Showing posts with label dwayne johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dwayne johnson. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 17, 2016 (VIDEO)


Well, this took entirely too long to finish editing... go figure, but man, so many songs that'll be gone in a day or two...

But anyway, next up is, well, it surprised me. Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 17, 2016

I called it last week, and now here it is. Folks, this is the week of The Weeknd, because of at this moment, every single song from his album Starboy either entered, re-entered, or rose up the Hot 100 this week. That's a total of eighteen songs - and what's all the more crazy is that he didn't encompass every debut this week, thank you so very much Disney. And what concerns me more than anything is overexposure - that's one of the biggest factors that lies at the roots of how much I turned on Drake throughout this last year... so let's hope this doesn't hit The Weeknd as badly as I might expect.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

movie review: 'pain & gain'

I've spewed a lot of vitriol against Michael Bay in the past. I've called him a hack, I've openly criticized his cinematography and stylistic tendencies for being lowbrow and shameless, and I've accused him and his screenwriting cronies for ruining the Transformers franchise, to say nothing of the horrible, horrible slasher film remakes that his cohorts at Platinum Dunes keep churning out. And that's not even getting into his fetish for all things military and masculine.

But even with all that, I can admit that there is something about the man that if he's placed in the right environment, he can work as a director. The Bad Boys movies worked in this regard and (arguably) so did The Rock, less as deconstructionist pieces and more as direct wires into certain parts of the masculine psyche, which tend to alienate critics but draw in the cultural demographic that tends to make his movies a massive success. 

But the odd thing that I've always found with the movies Bay has actually cared about (Transformers is a franchise he has admitted he's only doing for the money), it's hard to draw the line whether or not Bay empathizes with his meathead characters or wants us to openly despise them as much as he does, putting every inch of their depravity on screen for us to either ogle or recoil away. To some extent, I think he's intending for us to do both, and that can make for a fascinating watching experience, particularly when he hires good actors to play the part.

And so I approached Pain & Gain with a certain amount of trepidation, but at the same time a bit of hope. This film has been a passion project Bay has been trying to make for years, put together on a minuscule twenty million dollar budget with all the actors taking pay cuts to participate. In fact, the only reason Pain & Gain got released at all was because Bay agreed to make another Transformers movie to give Paramount another ridiculous pile of money that those films bring in like clockwork. 

So this is a film Bay has fought for, a labour of love, a story that he had to tell and put on screen, probably one of the truest expressions of Bay as an artist. How does it fair?