it’s a long and nasty downward spiral that leads to Popovich’s door.

So basically, he’s a modern-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the banks. Topical!  I plan to protest this film by mailing myself a teabag. It won’t really solve anything, but by the time I figure that out, my troubles will have melted away in a flood of soothing chamomile.

For thousands of years (give or take), the USSR was our mortal enemy, what with their grey clothes and drab efficiency.  But ever since Ronald Reagan personally punched down the Berlin wall with his bare fists, more and more it seems like Russians are actually just like us with funny haircuts minus human emotions.  And that’s what this trailer for Forbidden Reality is like.  It’s all in Russian, but all the slow motion, bullet-time, and Matrix-y special effects seem familiar and comforting, like eating warm apple pie on your cowboy horse.  Their synopsis:

Based on the novel by very popular sci-fi writer Vasiliy Golovachev, the film tells a story of an agent betrayed by his partner when transporting new psychic weapon. Believed to be dead, he escapes and takes new identity so he can live in peace far away. But later he is forced to return to Moscow to confront a secret organization, led by his former partner, that attempts to use the dangerous weapon in order to take control over the country. Now he is a key figure in the battle between forces of darkness and light. [QuietEarth]

My synopsis: A dude transforms into a lion!  OO WHA-AA AA-AA!

This is fast becoming a Michael Bay blog, but oh well.  The latest news is that he and Spielberg will produce an adaptation of I Am Number Four, the first of a soon-to-be-released series of young-adult sci-fi novels… co-written by Million Little Pieces guy James Frey.  Frey was the memoir fabricator who Oprah made famous then tried to bring down so that she wouldn’t look bad, only to later apologize (she gets a little crabby before her first hoagie).  Anyway, here’s the story:

“The story is about a group of nine children from a planet called Lorien who have been attacked by a hostile race from another planet. The nine and their guardians evacuate to earth, where three are killed. The protagonist, a Lorien boy named John Smith, hides in Paradise, Ohio, as a human and tries to evade his predators.” [Variety]

I was able to dig up a little more information about the project.  It’s actually about teenagers, which, as I argued to the judge, are not children.

The protagonist is 15.  The rival race of aliens are from the planet Mogadore.  They destroyed Lorien in order to strip the planet of its natural resources because Mogadore was dying, and still is, and they followed the Loric to Earth to finish the job.   The Loric develop their “Legacies” (special powers) around their fifteenth year. This first book is a kind of love story.  At its core it’s a type of father/son alone in the world, always moving to stay alive story, a lá The Road.

Lucky bastards.  I didn’t develop my “legacies” until around my 17th year, and by then I was already known as the guy who wore boxers in the shower.  Anyway, this story is pretty weird.  I’m assuming Bay and Spielberg are only collaborating with James Frey because they thought A Million Little Pieces was about explosions.

Now that they’ve literally greenlit a gum wrapper from the 50s, there isn’t much they could make into a movie that would surprise me.  Today’s news is that Sony’s 3D, Alvin and the Chipmunks-style Smurfs movie (which everyone had forgotten about and that’s why this is news) has a release date.

Smurfs 3D is scheduled for a December 17, 2010 release. The Colin Brady-directed film was written by David Stem and David Weiss. [ComingSoon]

Hey, remember how Smurf Village only had one chick?  That’s probably why the Smurfs always had BLUE BALLS!  Hey, and what’s the deal with airline food?

The only way I could understand Transformers 2 was that it was all an inside joke by the filmmakers.  I mean, there’s no way you film Shia LaBeouf meeting Optimus Prime’s ancestors in robot heaven without giggling the whole time.  But the thing about Michael Bay is that he never breaks character. His recent interview in the Wall Street Journal is either amazingly Freudian or a work of Andy Kaufman-level genius.

It’s interesting that you say you want to focus on acting. Megan Fox has criticized your films for being special-effects-driven and not offering so many acting opportunities. Do you agree?

Well, that’s Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do [**Bay cups hands in front of chest and winks** -Ed]. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, “Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it.” But I 100% disagree with her. Nic Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in “Armageddon.” [keep in mind both Nic Cage and Ben Affleck were Oscar winners before they worked with Bay] Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did “Transformers”—and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from “Bad Boys.” Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in “Transformers.” I like to think that I’ve had some luck in building actors’ careers with my films. [WSJ]

What an amazing answer.  When you break it down, it’s basically, “How could you say my movies are effects driven?  That’s 100% false.  Remember Nic Cage? Ben Affleck? Shia LaBeouf?  I BLEW THEM UP!  …Wow, she really said I can’t explode stuff good, huh?  I’ll show her. I’ll show them all.”