Pain and Gain, Michael Bay’s “Point Break with bodybuilders” movie (which is actually based on a true story) starring Mark Wahlberg and The Rock, hits April 26th, and just screened at CinemaCon yesterday to, um, reviews. The big question is, does Michael Bay still remember how to shoot human beings after three straight movies about robots? The good news is, he never did!

Here’s a new clip, which in just 42 seconds manages to lay out the Michael Bay blueprint for a scene. His secret? Every minor character is just one over-the-top, skin-deep gimmick, which then becomes both comic relief and plot point. In this case, it’s a gun store clerk who turns out to be a huge Stryper fan. The Rock and the boys tell him they’re cops, and he doesn’t believe them, but The Rock sees a Stryper sticker on the register and tells the clerk that they’re actually doing security for Stryper. Pretty soon he and the clerk are singing Stryper together right there in the gun store and everything works out okay! Haha, hilarious! Good thing the Stryper sticker didn’t turn out to be from another clerk, or any number of other infinite, more interesting possibilities!

Anyway, here’s the early word on the movie, from what I can gather from my Twitter follows:

Michael bay’s $25 million pain and gain is an impeccably crafted noisy soulless depressing enterprise. Dumb male demo.#cinemacon

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) April 16, 2013

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Well this sucks. Just days after announcing that he’d be taking a leave of absence from his work to deal with cancer that had returned to his body – discovered after he fractured his hip last year – Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70.

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so — but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide. [SunTimes]

I didn’t agree with him much about movies in recent years, but I always liked Ebert as a writer. He got a lot of flack for inventing the “thumbs up, thumbs down” system of reviewing movies, but I always saw that more as a hook to draw people in so they’d hear what he had to say than as an actual attempt to boil down complex reviews to a binary system. None of us really want to stamp a semi-meaningless letter grade or yes or no on the end of our complex thoughts on a film. But Ebert understood, even before RottenTomatoes, that people wanted reviews and ratings quantified, even if it was just in a superficial way, or as a hook to get them to read it. It’s a quirk of human nature, and he was just going with it. Much the same way the internet breaks things into lists not because internet writers love lists, but because something about the list format makes people more apt to read them. Obviously, he will be missed. Ebert still managed to outlive his old partner, Gene Siskel, who died in 1999 at 53, of a brain tumor. It’s sad to see so many film critics dying young. I blame our glamorous, devil-may-care lifestyle.

PS: I’ve seen countless news stories using pictures of Ebert post-jaw-loss to accompany the story of his passing. Really, you A-holes? You really think that’s how he’d want to be remembered, with most of his lower jaw missing from cancer? Somehow I doubt ithat.

PPS: I can’t believe I’d nearly forgotten this, but I do believe it was Roger Ebert who first introduced me (tangentially, via Drew Magary) to the wonderful work of Lindy West three years ago. Aw, and if I wasn’t feeling all squishy and sentimental about this five minutes ago, I certainly am now.

[be sure to check out his full obit over at his paper, the Sun Times. picture source = Shutterstock]

Only an idiot would expect a fifth Die Hard movie directed by the guy who did Max Payne and Flight of the Phoenix to be any good, but it’s still impressive the degree to which it’s been able to limbo under even the lowest of low expectations. And you need only read reviews for 5 Fast 5 Furious or The Last Stand to see how willing critics are to praise a film just for fulfilling the basement-level expectations set by their own marketing. While only seven reviews are in so far (and I made Laremy a deal where I’d have to see this if he’d see Inside the Mind of Charles Swan, so look forward to that), A Good Day to Die Hard is currently pitching a perfect Bucky Larson. For the uninitiated, that’s like a knuckleball that no one can hit because it’s so sucky.

Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely. -AO Scott, NY Times

Loud and tedious, “Die Hard” 5 is a shaky-cam/Sensurround blast of bullets and bombs, digital explosions and death defying feats of defying death. Not a decent villain or catchphrase in it  -Roger Moore, McClatchy

Hired hack John Moore taps into the McClane mythology to drain any lingering humanity from the Die Hard series. -John Semley, Slant

A complete waste of time on every level. Loud, obnoxious, boring, cartoonish, morally reprehensible, and just plain stupid. -Brian Tallerico, HollywoodChicago

An asinine, immobile feature that’s dripping with trendy cinematography and toxic banter, while a visibly bored Bruce Willis hobbles through this dud, putting in the least amount of effort possible. -Brian Orndorf, Blu-Ray.com

There’s no artistry to Moore’s work, he’s simply a factory employee who knows how to work a punch press, and his take on the world of “Die Hard” is dispiriting and borderline offensive. -Brian Orndorf, Blu-Ray.com

I can’t decide which scenario is more exciting, Die Hard maintaining its perfect zero percent rating, or reading the barely-perceptible praise from the first critics to rate it “recommended.” On another note, I’m a little sad that so far, no one’s gone with the obvious New York Post-ready headline, “Ho Ho No.”

I could never hate this man.

Rex Reed went on Mark Simone’s show on WOR 710 AM in New York this morning (don’t worry, I don’t know what that is either) to respond to the controversy surrounding his Identity Thief review. If you’ll remember, that was the one Burnsy told you about where Rex called Melissa McCarthy a hippo, and described her as “tractor-sized.” This controversy, according to Reed, has culminated in death threats, and emails wishing he’d get cancer. Speaking with Simone, and you knew this was going to be a favorable news outlet when Simone hilariously said during Rex Reed’s introduction that “telling Rex Reed how to review a movie is like telling Babe Ruth how to hold a bat,” Reed seemed to think that the controversy was all something planned and orchestrated by Universal’s “publicity machine.” He also ascribed Daniel Craig’s success, in part, to having “a good, hard, well-toned body,” but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.

With a voice that sounded a little like the late Huell Howser, Reed said of his haters “This is an organized group of people, believe me. And it’s all being fanned because of Universal’s desire to sell tickets to a bad movie,” which does seem somewhat plausible. He then went on a side rant about Facebook groups “telling kids obesity is good”, saying “only carefully-organized plots can turn into this kind of out-of-control mess.”

That is, the out-of-control mess confined mainly to Rex Reed’s email inbox. To rebut, speaking only for ourselves, we had zero contact with anyone from Universal before writing that post (or after writing it, for that matter). Burnsy saw Reed’s review (likely in the course of writing up a Weekend Movie Guide) and thought it was funny, especially so considering we’d already known Rex Reed as enjoyably un-PC and kind of nutty. We like to bust his balls because it’s fun. I hope he keeps writing and doesn’t get cancer, but I do feel a little bad about focusing the Eye of Sauron that is the internet on poor old Rex Reed (or at least contributing to it).

Reed, after proudly proclaiming that movie reviews are protected speech, defended bringing McCarthy’s weight into his review, arguing that she was already trying to capitalize on it herself. “I object to using health issues like obesity as comedy talking points, ” Reed said. “That’s what this girl does! This Melissa Manchester…”

That’s right, Rex Reed called Melissa McCarthy “Melissa Manchester,”  which is just about the most Rex Reed goddamn thing ever. He went on to make fun of people who emailed him about ‘Declined,’ mistakenly thinking the headline of his review was name of his movie. This without acknowledging that he’d just called the star “Melissa Manchester.” A+ for Rex Reedness.

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Melissa with something that she’d like Rex Reed to sit on.

Rex Reed is a 74-year old film critic who once famously wrote the following sentence about South Korean people in his review for the film Old Boy:

“What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?”

He also started the rumor that Marisa Tomei only won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1992 because Jack Palance was wasted when he presented the award. So basically, Reed is a cranky, cantankerous assh*le, and he wants to remind us of that with his new review of Identity Thief in the New York Observer.

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