Mike Goes To Movies

Pain & Gain (2013) Even imperfect as it is, Pain & Gain is definitely one of Michael Bay's more successful recent endeavours. To be fair, he has really only had one other non-Transformers film that he has directed since 2007 so there's that to consider... Pain & Gain with its effective mix of action and dark humour takes Bay back to the ilk of Bad Boys, one of his more beloved franchises. This film, remarkably based on a true story, is a classic tale of the quest for the American Dream. Well, in a way, at least. This iteration of the classic fable centres on three incompetent and rather repellent gym rats who attempt a kidnapping of a rich client of the gym that they work at. The job is less than a success though, causing the thugs to use their combined intellect and scheming to save the job and their own selves. If not for the darkly black humour underlying the film, this would be quite the despicable and violent story. However, Bay wisely banks in on the ine...

Everest (2015) I'm not going to lie, my expectations for Everest sat quite nicely at ground zero (around where I would imagine base camp to be) - I thought this was simply going to be yet another action-packed disaster-esque kind of film. And so, it was that I was pleasantly surprised by the quite-grounded nature of the film that built its action and suspense not through crazy special-effects action set-pieces but through character drama and the realistic threats that one would encounter summiting the highest peak on this planet. It may be that part of my enjoyment of this film stemmed from my own recent experience as a few years ago I hiked up a mountain and got a small taste of the dismantling effect that cold and oxygen deprivation has on a body. No, what I climbed is nowhere close to the feat of Everest, but a lot of what is depicted in this film regarding preparation (both mental and physical) were things that our guides talked to us about on our own climb. As mentioned,...