When he wakes up he wanders and finds a carnival with a sideshow. That’s where he sees this winged lady. Not riding a ferris wheel – she’s in the sideshow, because she has wings. Not sure if you got that.

Huh... that's weird. They forgot to mention that she has wings.

Later he comes to her in her trailer and convinces her to let him hang out a while. He’s really impressed by what he calls her angel wings, but she says “I’m not an angel, I’m a bird-woman.”

When the jealous ringmaster dude (Rhys Ifans) sees Mickey around he thinks this hep cat is trying to steal his bird-woman. He’s about to have Mickey killed via-snakebite when she drives a truck through his trailer and saves him “come with me if you want to live” TERMINATOR style. Next thing you know they’re on the run together.

Keep in mind, though, by “running” I mostly mean sitting around looking sad, or talking on gas station pay phones. This is not a very eventful movie. It’s low budget and minimalistic, like a weird indie arthouse movie from the ’80s or ’90s except with some phony looking greenscreening here and there. There’s even a greenscreen rooftop set but I don’t think it’s the same one from THE ROOM or the one from NINJA. There are just alot of these greenscreen rooftop sets around to rent out to low budget movies, I guess.

The whole thing is very dreamlike, but a little on the cheap side. I guess that guy Christopher Doyle shot it, so some of it looks nice, but it’s probly not his proudest achievement. One thing that bothered me is that they didn’t seem to try to make it seem like Rourke is really playing the trumpet. The sound mix just makes it seem like he’s pretending to play along with a record.

One random casting note before we move on: there’s a tough-looking enforcer that Mickey has to deal with, when I saw him I thought who is that, I know that guy. Kinda looks like Michael Rooker, but who is that? For some reason it didn’t connect that that was retired UFC badass Chuck Liddell.

So that’s The Iceman working for Bill Murray. It’s weird to see Murray playing a cruel bastard crime lord that everybody’s afraid of. I guess he pretty much always plays an asshole, but usually he’s supposed to be lovable. Here he has people killed, including his wife. He’s supposed to be scary. But a little bit sad, despite the name. Murray brings his usual sarcasm and open bitterness to the role, but mostly I don’t think they’re going for laughs.

It’s a humorless movie, but when it reaches the inevitable poetic climax (she flies away to freedom [SPOILER]) the effects are so goofy that it does not have the same emotional impact I think they were looking for. They might as well have done a little stop motion doll or something, at least have some style with their laughs.

But I don’t wanna be too harsh on PASSION PLAY. It’s already been picked on and I don’t really think it’s for entirely fair reasons. Look at the cycle of Megan Fox: she’s this hot piece of ass with no character or acting in the TRANSFORMERS movies, but all the magazines and websights think she must be the next big thing so they do cover stories and interviews and she’s in all the gossip and they leak photos of her wearing skimpy outfits on the shitty movies she can get into with her beginning actor skills (this, JONAH HEX). But those movies don’t do well so the “next big thing” thing doesn’t really pan out and then those same media sources are over her and their attitude becomes who is this bitch, she thinks she can act just ’cause she has tits? Who told her she could do that, wasn’t me I don’t think I said anything like that when interviewing her for our cover story on her. I have no choice but to either write about someone more worthy or – and this is the one I’m leaning towards – to keep writing about her all the time but in an attempt to humiliate her!

I sense a little bit of that anyway. I’m not saying she’s that great in this, but she’s better than in the TRANSFORMERS movies. She gets to try at least. And Rourke has a pretty stupid character, but throws his soul into it like he always does. The few redeeming qualities the character has come from the passion in his performance. (That’s not a pun, by the way, it’s just a word I need to use that happens to also be in the title and I refuse to compromise my wording out of wordplayphobia.)

The biggest target, actually, is the wings. If this didn’t have this magical realism angle everybody would be fine. It would just be another worthless indie drama nobody ever heard of. But because there’s some weirdness in it people act like that makes it worse. They’ll focus on the wings as being the reason why it’s bad.

That’s not the reason. It’s bad because it’s not a well thought out story, the characters are not very interesting, nothing much happens and the visuals and timing are lifeless. The wings are a plus, I don’t think I could’ve finished it if she didn’t have wings. At least with this we can dream about these two lovebirds going off, building a nest, hatching some crazy eggs together.

But I guess normal people hate interesting stuff, so that’s the main thing they shit on. The marketing people realized this, so the posters and the screener cover don’t show the wings at all. In fact the screener has stills from the movie all over the back and the inside, but none of them show the wings, and the plot description doesn’t mention them. These things are always funny, they’re always stretching it in the ways they try to make any random shitty movie sound like a must-buy for your video store. That’s another thing that’ll go down with the mom and pop stores, the art of the ridiculous screener claim. For example this mathematical formula:

See? PASSION PLAY is a sure hit because it’s related to the combined box office totals of the TRANSFORMERS movies, IRON MAN 2, the GHOSTBUSTERS movies, the GARFIELD movies, and, you know, the one where he’s with the elephant.

Also, this is just my personal opinion but it seems to me like this claim here is hard to back up:

But I guess since as of this writing it hasn’t come out yet it could still be a surprise smash.

The director is Mitch Glazer, who not surprisingly hasn’t directed a movie before. But he grew up friends with Rourke and must know Murray from his days as writing partner to Michael O’Donoghue (they did MR. MIKE’S MONDO VIDEO, Saturday Night Live and SCROOGED together). And he’s married to Kelly ROAD HOUSE Lynch, who’s in there too.

Glazer should probly stick to the writing, but I can’t fault him for giving it a shot and calling in favors. Maybe some day somebody else will make the definitive Mickey Rourke/Megan Fox bird-woman love story. Until then we have this.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. Also it’s not at all true. Armond White doesn’t count as somebody seriously for real liking JONAH HEX. But I’m a positive individual so I was trying to put a good spin on it. Believe it or not though I don’t have to delve into too much negativity for this review. JONAH HEX is not as bad as I was expecting, or as people have said. It definitely doesn’t work, but I don’t consider it a total abomination. It is beautiful in God’s eyes, it’s only on this earthly plane that it gets bullied because of its deformed face.

Josh Brolin plays Jonah Hex, a bounty hunter who was a soldier in the Confederate army. I’m not sure how they handled it in the original DC comics book it was based on, but here they have an African-American blacksmith who vouches for him, pointing out that Hex never believed in slavery. In fact he decided what he was fighting for was wrong and conscientiously objected to a direct order to burn down a hospital full of yankees. We learn the details of the backstory over the course of the movie, but the important thing to know is that Hex had to kill his buddy Jeb Turnbull (apparently Jeffrey Dean Morgan from WATCHMEN, although I didn’t realize it) so it was a double betrayal of his crazy commanding officer Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). Turnbull took it so personally he tracked down Hex, tied him to a cross, made him watch his family burn to death and then branded his face. Hex later burned the brand into unrecognizability (laser surgery was not yet available) and now he rides around with half his face deformed.

Years later the government finds out that Turnbull and some of his confederate soldiers have stolen a super weapon and plan to attack crowds during the Centennial celebration. They think only Hex has the skills and personal vendetta to take out Turnbull, so they hire him to save the country.

It sounds kinda stupid ’cause it is kinda stupid, but I feel like I get what they’re going for and I don’t think they entirely fail. It’s a western, but it’s a comic book western, so everything is amped up. Yeah, he’s a guy riding a horse, but he has a monster face and two giant gatling guns under his saddle bags. When he rides out of town the entire thing goes up into a fireball. Same thing with trains, they get robbed by bandits like in a regular western, but then they blow up like it’s a Schwarzenegger movie. Instead of a human prostitute girlfriend, Hex has Megan Fox, looking good except for the creepy alien waist her corset gives her, like a comic drawn with unrealistic proportions. When Hex tracks down a confederate colonel (Luke Duke himself, Tom Wopat) at a gladiatorial combat joint one of the fighters in the pit is a fuckin Snake Man. And at one point Hex rides across the plains with a giant swarm of crows following him. Not like they’re gonna help him or anything, they must just like hanging out with him, or think he’s onto something, or just want to help him look cool. You can’t do that in TRUE GRIT, but you can in JONAH HEX, so you might as well.

To really say “this is not your father’s western, or a movie your father would watch, even on cable” they got some band called Mammoth Mastodon to do the score along with Marco Beltrami. The rockin guitars and drums sometimes make it play as yet another shitty modern action movie that doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing, and sometimes gives it a unique feel. I like that they even did a guitar version of the WB logo music at the beginning.

The script is credited to Nevildine/Taylor of CRANK and GAMER infamy, but luckily they left before filming. Instead it’s directed by some dude named Jimmy Hayward who formerly only worked on computer animated family films. He was probly in over his head and couldn’t control the thing, but doesn’t seem entirely inept (except, surprisingly, in the shitty animated prologue). It’s not too spastic with the style and is generally well shot.

Where it goes wrong is mainly with the general plot of what the bad guys are trying to do and how the good guy stops it. It doesn’t really stick to what works in a straight western because it spends too much of its less-than-80-minutes on a slim post-Civil War version of a DIE HARD plot. Turnbull is your typical Malkovich weirdo character (he barely attempts an accent) and his big plan is just to shoot cannonballs into towns followed by little crystal ball things that cause big explosions. (It’s a weapon called “The Nation Killer” that was developed in a secret government program run by Eli Whitney.) But all Hex can really do is chase after him, punch some guys, chop some guys, shoot some guys, and all of this in the dark because the celebration is at night time. Not a very exciting climax.

But I have to admit I kind of like Brolin as this character of Jonah Hex. He gets to mutter and mumble and not worry about ever charming anybody. Every enemy he comes across has to make some comment about his face, and he has a whole catalog of snappy comebacks, but eventually gets tired of it and announces that he’s run out.

Hex never smiles (I’m not sure he physically can) so when he says funny shit it seems like he doesn’t know he’s funny, and that makes it better. After gunning down a corrupt sheriff and his entire posse he looks around at the witnesses and decides to pin the sheriff’s star on a DELIVERANCE-looking fat guy. He pats him and says “Congratulations.” I hope things turned out okay in that town. That could’ve been a spinoff.

Remember when I reviewed THE PHANTOM a while back I enjoyed how for some reason The Phantom has a horse and wolf that follow him around and know how to rescue him and shit? Jonah Hex could have a setup like that if he wanted to, because he frees a dog from a dogfight and the thing shows up at his side later, and in an entirely different part of the country if I’m not mistaken. (That could be another spinoff, the adventures of the dog walking many miles to find Jonah Hex.) You think the dog’s gonna help him somehow but instead Hex just looks at him and mutters, “You. Yeah… I don’t know what to say to you.”

The other thing I like about Jonah Hex is his inability to completely despise his old war buddies, even though they’re terrorists now. He knows they’re on the wrong side and has no problem killing them, but afterwards likes to pay his respects by saying things like “Thanks men” or “Sorry Jim.” I mean, who is he to judge, he was fighting for the South at one point too. He knows he’s as dumb as they are. I guess the awareness makes him smarter. But I like that he’s forgiving, even of these pricks.

One thing I haven’t mentioned: Hex has magic powers. He’s a corpse whisperer. Because of his past brush with death he has this weird thing where if he touches a dead body it comes back to life. He can’t resurrect the dead, because they’ll turn into ashes after a minute, but he can use it to get information. Lucky thing the Geneva conventions didn’t exist yet because I don’t think you could justify his post-death enhanced interrogation of a prisoner that already got interrogated to death.

I guess the supernatural element wasn’t in the comic strip books and it isn’t really needed in a western, but it’s okay because it leads to the one genuinely great scene in the movie. Hex realizes that to get the information he needs he has to dig up the grave of the best friend/villain’s son who he killed in the war and question the guy. I seriously liked this scene because not only was it a weird way to explain some of the backstory and the idea that Hex and Turnbull have both been turned into vengeful monsters by the same incident, but Brolin and Morgan turn it into a great character moment. They’re two friends who are pissed at each other but can’t hide the remains of their friendship. They talk it out and then sort of enjoy their short time together before the dead guy says, “Ah, hell. I’m startin to burn. I best be getting back underground.”

That scene alone puts JONAH HEX above some of the other universally panned movies it’s been lumped in with. It doesn’t have that total-mess feel of expensive, befuddling ideas loudly banging against each other, like WILD WILD WEST or LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. To me it feels a little closer to a SOLOMON KANE “I want to like this, some of it’s cool, but it’s not quite setting my world on fire for some reason” type feel.

I suspect some of the problem is that it was designed as a small movie, but I guess they moved it from August to June and did some reshoots to try to make it seem more like a big summer movie. I’m not sure which parts that would be but the movie would definitely benefit from a smaller, more personal scope. Not every hero has to be saving the whole country or world every time out. Ask The Punisher.

Whether it was the postproduction shenanigans or a screwup from the beginning, there’s definitely some narrative sloppiness that’s hard to get past. The opening origin story seems fine at first but gets more convoluted when it turns into barely moving drawings. Why do we have to be told that Turnbull is dead in one scene only to find out he’s not dead in the next scene? And there’s an early flash forward to a scene in the middle that turns out to be a showdown between Hex and Turnbull that only takes place in Hex’s mind as he’s dying and then is intercut later as a flashback when they actually do have a showdown. It becomes needlessly confusing and I suspect it was the original August ending that they didn’t want to waste so they incorporated it into the reshot June ending.

Also in the cast are Michael Fassbender (good as a bowler-hat wearing henchman character), Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, Aidan Quinn as Ulysses S. Grant, and Wes Bentley in a role that I bet was supposed to be bigger at some point. Also the usually comedic actor Will Arnett plays a completely straight underling role, which is kind of distracting, like when Chris Elliot was in MANHUNTER.

In defense of my good name (just Vern, no last name) I want to reiterate that I am not saying JONAH HEX is a good movie. I just don’t think it deserves to be shit on as much as it was. With low expectations I was at least able to get some good moments out of it. Is that so wrong?

Nope, it’s not an adaptation of anything, and it’s a little different from most of the other horror pictures that come out now because it’s from a girl point-of-view and it’s about relationships between girls. It’s not about something easy to sell like isn’t it fucked up how there is no hope at all or remember how there was a movie that had this same title before, well I know you never saw that one but what about seeing this guys, thanks. So Fox Atomic (who I thought got closed down already) panicked and aimed all of the advertising at male boners, basing it entirely around the other star, Megan Fox. The implied tagline is “get out the lotion fellas, it’s Megan Fox.” They didn’t even have Diablo Cody’s name on the trailer, let alone “from Academy Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody.” So don’t blame her for the movie not selling tickets.

Not that it’s all that great. I don’t think it really works as a whole, but it has enough good stuff that it deserved a better shot. You know how there’s still not equality in women’s salaries, well it’s the same with horror movies because there are plenty of way worse ones that made more money.

Seyfried plays Needy, a bug-eyed high school misfit (one of those hot-but-with-glasses girls they got in movies) whose life-long best friend Jennifer (Fox) grew into the hottest, most popular girl in school. Needy’s a sympathetic protagonist even though she’s introduced bloodying an innocent woman in an insane asylum. She’s not some type like a goth or something, she’s not trying to rebel or to get popular. She’s happy and she has a boyfriend and everything. But she’s been best friends with Jennifer since they were tiny and is kind of worshipful of her. Then after Jennifer leaves a club with some corny indie rock band she returns as a demon who has to eat people to survive, and it works as kind of a metaphor of the changes in their friendship. It’s hard to still hang out with somebody when they change that much. Needy is not comfortable with all the cannibalism and everything.

I don’t completely get the Megan Fox mania that has swept the male portions of the nation. I mean I agree that she looks hot alot of the time, but in the TRANSFORMERS movies she sounds like she’s reading off a card – I figured she was dumb as a sock full of gravel. Doesn’t that ruin it a little? And I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before, but most of the women who make it in Hollywood look like models, so why the fascination with this particular one? Why is she so much more exciting for them to talk about than Naomi Watts or somebody who’s clearly talented and intelligent? Or I’m sure there’s some twentysomething equivalent.

Well, I don’t know the answer to that but it’s not Megan Fox’s fault and I’ll lay off because she’s actually pretty good in this. It’s not surprising that she knows how to play a sexually aggressive femme fatale monster, but she also handles most of Cody’s dialogue well, which I didn’t expect. I guess she wasn’t exaggerating when she said Michael Bay’s only direction to her was “sit there and look hot.” In those movies sometimes she didn’t sound like she knew what the words she was saying meant, for this one she actually went out of her way to learn. She told Fangoria, “There was some weird shit Jennifer says that I had no idea what it meant, and no one else on set really knew either. We were in the middle of the writers’ strike, and we’d have to call and consult [Diablo Cody] and find out what some of this stuff was.”

I like the characters, I like some of the jokes, but I don’t think there’s enough story here, or maybe it’s just not moving along as quickly as it ought to be. The script might be a little thin but I think the direction might be to blame – some of the timing of the jokes seems a little off, some of the scenes in the middle seem to drag too much.

And I think the similarities to HEATHERS get a little offputting, because of what HEATHERS was saying. It’s hard not to think of that movie when watching JENNIFER’S BODY because you’ve got the same kind of made up slang, you’ve got a scene where one of the leads seduces a football player in the woods and kills him, you’ve got jokes about the awkward ways the teachers deal with the students’ grief over the tragedies, and Megan Fox even looks kind of like Shannen Doherty in parts of the movie. But HEATHERS used those things in an angry portrait of how cruel high school is, JENNIFER’S BODY seems to use it just for fun. It doesn’t have the same substance behind it, which would be fine if nobody had brought up HEATHERS and it didn’t occur to you to compare it. But let’s face it, it occurred to you.

Actually the movie it’s most similar to in substance is GINGER SNAPS. That one used a girl turning into a werewolf as a metaphor for her and her sister growing apart. This one has a girl turning into a demon as she’s growing apart from her childhood best friend. But that’s the part of the movie that works best. I think the relationship between Jennifer and Needy is strong (even though I didn’t understand if Needy really had lesbian feelings for Jennifer or if it was just a childhood curiosity).  This is where having a woman director and a woman writer pays off. I don’t think a dude would handle their friendship as well. It’s the rare horror movie that focuses more on the characters and if anything skimps on the horror.

Same goes for the treatment of sex in the movie, or at least the scene where Needy loses her virginity. The scene is awkward and sweet, not some conquest or uncontrollable lust. And even though it turns scary it’s not one of those things where the boyfriend turns out to be evil. It’s an overall positive experience I think. I don’t think she regrets it, and that’s not something you see in movies too often.

I’m not sure what this movie tells us about the skills of Diablo Cody. You may remember I was put off by the hype around JUNO and was prepared to hate it, but it won me over. Some people can’t get past the little oneliners and pop culture references, and admittedly the dialogue in that opening scene is deadly. But beyond that there’s a genuine sweetness and thoughtfulness that I can get behind. All the jibber jabber is a defense mechanism to hide the emotional vulnerabilities of the character, and maybe the writer too, I’m not sure.

JENNIFER’S BODY has some more of that dialogue she’s known for, but I liked most of it. It works because it’s a teenage girl story. Teenage girls do like to find their own ways of talking, and for movies to make up new ones is a long tradition, it’s allowed. And there are some good laughs. But the construction of the story is not as good as JUNO. It has a good beginning and ending, but the middle gets iffy at times. I think part of the problem is that Needy is the heroine but she’s not really active for alot of it, she’s kind of waiting around while Jennifer’s out murdering people.

So it’s still up in the air whether Cody is an original new voice we are just beginning to know, or whether she’ll disappear after a couple years like that dude who wrote SCREAM. But I wish her the best, and maybe I can help her out with that.

There’s a little part in this movie where Needy, in voiceover, compares somebody to a tree she saw as a kid. Then there’s a quick shot of a little girl looking at a tree, but it doesn’t look like the guy so it doesn’t add to our understanding of what she said, it kind of subtracts from it. Assuming these shots were specified in the scripts, and if I may be so bold as to give nitpicky advice to an Academy Award winning screenwriter, I think Cody should consider that maybe sometimes telling is better than showing, or at least telling is better than showing at the same time as you are also telling. Because there are a couple other parts where I noticed this. In JUNO there’s a funny line about a girl always making faces at Juno and somebody says that’s not making a face, that’s how her face looks. But then it steps on the joke by cutting to the girl making a face, showing what it looks like, making it less funny. JENNIFER’S BODY does it with the ending, too. I loved the ending. Not only does it have an uncredited cameo by an actor we all love, it leaves you laughing about the implication of what happens next… but then it throws a wet towel on it by showing what happens next during the end credits. What’s wrong with implications, man? Should’ve been left to the imagination in my opinion.

And as long as I’m giving unsolicited tips, I’d stay off the web-related slang from here on out. “Honest to blog” was one of the biggest groaners in JUNO, and now JENNIFER’S BODY introduces the horrors of “why don’t you just move along dot org.” Oh well, not a big deal.

The good news is Kusama and Cody do a pretty good job balancing the tone, having lots of jokes but treating the horror semi-seriously. SPOILER – if you’ve seen the movie I want to mention two disturbing moments that I thought were highlights. One was in the beginning when she kicked the orderly. At first I laughed because it was such a sudden and powerful kick, and the way the orderly stumbled over somebody else and had a hard time getting up. But then when I saw the blood and horror on her face it became upsetting, this poor lady, just doing her job, getting the shit beat out of her for no reason. A similar scene was at the end when Jennifer’s mom discovers Needy just after murdering her daughter. It’s such a jarring switch from fantastical monster movie to family tragedy. Good job on that scene.

Well, I think it’s too late, JENNIFER’S BODY has been legally declared a failure at the box office and with critics, and it will quickly slip away since there’s a better horror comedy and a better girl relationships movie both out this week (reviews coming soon). But I don’t look down on it. I liked it. Sort of.

[ratings]

Obviously you already know what this is. There’s no reason to try to explain the plot, except as a personal challenge. I accept. Here is my serious attempt to remember what in holy hell was going on in the movie I just saw.

Okay. In the caveman days there were already Transformer robots on earth, fighting with robot spears. Meanwhile, a few years after part 1, a giant wheel attacks Shanghai. Also I believe a car or SUV was helping the giant wheel by driving around real fast. The “Autobot” good guy cars now work with the US military (same soldiers from part 1) so they are there to chase around the wheel and enemy car and savagely murder both of them on the spot.

Sam (Shia Lebouf, I, ROBOT) is about to leave for Princeton. His dogs like to buttfuck each other and his parents bicker all the time – you know, the kind where you can tell it must be funny by the way they say it. Sam takes out the shirt he was wearing in part 1 but he never washed it so he didn’t notice the large chunk of alien technology still attached, which comes out and turns his kitchen appliances into robotic gremlins, so his Camaro/robot guardian Bumblebee appears and heroically blows up the house. Sam is afraid of commitment so he avoids telling his Playboy model/mechanic girlfriend (Megan Fox, from the magazine covers) that he loves her.

In college his roommate Leo runs a robot-sighting websight. (This character will stick around for the rest of the movie because it’s supposed to be funny when he gets real scared or when he gets tased.) Also a hot girl keeps hitting on Sam and his girlfriend at home gets attacked by a small robot that she tortures and captures but Sam starts seeing symbols and going nuts in class so his girlfriend comes and sees him about to fuck the other girl who turns out to be a robot like in TERMINATOR 3 so there’s a car chase, etc.

At some point an hour or more in they meet up with John Turturro, who you’ll remember got pissed on by a robot in the first one so in comparison his part here seems very dignified. I forgot to mention that the bad guys resurrected Megatron (dead leader from part 1) but I’m not sure why since he’s now just an asskissing flunky for the new villain character, The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd, hopefully they paid him enough that he can take a break from signing CANDYMAN posters at conventions). Megatron lives in a cave in space with Starscream and The Fallen, who if I understood correctly just sits in a throne all day shitting out slimy baby robots and complaining about the Prime brothers and how they’re the only ones who can “defeat” him. So Megatron goes back to earth (jesus, I just got home, you’re sending me back already?) to kill Optimus Prime so that The Fallen can come down and get the secret symbols from “the boy” and use those to find a secret tomb where his brothers sacrificed themselves to hide The Matrix, not the movie but a piece of metal that can power a machine that nobody noticed was hidden inside one of the pyramids and that will destroy the sun in order to do something else although I honestly forget what it was, but it was evil. I remember that much.

I think the robot Starscream has to stay home and take care of the babies, but I’m not sure. Most of the evil robots look about the same so I’m not sure who is in what scene, but every half hour or so I would figure out one of them was Megatron (usually standing on a building with a camera flying around it in circles) and I’d think “oh yeah, forgot about him. Where’s he been?”

At one point somebody kills Optimus Prime, but the girlfriend’s little robot prisoner brings them to a museum where they find a jet plane that turns into a robot that is an old man and farts parachutes but agrees with Sam’s hunch that the Matrix could bring Optimus Prime back to life so he warps them to Egypt (I didn’t catch how) and the military flies in with Optimus Prime’s body so they bring it back to life and then a giant robot climbs up the pyramid for about ten minutes until they come up with a plan: shoot something at him, and that kills him. Then I think there was some more fighting, Sam died and went to robot heaven and came back and at the end Megatron was still apparently there because I remember he ran away. Score by Steve Jablonsky featuring Linkin Park.

It’s hard to measure but in my opinion this is the single worst script ever used in one of these huge moron movies. It makes INDEPENDENCE DAY seem witty and tightly structured. Traditionally plenty of stupid shit happens in a movie like this, but usually there’s an obvious plot there, “they have to stop the aliens from destroying the world, so they find a flaw in their defense systems and work out a plan to destroy them” or whatever. It’s a new development to make it so hard for a normal person to even have a clue what the fuck is supposed to be going on, what anybody is trying to do. Michael Bay applied this disorientation method first to editing, then to character design, and now to writing. But it’s good for many laughs because every 30 minutes or so some robot earnestly gives some explanation of some magic gizmo or ancient history that comes out of the fuckin blue and then they’re off to do some other stupid shit somewhere else. At about the 2 hour mark it sinks in that you are nowhere near a passable ending or climax to a story and there could well be another hour or more left.

I think you all know where I stand on TRANSFORMERS PART 1. I took some flack because I hated the fucking thing but apparently it was agreed on that we were gonna let that one slide. I guess I took it a little personally because I love these types of movies when they’re done well, so it really chapped my hide to hear everybody parroting and accepting that cliche about it’s just a summer movie, it’s supposed to be dumb and incomprehensible, what did you expect, Terminator 2 Terminator 3 Hamlet? only a dijon mustard loving elitist snob would not get a huge boner just from watching a blurry robot punch (hug?) another robot (building?) in 1 second shots while a camera rotates around it really fast so fuck you you hate America why did you call me stupid by saying you don’t like it you are a faggot it’s not supposed to win oscars.

You know me, I can enjoy stupid movies, even bad movies. I fucking wrote SEAGALOGY, man, of course I understand appreciating different types of movies for what they are, warts and all. All I’m saying is have the courage of your convictions. If you like it, tell me why you like it. Don’t just give me a list of the standards it’s not supposed to live up to. You’re selling movies short. Don’t tell me that a movie about this can’t also be good. And especially don’t tell me that this counts as good action scenes. That’s crossing a line, pal. That’s like pissing on Abraham Lincoln’s grave.

It’s a fight I still get dragged into from time to time but you know what, after last summer had THE DARK KNIGHT and IRON MAN and WALL-E, all great, fun, smart, well-made, and hugely popular, it’s hard to really get upset about it anymore. I can let go of my fear that standards are so low nobody will try to make good ones anymore. If people like a movie I think is shit then so be it. It’ll take more than Michael Bay to kill the summer movie.

But give him an A for effort, he’s running after the summer movie naked with a chainsaw like Patrick Bateman. And he has the same abs. TRANSFORMERS PART 2 THE REVENGE OF THE FALLEN is the single most relentless cinematic assault on the human brain that technology has been able to achieve so far. It has everything from the first one, but more: more robots, more visual information, more confusion, more bad jokes, more racism, more minutes to sit through. I compared part 1 to BATMAN AND ROBIN, which nobody agrees with. But forget about the quality comparison and consider this as a case of Batman and Robin Syndrome. Director makes dumb movie, people are okay with it and make it a huge hit, so for the next one the studio says “he seems to know what he’s doing” and lets him indulge in every excess and fetish a couple hundred million dollars can buy, truly believing that’s what people want because they paid money that first time.

Well, they’re paying money a second time too, and that’s all that matters to Bay, unfortunately. But unless the general audience response is drastically different from what I’ve seen so far I think it will have the same effect of killing the popularity of the first one. After all, the robots in that one won’t seem as novel after having seen this one. It’ll be obsolete. But who wants to watch this shit again?

That really is the only thing the movie intentionally has going for it: an unprecedented amount of ridiculously detailed CGI creations. But just like last time they’re put into such a dumb story making such terrible jokes that it’s hard to care, and on the occasions when they do the robot fighting that fans of the movies keep talking about it’s not all that exciting because you sort of want all of the characters to die and you can’t tell if they did because the groundbreakingly indecipherable designs make it hard to tell exactly what’s going on. I honestly think they made an effort to pull the camera back a little this time, and I was able to follow it slightly better. In probaly the best scene (I guess) Optimus fights a bunch of bad guys in a forest, and although I don’t know who any of the bad guys were I was able to tell that Optimus was the one in the middle and the grey guys surrounding him were the bad guys. That’s progress.

In the same way that I’d rather watch BATMAN AND ROBIN again than BATMAN FOREVER (because both are terrible so you go for the more spectacularly terrible one), I enjoyed this alot more than the first one. I have to admit I had a big smile on my face. This crazy motherfucker never runs out of what the fuck!?! moments. I’m sure you’ve heard about many of these but this movie includes: wrecking ball testicles, robot farting, a robot humping Megan Fox’s leg (and she likes it), an extended skit about Sam’s mom getting high on pot and going around tackling people, a robot with a cane and beard, a robot that talks like Joe Pesci, internal car peeing in the form of anti-freeze on a girl’s face, John Turturro suddenly tearing his pants off to show a closeup of his ass in a g-string, and a scene where Turturro tells a robot that a story he’s telling should have a clear beginning, middle and end, a “plot,” – as if one of the screenwriters is trying to send out an S.O.S.

I’m kind of fascinated by the schizophrenic tone not only from scene to scene, but even within a scene. For example when the gremlinbots attack Sam it keeps changing from shot to shot whether they seem to want it to be a hilarious comedy scene or a tense moment. People are getting attacked, I think somebody dies, then it cuts to dogs fucking, then Bumblebee gets a hero shot accompanied by THE ROCK style music of courageousness, then the mom bumps her head and it makes a sound like two pans hitting together. It’s like one of those writing exercises where you write one sentence and then pass it on to somebody else to continue. Sometimes there are weird non-sequitur cuts like suddenly the hot girl is walking down a hall for no apparent purpose, or they walk out of the Smithsonian and appear in an airplane graveyard. Like in BAD BOYS 2 Bay seems to think he can both do a serious movie and make constant lame jokes.In the middle of what I guess is a tense sequence where the whole world is after Sam there’s a cameo by Deep Roy as an Egyptian border guard, they make midget jokes and then he lets them through because he knows John Turturro from a falaffel stand in New York. Get it?  I think the comedy is his worst sin, worse even than the action scenes, because constant unfunny jokes are harder to laugh at than confusing action scenes.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about “the twins” Mudflap and Skids, last seen in a montage in Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED. It’s funny because in my review of part 1 I got on Michael Bay for the racist stereotype of having a “black” robot whose entire part is to say “what’s crackin bitches?”, do a breakdance move, and later be dead. Well jesus, that seems quaint after the twins. I read all about it but when you actually see it on screen it’s actually shocking, your stomach just drops. They’re these two “comic relief” robots who talk ebonics, always punch each other and talk about “popping a cap in your ass.” Defending the bigotry to the Associated Press, Bay said “Listen, you’re going to have your naysayers on anything,” and “I purely did it for kids.  Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.” Which explains why they’re first disguised as an ice cream truck that says “SUCK MY POPSICLE” on the side of it, and spend most of the movie punching each other and calling each other “pussy.” Because of the kids.

(By the way, have you ever noticed how blowhards like to throw in a “listen” here and there? “Listen, you’re going to have naysayers on anything. Even David Duke, when he ran for office, alot of naysayers were saying nay to that. Are you listening? Listen. Listen to this. Listen to me. Shut the fuck up and listen. Listen, I’m Michael Bay.” Other good phrases for Michael Bay to use would be “Hark!” or “I declare!”)

Although there was alot of derisive laughter throughout the movie, some of the audience I saw it with were into it enough that they clapped during some of the fights. But in the scene where you first see the twins’ faces clearly everybody groaned and booed. That was right before the joke about how they don’t know how to read. I’m embarrassed for Steven Spielberg having his name on this thing, not just because it’s so terrible but because I know he fucking knows better. He should have to bring Michael Bay to a slavery museum. Sure, the jive-talking gangsta wannabe stereotype is a common one, but those faces are straight out of some Ku Klux Klan newsletter, or at best a cartoon from the 1930s. How the fuck does that even happen? Look at that shit! He has a gold tooth! They have monkey ears and stoned eyes! This is actually in a 2009 movie, no joke! Who designed these and why?

In Devin Feraci’s article about the twins he mentioned that Spielberg was going to screen the movie for the Obama family. Maybe he was making some joke I didn’t get because I can’t find any other reference to this, but if it’s true I would’ve loved to see the CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM-worthy uncomfortableness on his face during that “we don’t read so much” scene. Sitting there with the first black president, watching ol’ Mudflap and Skids. What a great time. If I was Spielberg I would’ve shown up and said “Hey Obamas, I’ve got a special treat. I know I said we were watching TRANSFORMERS 2 but instead I brought E.T.! Or MUNICH! SUGARLAND EXPRESS! Anything! Whatever you guys want to watch from all of my movies pre-summer of 2009, we’re watching it! Just for you guys!”

There are other politics in the movie that I think are on purpose, not just done out of moronic ignorance. One of the bad guys is a nerdy bureaucrat working for Obama, who talks about diplomacy in the same way a bad guy dean talks about discipline in a fraternity movie. (Michael Bay hates nerds and has to have a scene where a soldier physically humiliates the guy and practically makes him shit his pants.) This guy wants the Autobots to leave earth, because if they weren’t there the Decepticons wouldn’t be attacking and the war would go away. Optimus says he’ll leave if Obama asks him to but implies that it would be foolish and fatal. So yeah, I’m pretty sure Michael Bay wants us to stay in Iraq. Good one. Thanks for your insights, genius.

So, there is some political subtext here and there, but I don’t know who wants to analyze that shit. As far as I’m concerned the one aspect of this thing that deserve more thought is the robot babies. Did I dream that part? I had to ask some other people and although one was too drunk to remember it two others agreed with me that there really was a scene with slimy robot babies. The movie just throws that one in your face like you already know about it. “Oh yes, of course, there is a cave in space where Starscream is the nanny to a whole bunch of baby robots. Everyone knows that. You didn’t know that?”

I don’t know if there are webisodes or prequel comics all about the Deceptitots, or a spinoff sitcom, but personally I was surprised. I guess it’s like CARS, you gotta wonder how these things reproduce. Even Tyrese muses about Optimus Prime, “You gotta wonder – if God made us in his image, who made him?” You know how Tyrese is though, always philosophizing. It seems like The Fallen must be the Queen Transformer, laying robot eggs, but I’m not sure. We do know there are girl Transformers, but they don’t seem capable of bearing the entire race. I count four, and one of them just has one line and then dies, and then another one dies, and a third one I think might also die in that scene but of course there is no way to really know in a movie like this. Plus all of them are skinny and do not have robot-bearing hips.

It would be best for mankind if there is never a part 3 and if everyone involved in making this one goes off to live on an island harvesting bees and staying away from any sort of device that would cause them to share ideas or pictures with the outside world. But there is a chance these pricks are in it only for the money and will make a part 3, so if that happens I hope they will address the nature or nurture issue. Are these Trasformkins born Autobots or Decepticons? Or are they raised that way? At what point do they grow the symbol? Is it possible for a doctortron to see the symbol on an ultrasound? We learn from the guy with the robot beard and the “funny” Scottish accent that it’s possible to switch sides, so the symbol really doesn’t prove anything. But I doubt most Transformers see it that way. They’re gonna be real upset when a baby pops out with the wrong symbol. It leads to some serious ethical and biomechanical issues.

* * *

Geoffreyjar wrote to me to ask why I thought people were being so harsh in their reviews when really this is just more of the same shit everybody liked two years ago. For example Roger Ebert wrote a hilariously dead-on evisceration of the movie, but doesn’t ever argue that it’s different from the first one, which he gave three stars and seemed to enjoy. And it’s true, alot of these reviews are basically saying the same things I ranted about in my part 1 review that made so many people so mad.

To answer Geoff’s question I believe it’s because the novelty of computer animated robots was the only thing people liked in the first one. Same thing here but the novelty has worn off so now they’re noticing the rest of it. They’re being harsh because they’re going through what some of us went through with part 1. I already aired my grievances about the action scenes looking like a closeup of a ball of smashed cars rolling down a hill. So now I guess I’m less mad about it and more able to laugh about it. As camp, if  you’re able to stomach it, it’s actually pretty hilarious for a while, although it would be much funnier if they trimmed 60-80 minutes. I usually think people have too short of attention spans but this is clearly too long for a movie that doesn’t make a very serious attempt to include characters or stories.

I think Roger Ebert may be right, this may be the peak for this type of crap. It would be pretty hard to devise a more potent mix of expensive and horrible. Stephen Sommers and Roland Emmerich will make movies almost as stupid and equally full of destruction, but it will seem a little underwhelming. Unless some studio wants to spend $400 million on an adaptation of a Mountain Dew commercial with  no script, seven years of postproduction and the entire cast in blackface this is about as far as this path will take them. Even then, what kind of special effects would catch people’s attention? No matter what stupid shit they come up with people will think, “Yeah, but are there twenty or thirty fifty foot tall robots with ten thousand moving parts wiggling around? No? Then I’m not impressed.”

To say that Optimus Prime has an overly complicated design is a huge understatement. I don’t even like to look at the fuckin thing. Then at the end another robot dies so Optimus takes the pieces of his corpse and attaches them to himself to go into battle! Never mind the weird Ed Gein implications of that, it’s just funny that they think it’s a good idea to add even more clutter. That’s all they can do is keep spending more money to stack more junk on top of junk. Either that or go back to that whole “good stories and characters” idea from last summer.

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