Salon.com > Mark Wahlberg

Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

Straight stars protest too much

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:24:00 +0000

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing a straight actor can do is play gay.

While gay actors like Zachary Quinto, Ian McKellen and Neil Patrick Harris are compelled to play heterosexual roles as a matter of course -- that's the bulk of what's out there -- straight actors get Oscars and praise for bravery.

The latest actors to join the fraternity of the courageous are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, who respectively play Liberace and his lover in the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra." Damon told Entertainment Weekly that the film's revealing costumes embarrassed his wife: "I really wish she didn’t see that. That’s too much." As for the sex scene between Douglas and Damon, "The scene where I’m behind him and going at him, we did that in one take," said the younger actor.

"We do it. Cut. There’s a long pause. And then you just hear Steven [Soderbergh, the director] go, 'Well … I have no notes.'"

Gurley show: From Burt to Magic Mike

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:31:00 +0000

As the groundbreaking author of "Sex and the Single Girl" and editor of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown was known as a leading voice in the second wave of feminism, and an outspoken advocate for female sexual pleasure. With the help of Cosmopolitan, she has left behind a legacy of teaching women to embrace their bodies and explore their sexual pleasure.

Less discussed, however, is her impact on another aspect of female sexual liberation: the freedom she gave women to openly admit their enjoyment of the nude male form.

With the debut of Burt Reynolds as Cosmo’s first male centerfold, Brown loudly announced that men weren’t the only ones who enjoyed a little eye candy — and that the male body was just as capable of being objectified as the female form.

Brown’s insights on the desirability of the male body may not have caught on quite as quickly as her thoughts on oral pleasure, but they still managed to jump-start a slow but sure revolution. Forty years after the publication of Burt in the buff, male centerfolds can still be seen as a novelty … but at least there have been quite a few more of them for lusty women (and other admirers of the male body) to enjoy over the years.

Pick of the week: Mark Wahlberg and his foulmouthed teddy bear

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It's not mere coincidence that when Ted, the eponymous teddy bear-come-to-life voiced by co-writer and director Seth MacFarlane, invites a bunch of hookers over for a fun evening, the movie he puts on is Adam Sandler's "Jack and Jill." When his hapless roommate/owner (Mark Wahlberg) comes home with his disapproving girlfriend (Mila Kunis), surprising Ted partway through an especially disgusting party game with his female guests, the plush ursine delivers his movie review, in the New England growl familiar to viewers of TV's "Family Guy": "Sandler plays both a girl and a dude. It was unbearable! Unwatchable!"

Indeed, with "Ted" MacFarlane has thrown down the comedy gauntlet, most prominently before Sandler, but also before others we could name: You want to make a raunchy, hard-R farce, homeboy? Complete with a ludicrous premise, Boston-centric sports gags, random washed-up celebrity cameos, spoofs of several different kinds of more serious movies, an irrelevant third-act action sequence and a sentimental resolution? Step aside and see how it's done, my man.