There are so many other great touches throughout - Ed Harris's reflective narration about life to anchor the overblown satire to some grounding (with an excellent bit of score - Du Bois), the toe-shooting sequence, the Rock's acting of being high, the scenes shot in Bay's own house, Tony Shalhoub's performance. It needs to be seen/heard on a good system for sure, to do justice to the film. The use of non-score songs like Gangsta's Paradise also fit the film perfectly. I've listened to it a lot as standalone music whilst swimming in Portugal, and hearing it in the film anchors me right back to those awesome summer vibes. The use of different cameras and styles with kinetic editing reminds me of what Oliver Stone was going for with U-Turn, but Pain and Gain works so much better. Its shot and edited so tightly, with a ferocious energy that really makes the most of the medium. Its why I think Michael Bay was the perfect choice to direct. The color saturation, photography, editing perfectly match the story, tone, energy and satire. After all their incarcerations and the final edits of what happened, the voiceover of "that's the American dream baby" before the credits hit seals the deal. The references to pop-culture ("the greatest men were self-made Rocky, Scarface, The Godfather", the stripper basing her plan on Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman), the toxic values of the self-help industry (Johnny Wu standing in for Tony Robbins), the liberties taken with the story - it all adds to the fun of the satire. In classical style, the script structure mirrors a lifetime - the young, early days of yearning/scheming, the flabby indulgent middle age where emptiness and desperation kick in, the inevitable fall where it all gets taken away. How greed, selfishness, stupidity, pride and excessive indulgence all became entwined. The writers took a fascinating true-story and recognised its potential for a piss-take of the American dream. I love Hitchcock, Kubrick, Coens, Billy Wilder, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch, even Wild Strawberries - but Pain and Gain somehow became my favorite movie. I'm pretty sure if it was a subtitled Spanish movie by the director of Timecrimes or something that it would be heralded as a cult classic. I think it suffers from a massive case of negative bias, because its rare that a typically trashy director could pull off something brilliant.
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