note: this review is excessively long and convoluted and takes forever to get to the point, but only as a clever form-is-an-extension-of-content type reference to the movie it describes, in my opinion. Unfortunately I could never match the feel of the movie no matter how hard I tried. It’s like when some asshole reviews a Dr. Seuss movie in rhymes or some shit like that.

introductory remarks/overture

My friends, we have lost. Michael Bay has defeated us. First he invaded the shores of the genre we hold most dear. He brought us gifts of explosions, while behind our backs he robbed us of the very language of geography and context we use to communicate what is exploding and who or what is endangered by said explosion. Then he confiscated our property, buying up our favorite low budget horror classics to rebuild as slick, soul-less product – just to crush our spirits. And now he has completely subjugated us.

At first we sought to make peace. I tried to enjoy THE ROCK, but I couldn’t make it work. After ARMAGEDDON we resisted and openly rebelled. We stopped going to his movies, stopped paying for his remakes. But all these years later we’ve lost our fight. We’ve grown used to the occupation, learned to accept it as a fact of life. We’ve gotten curious, wanted a taste of the other side. So we gave them $12.50 for a ticket plus $2.00 for 3D plus $1.25 internet convenience surcharge. Right? Didn’t we guys?

Well, I did. I cracked. But they said the most horrible things. They threatened to remake my family.

I’ve said more than my piece about why these TRANSFORMERS movies are awful. This is the third one, there’s no surprise and nothing to prove here. Michael Bay movies haven’t changed, but I have. I can admit I’ve gone from hating them to loving to hate them. I might even watch ARMAGEDDON again some day. You never know.

Of course, if Platinum Dunes starts announcing more remakes I might get bitter again. And I definitely reserve the right to go off when people make that “it’s only entertainment, so you can’t criticize it for doing a shitty job of that” argument, or the “this is what action movies are meant to be: badly made action movies,” or the “if you haven’t personally directed a $200 million robot movie then you don’t have the right to point out that one could theoretically be made that was actually pretty good,” or the “I know it seems like it’s shitty when you watch it but actually it’s not, because here is the number of dollars it has made and it is a high number,” or of course the “what did you expect, it’s based on a toy commercial, of course it’s ineptly made, moronic horse shit designed by and for drooling, tasteless, subhuman imbeciles. That said, it was right up my alley! I loved it!”

If you claim he’s making the modern equivalent of TERMINATOR 2 then I’m gonna react on primal instinct like you just spit on my grandma. But I can appreciate him as a hilariously overblown and uniquely inept (but also talented in some superficial ways) weirdo. We can use a couple of those as long as they’re the exception to the rule. There have been great Summer Movies made since TRANSFORMERS, and there will be more of them some day I’m sure. (Maybe next summer.) Unlike Autobots and Decepticons I have come to believe that high quality Summer Movies and hilariously shitty ones can co-exist peacefully. After all, ALIENS came out the same summer that HOWARD THE DUCK did, and I don’t got a problem if some people get their jollies putting on the duck movie every once in a while and trying to figure out what the hell that was all about. We have the capacity to enjoy both. Humans are complicated machines.

So I cannot lie, I was really excited to see TRANSFORMERS’S DARK OF THE MOON. I come to it not as a so-called hater or as an insurgent, but as someone who has made peace with the terribleness of this series and now enjoys watching them to see just how far they will go, just what they will feel is a good thing to put on screen, just how intimate a portrait of Bay’s subconscious can be concocted within the confines of the budget, shooting schedule and needs of advertising partners (Hasbro, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, the U.S. military).

the action

If somebody likes this movie they’ll say it’s because of the action. TRANSFORMERS sequels are more like software upgrades than sequels. They’re about advancements in computer technology, not in story or character. In each one they wreck more stuff than in the last and since that’s all most people care about each new sequel has to be by definition the best one.

To its credit part 3 does have some spectacular spectacle. It does seem more impressive than, to name one recent example, 2012, even though technically it doesn’t destroy nearly as much of the earth. Although the robots can barely count as characters they do get to smash lots of things and flip around and shoot lasers, occasionally saying moronic comedy dialogue in a variety of ethnic accents, like the dogs in Walt Disney’s LADY AND THE TRAMP. So by that definition there’s alot of action.

There’s a part where a building is slowly tipping over and a bunch of humans are (for some reason) running up it and climbing around in it. There’s some real footage of some guys base jumping. Chicago gets destroyed (in a short montage). PEARL HARBOR has better put-together action sequences in my opinion, but (despite intentionally evoking imagery from 9-11 and the Challenger explosion) this is more tasteful so it might be Bay’s most enjoyable action. And for reasons explained in the next section I was able to mostly follow what was going on.

So for once I know for sure that it’s not just fast editing that keeps me at a distance from Bay’s action. It’s that these characters are so stupid and unlikable, their predicament is so ridiculous and the specific goals of each sequence are so poorly explained that it’s hard to really give a shit about an hour straight of bang bang bang bang bang scream bang complain bang. There’s an impressive amount of “cool” stuff in there that’s nice to look at, but it’s all so hollow. When John McClane is so desperate to avoid an explosion he decides he has no choice but to tie a firehose around his waist and jump over the side you’re right there with him, you feel it in your gut. But the dickheads in this movie run around beneath an epic intergalactic war of massive destruction and you barely ever bother to think “oh shit, you better duck.”

I was thinking Tyrese was gonna return (he was in parts 1-2) and when he hadn’t shown for a good 2+ hours I thought “Tyrese was smart to choose FAST FIVE over this.” Then he shows up and brings some authentic-looking military hard-asses to fight the robots and I thought “Jesus, why has the movie been about whiny fucking Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) when these guys were around?” Then for some reason Witwicky gets to lead their team against the Decepticons. Every once in a while a good guy robot shows up to murder somebody or get murdered. There’s not that much interaction between the robots and humans except when the bad guys vaporize people leaving just skulls.

I guess you don’t always have to connect with the characters, but you do have to believe in them on some level for it to be effective. The opening kidnapping/car chase/shootout in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION is fucking exhilarating, and you have no idea who those people are when it happens. But there’s a story arc to the scenes, there’s escalation, there’s a climax, there’s a constant sense of danger. That’s the more important part of a great fight or chase: it’s not just bombast, it’s a story within the story. The much discussed last act of DARK OF THE MOON is like a white guy, it doesn’t have any rhythm. Optimus or Bumblee Bee will show up for a second and do something and then be gone for a while and you don’t know where they are. They aren’t really anywhere I guess, until they’re needed for a shot. As is traditional in the TRANSFORMERS series the villain just stands on a tall building for the last half hour or so, occasionally yelling something evil.

I really believe you could chop out almost any of the scenes and mix them up in any order at all and it wouldn’t make any more or less sense.

stereoscopics

The tone and style of DARK OF THE MOON is not all that different from the preposterous last installment. The one major difference is that it’s shot/animated in the 3D. There has been alot of hype and complaints from Bay that he was forced into shooting competent action scenes because the cameras are too heavy to jerk around like he normally does and the 3D is too hard to read if you edit it in his usual eyeball torture style. I was convinced that somebody would be blinded by this combination.

It doesn’t seem to me like he toned down his style much from the previous two, and the quick cuts in a few scenes actually did hurt my eyes (mostly the opening montage, which jarringly cuts between 3D and 2D and stock footage and grainy fake stock footage because the president JFK is featured so the style of the movie JFK has to be mimicked). But I have to admit that I assumed wrong, the 3D really is more helpful to a Bay movie than hurtful. In 2D the big-pile-of-garbage character design style of the robots blends together so you can’t tell where one ugly robot ends and the other begins. In 3D your eye can easily distinguish between the different piles of garbage because one is in the foreground and one is further back. You still don’t necessarily know who the different robots are or what they’re supposed to be doing, but you definitely have a better idea of where they’re situated within the smashed buildings, which is a major breakthrough for this series. I know I’m being condescending but I mean it honestly that for me anyway the 3D was a handy tool to understand what in fuck’s name was going on.

I guess Bay was right, there was no reason to learn how to stage clear, crisp action scenes. He was waiting for mankind to develop a system of cameras, projector lenses and glasses that would help people’s eyeballs to partly decipher the wiggly pile of bullshit he slops in front of them.

What’s new in Transformers 3.0?

So I agree with any praise people have for the 3D here, but not the other conventional wisdom that Bay toned down all the horrible parts of the previous TRANSFORMERSes, like how George Lucas had less Jar Jar Binks after everybody hated him in Star Wars part 1. It is different in a few respects:

1. Racism. As far as I noticed Bay made good on his promise that the jive talking gold-toothed “gangsta” robots with the monkey faces were not in this one. And you know what, how dare you imply that those racist caricatures that he created and publicly defended would be in this movie? What kind of person do you think he is, to continue doing that? You make me sick, smearing a good man’s name like that. Shame on you. Shame.

My prediction that Bay would have a WWII flashback featuring buck-toothed Zero-bots has not come to pass. The most racist stereotype in the movie is Ken Jeong as a guy named “Wang,” but that’s his usual shtick so I blame him as much as Bay.

note: Bay fills the hole left by the missing racism with a couple of his old standbys, the Gay Stereotype Character (Alan Tudyk) and The Scene Where Two Guys Are Doing Something That Is Misinterpreted As Them Buttfucking.

2. “”One thing we’re getting rid of is what I call the dorky comedy.” –Bay, to USA TODAY

That’s another one, I wonder how they got that “dorky comedy” into all of Bay’s previous movies. It’s weird that they could slip that past him so many times, but I’m glad he was finally able to put a stop to it. Except not really. This is not the gritty, serious version of talking car robots.

DARK OF THE MOON does show a small amount of restraint. He doesn’t undermine every attempt at drama with lame jokes, just some of them. It’s not the constant groaner-fest that the other two TRANSFORMERSes and BAD BOYS 2 are. But there’s still alot of the actors riffing and never connecting, plus wacky flashbacks and entire scenes to introduce “funny” tangental characters. (John Malkovich for example has a big scene where he’s kind of funny, and it seems like he’s gonna be a character in the movie, and then he disappears. Doesn’t even get his head bit off by a robot I don’t think.)

3. No peeing, farting or robo-balls. And John Turturro keeps his pants on. He’s still talking and acting like an idiot, but he wears a suit. Very professional. I guess the dick and butt stuff must’ve been all Bay meant when he said “dorky comedy,” but if he’s going to continue making comedies I think he might want to re-examine the dorkiness levels of the rest of his work.

I guess these fixes have made a difference for some people, but in my opinion that is not a drastic course correction. It’s like if Joel Schumacher had made another Batman movie and said “this one has less puns, and we got rid of those stupid nipples! Who put those fucking things in there?” Okay, I see you’re trying to please me, but that isn’t enough to make it into an actual good movie. Maybe you should’ve just kept following your heart.

I believe a good movie could be made about this subject matter. I don’t believe a good movie could be made about it by Michael Bay, so the fucker might as well just get naked and go buckwild like he did last time.

And he kind of did. It’s not that different. It kind of makes me sad that Bay and LaBeouf are distancing themselves from part 2 now. It’s a terrible movie, but it’s obviously Bay’s movie, so he should stand by it. You can’t convince me that that wasn’t the movie those guys wanted to make at the time. Back then they were so high on it that Bay wrote a letter to some dinky newspaper nobody ever heard of to imply the critic should be fired for writing a negative review of a movie that made lots of money. But after a couple years of hearing how it’s the worst fucking shit ever they started to get embarrassed and blame it on the writer’s strike. (Joel Schumacher wishes he had that excuse.)

the plot

Don’t worry though, the claims that the new script by Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, THE RING, BROTHERS GRIMM) is relatively sensible and well written are an utter fabrication. There is no evidence of that in the movie anyway. The convoluted plot involves an Autobot  or good guy robot (Leonard Nimoy) that was carrying a technology that “would’ve won the war” on the Transformer home planet of Cybertron, except he crash-landed on our moon and died so now Optimus Prime finds out about him decades later and brings him back to life but it turns out he was lured into doing that because actually the guy made a deal (hundreds of years ago?) with the bad guys, the Decepticons, to use the technology to transport the planet of Cybertron to Earth (?) and turn all humans into slaves or something. (I hope this means the humans would have to work as the robots’ household appliances, like the dinosaurs in The Flintstones.) Meanwhile sellout humans conspire to make it happen and a robotic bird is murdering NASA scientists and our hero Sam is worried that his new girlfriend is gonna fall for her handsome boss (Patrick Dempsey) and also he’s pissed because “it’s not fair” that the Autobots get to go on secret missions in the Middle East (I believe they are American citizens now) but he doesn’t get to go and the National Secretary of Intelligence (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) is finding out secrets even she didn’t know about and Optimus is really pissed that he didn’t know about it either. Also Sam goes on a bunch of job interviews and his dad is disappointed in him that he hasn’t found a job yet but he did get a medal from Obama but nobody’s impressed. This all ties in to the moon landing and the Chernobyl meltdown, and then Congress votes that the Autobots have to leave Earth so they fly away on a secret space shuttle they had and then Chicago is destroyed and taken over by the Decepticon party (in a brief montage, it’s worth repeating that) so Sam and Tyrese lead a team of badass Navy SEAL type dudes to climb around on destroyed buildings and try to shoot the one rocket they have at a space thing or whatever, and it turns out the Autobots were faking it they didn’t leave so Optimus kills some of the Decepticons and makes one of his little speeches, so everything should be okay now. God bless America.

I might have done a better job summarizing that than I did with part 2, but in my opinion it’s not a well constructed story. Fortunately that’s the charm of these movies, if you can call it that. While not as out-and-out insane as the last one this one has a respectable collection of incredulous laughs:

-Megatron (I didn’t realize it was him at first) drives through an African Savannah, scares the zebras, tells the elephants to hail him and feeds “my frag-ile ones,” baby Garbage Pail Kid robots

-an Autobot is described as “the Albert Einstein of his civilization” even though another Autobot is designed to look like a cartoony Albert Einstein type (with glasses)

-a weird Decepticon goblin/Slimer guy occasionally wobbles past the camera making odd noises and then disappears

-for some reason Sam lives with two gremlin-sized asshole robots, one that I’m pretty sure was a bad guy in the last episode and one with hair that I thought I forgot about but I am told he was new

-a printer, a TV monitor and various other devices turn into robots and murder people

-Megatron blows up the Lincoln Memorial statue and sits in its chair (probly my favorite part of the movie)

-Optimus Prime occasionally chimes in out of the blue with corny narration (I kinda wish it was Werner Herzog)

-there’s a mournful procession of Autobots driving to the secret giant Space Shuttle to abandon the Earth, and sad music plays but you can’t help but laugh because they’re all shiny candy-colored hot rods with flames painted on them and shit

-”The honor is all mine”: Optimus meets Buzz Aldrin (playing himself!) and melts with patriotic goo, as if a robot who can fly into space without a vehicle gives a shit which puny humans landed on their moon years after his personal friend Sentinel Prime already had

etc.

With no investment in the story or characters it’s these type of unexpected bits that you have to latch onto to be able to enjoy it. If the movie’s inane, you must have insane. And there’s enough of it to keep me amused through a good percentage of the film’s seven hour, forty-two minutes not including credits running time.

empowerment or exploitation?

The love of Sam’s life from parts 1 and 2 is gone (his mom says she dumped him, one of the little asshole robots says “She was mean!”). You probly read that the original piece-of-actress Megan Fox allegedly got fired and allegedly for saying in an interview that Bay “wants to be like Hitler on his sets.” In that recent piece in GQ Bay said that Spielberg told him to fire her, so in that sense he is like Hitler, because he blamed it on the Jew.

(that’s a joke, I don’t really believe that, don’t fire me. Also I looked it up and apparently he’s Jewish too. More importantly if I was gonna unfairly compare him to a dictator I’d say he’s more of a Muammar Gaddafi)

The replacement model, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Carly, comes courtesy of Victoria Secret, where Bay has alot of connections. To her and Bay’s credit she’s fine, her acting performance is more natural than Fox in the other two movies. But her giant man-made lips (on her face) are more distracting. Seriously, it made me yearn for the down-to-earth girl-next-door looks of Megan Fox. Huntington-Whiteley is even more in the Playboy/Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue/Person You Would Never See Or Be Allowed To Talk To In Real Life neighborhood, which to be fair is where Bay has one of his summer homes.

Carly is introduced ass-first, walking up stairs in her panties holding a stuffed bunny. Later there’s a 3D upskirt shot as she gets out of her Mercedes (a new model that Sam looks up on the internet so it can show all the specs on screen).

She’s already Sam’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, but Sam is humiliated that he can’t find a job and has to live off of the money she gets from a high paying job organizing a valuable art collection for Patrick Dempsey. You’ll notice that Sam regains his manhood late in the movie when it turns out Dempsey is a Decepticon collaborator and explicitly states that he really gave Carly the job because of her connection to Sam and not based on her actual talents. So don’t worry everybody, she actually didn’t do a good job or achieve any success separate of her boyfriend. Women are still in their place. It’s kind of like if in part 1 it turned out that Megan Fox wasn’t actually good at fixing cars, Sam had actually done it all while sleepwalking.

Dempsey also waxes poetic about the curves of his prize car while the camera ogles Carla’s body, because your car and your women are pretty much the same thing. Yeah, he’s supposed to be kind of a sleazebag, but I think these movies share his point of view on that one.

Bay doesn’t seem like a political guy, but he’s trying so hard to be “politically incorrect” that his movies end up having subtext anyway. I just can’t figure a coherent world view from it. He tries to ridicule any government figure but lionize any soldier, astronaut, or robot that stands in front of a flag. There are some Obama references, but I think it’s up to debate whether they’re derogatory like in part 2. Maybe the worst is a mention that he has some kind of surveillance on members of Congress so he can get dirt on his political enemies. It doesn’t come across like the smear it ought to, though. I’m not sure Bay is against it.

But Bill O’Reilly does appear in the movie as himself. You don’t put Bill O’Reilly into a movie unless you’re into him.

There was another part that I took as an anti-so-called-socialism message, when the character Sentinel Prime sinisterly yells something about “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few!” But then somebody explained to me that it was what Spock said in WRATH OF KHAN. Still kinda weird though that they would get Leonard Nimoy himself to portray Spock’s philosophy as evil. I bet it was scripted to be an understandable motivation for the character, but the way it’s delivered it might as well be “We evil robots will conquer your puny human world! HAHAHAHAHA!”

I’m scoffing at those parts because I disagree with them, but I think they belong in the movie. I think even big expensive bullshit like this should have an element of personal expression, so I encourage Bay to put whatever he believes in his movies. And you know how hard it is to be a conservative in liberal Hollywood, it’s obviously a huge struggle for him every single day. Never once given a fair shake in the business or allowed to do what he wants. It’s a crying shame.

the douchebag’s journey

I think the most interesting new development (and maybe the part that makes it a personal expression for Bay) is that Sam has transformed (get it?) from a likable, self-deprecating reluctant hero to a condescending asshole with an out-of-control sense of douchey entitlement. He spends the first 2/3 of the movie yelling at and sarcastically insulting people. It oughta be called TRANSFORMERS: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!? For example he chews out some soldiers for the crime of not just letting him drive into the world’s most top secret military base. He insults his girlfriend, his parents, his robot friends, several potential employers, and even the National Secretary of Intelligence, who gets it for asking him who his girlfriend is that he has let into the world’s most top secret military base. There are heroes, and then there are pricks who throw a tantrum at the new security guard in their office building for not recognizing them without their required ID. I guess the idea is that Sam is supposed to be both.

I guarantee you this Sam Witwicky does not tip well, if at all.

Not only is he a prick, but as soon as he berates his way past national security procedures he proceeds to shit all over that trust. After complaining about being questioned and swearing to keep everything secret he goes straight to the fired/pissed-on-by-a-robot guy from the other two movies (John Turturro), that guy’s new gay stereotype assistant, and some Russians they never met before, and he tells all of them something that had been secret even from the intelligence community and the Transformers for 50 years. Later he has an evil robot watch attached to his wrist so the bad guys can find out the good guy’s plan, and if he tries to tell them about it it will kill him and his girlfriend. So he goes to another super top secret nobody-knows-about-it place and pumps his side for the details of their plan… meanwhile complaining some more about how nobody trusts him!

What makes it interesting is that I don’t think he’s supposed to be some kind of an anti-hero or even a funny asshole like an ’80s Bruce Willis role. That’s just what you do, right, you complain and insult everybody constantly? Everybody is stupider than you, and you always tell them that. Right? (if you say no you’re a loser, my friend Steven Spielberg knows a few things about movies, etc.)

Sam’s parents are annoying, but they don’t seem like they’d raise such a despicable little shit. I can only guess that he gets it from Optimus. Sure, Optimus makes some nice speeches and everything, but he’s a whiner in this one too. He also turns into a big baby and gives the humans the silent treatment, refusing to speak to them because he’s mad that they didn’t tell him about the moon landing. Maybe we should give him the silent treatment ’cause we’re mad at him for bringing his robot civil war to Earth and causing the deaths of probly hundreds of thousands of innocent people, not only indirectly but also through his numerous wreckless battles in populated cities.

Man, Autobots are the worst. Maybe they’re not as blatantly evil as the Decepticons, but they’re not doing us Organicons any favors. In the first movie all they had to do was fuckin leave and they would’ve saved us from getting killed. At this point it’s like Afghanistan, they’ve started this cycle of violence and they don’t know if it’s gonna get worse if they leave. Megatron might stay and keep trying to turn us into slaves. Like his little robot brain spiders and pet bird and shit aren’t good enough for him.

At one point in the movie Congress passes landmark Tell The Fucking Autobots To Leave Already legislation. Sam talks about it with them as if nobody understands how legislation works, which is too bad because it would be awesome if there was a scene where Optimus gives a speech to Congress urging them to vote no. Anyway the Autobots comply and fly into space, leaving the Decepticons to destroy Chicago, but it turns out the Autobots were just hiding (giggling the whole time, I bet) and waiting until everybody gets killed to “show your leaders why we’re needed here.”

Dear Optimus Prime,

Thanks for making such a good point.

signed,
dead Chicagoans

Then at the end he has the wrecking balls to tell Sam “We shall never forsake you.” A little late for that, one-arm. Why don’t you make like E.T. and leave. Land on that asteroid from part 2 and have your war with the robot babies.

Optimus isn’t as obnoxious as Sam, and he does still have that great voice, but it’s hard to remember what it is that’s supposed to be so good about him. He keeps complaining about how the spaceship that crashed on the moon contained the technology “that would’ve won the war.” Yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. He’s like Rambo complaining about how the bureaucrats wouldn’t let him win Vietnam. But here he is fighting and he’s doing a terrible job, getting humans and robots alike killed. He’s not a particularly good military leader and he makes huge mistakes like, to name one example, resurrecting the guy who’s trying to enslave all of humanity. Whoops.

He’s even more bloodthirsty than before. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a secret Autobot prison where they enhanced-interrogate wacky comic relief Decepticons and disrespect their religious beliefs (didn’t they worship that guy “The Fallen”?). Or they could have him kidnap Megatron’s babies and use them against him. Optimus comes from a culture where you don’t try to give somebody a fair chance, you just chase them around and then when you catch them you say something mean and execute them on the spot. In this uncomfortably humorless interview with Drew McWeeny, LaBeouf explains that part 3 is the best because Optimus is “essentially a murdering monster.”

wrapup

If this sounds like a negative review it’s not really. I find all this stuff hilarious. I got what I wanted out of the movie and I keep thinking about it days later, suddenly remembering parts I had forgotten about. “Holy shit, I forgot about that part where the elephant opened his mouth and it seemed like he was talking!”

Do not go to this hoping for a legitimately good movie on any level, but if you like ludicrous bullshit (and I do) this is top shelf stuff. Not as charming as GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA, but even more head-scratchingly crazy and way more expensive looking, if that matters to you. And 3D. I’d feel better about the world if it had the August stupid-Rob-Cohen-type-movie slot instead of the July 4th “this is what this summer has to offer,” but I’ll take it.

Some day Bay’s kingdom will probly crumble. He wants to keep going bigger and more expensive, but he’s not James Cameron. The sun will eventually melt his wax wings. A couple of his movies in a row flop, the studios are gonna at least have to shrink his budgets a little.

“I don’t change my style for anybody. Pussies do that.” –Michael Bay on changing his mind about trying to hold shots longer on Pearl Harbor, to GQ

I know he’s saying he’s gonna do a $20 million “dark comedy like PULP FICTION” next, but I can’t imagine doing those for now on would keep him happy. I’m not sure he could persevere – more likely he’d just do commercials, or retire and live off the checks from the Lamborghini Collectors Union. Tastes will change, movies will evolve, interesting new people and styles will appear. Until that day Bay will sit on his throne and we can either stay out of his way or try to get in on the orgies.

See, Megan Fox? He’s not Hitler. He’s Caligula. (not sure if you got that metaphor there)

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bonus questions:

1. Were Megatron’s “frag-ile ones” the Deceptitot babies from part 2, and what was he feeding them? Do adult robots have to eat? What would happen if Megatron fucked Lightning McQueen’s girlfriend?

2. What the fuck was that robotic goblin dude?

3. Was it my imagination or did the two little asshole-bots die heroically in a crashing something or other? And if so why didn’t they get a dramatic slow motion death, because that would’ve been awesome?

4. Explain Sentinel Prime and Megatron’s plan. What were they trying to do and what is the chronology of their truce in relation to when they separately crash-landed, the whole thing with the pyramid that was gonna destroy the earth in part 2, etc. (seriously, if anybody feels they understand this clearly I would love to know)

answers: I honestly have no idea, that’s why I’m asking you guys

chapter 8

released June 29th, 2001
(ten years ago today!)

Today, as we celebrate the opening of the third Steven Spielberg produced Hasbro adaptation about overly detailed space robots with different accents wiggling around and smashing buildings, let’s also take a moment to note the tenth anniversary of that one time when Spielberg tried to make a thoughtful robot movie.

I always liked A.I. Not perfect, but ambitious, and the stuff I really liked – which was most of it – I really liked alot. I always thought it got a bum rap. Now I’m watching it ten years later, the parts I had a problem with don’t seem as bad, the parts I loved seem as good or better than ever. And watching all these movies from the time right in a row… CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES, DRIVEN, THE MUMMY RETURNS, PEARL HARBOR, EVOLUTION, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER… it really makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with people? In the middle of that all-you-can-eat-dog-shit-buffet this is the one people complained about! Too much mood and think. Me need more bang and joke!

Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings: A.I.: 58%. Tomb Raider: 60%. Mummy Returns: 69%. Pearl Harbor: 73%. It boggles the fuckin mind.

Director Steveley Spielbrick tells us the heartbreaking tale of David (an eerily dead-on Haley Joel Osment), a robot designed to seem like a little boy and programmed to love his mommy. A couple grieving over their terminally ill son brings him into their family, at first with hesitation, then being horribly creeped out by him, then becoming emotionally attached, then considering him a “toy.”  When their real son is miraculously healed, David’s shortcomings become more obvious, and he becomes increasingly scary when the other kid turns out to be a total bastard who gets off on tricking and tormenting him into acting out and making mistakes.

One of this little futuristic prick’s schemes is to get mommy to read them the story of Pinocchio, so that David will realize he’s not a “real boy” and feel bad about himself. The plan works out so well that David is still on a quest to find the Blue Fairy 2,000 years later, long after the extinction of all human life. Great job, kid. You did it. You win.

Like some of the other Kubrick pictures (I’m thinking 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and FULL METAL JACKET: A ‘NAM ODYSSEY) A.I. is divided into very distinct sections, in this case basically three (at home with the family, out in the world with Gigolo Joe, in frozen Manhattan with the futuristic super-robots). I really dig that about it, it’s three stories within one story and I especially like that it spans more than two millenniums.

My least favorite was always the “Flesh Fair” part in the middle, after David leaves the house but before he makes it to the city. He gets rounded up with a bunch of broken down robots and brought to this sort of out door carnival where humans who morally oppose the use of robotics listen to Ministry and watch stuff get shot at the robots. It’s this bloodthirsty audience but even they get upset when they see David out there and it looks like a little boy getting tormented. And people in the audience stand up and speak out on his behalf. I think Kubrberg was trying to give anti-robot bigots a fair portrayal, but it seems forced. The modern day Tea Party movement aside I don’t buy it, either that Flesh Fairs would be a thing or that if they were a thing that there would be normal, reasonable people in the audience who would turn on the ringleaders and try to appeal to their sense of decency.

I remember it always bothered me that there was a robot that looked like Chris Rock and had his voice. I was surprised to see how brief that part of the movie actually he is – he only has one line. I still don’t think it works but this time I decided he was supposed to be a comedy robot, that’s why he makes a joke before having his head crushed. It’s like having a robot of Groucho Marx or Charlie Chaplin, they sell Chris Rock robots in the future.

But there are aspects of the Flesh Fair that do ring true to me. They have a sign that says “Celebration of Life” – it strikes me kind of like groups who say they’re “protecting marriage” by being against other people getting married. They think they’re celebrating humans by helping them to get off on the pain and mutilation of robots. But you keep seeing examples of why this is bullshit. Even the life-celebraters have a hard time knowing what’s “life” and what’s not. A little girl sees David locked up and convinces everybody that a human boy got in there by mistake. And in fact it seems there was a time in the past where somebody confused a real guy for a robot.”You’re sure he’s not a man?” one of the workers asks. “I wouldn’t want a repeat of the Trenton incident.”

One part I loved this time, not sure if I forgot about it or just never properly appreciated it, is the nanny robot that David meets at the Flesh Fair (she’s the disembodied-face lady on the poster). She starts saying kind things to David and trying to make him feel safe as soon as she sees him, but it’s not entirely comforting. It’s partly creepy because it’s obvious that she’s programmed to respond that way to kids just like David is programmed to love his mommy. It seems kind of desperate, even. While being dragged off to be publicly executed she gives David a warm, reassuring “Goodbye.” Then she smiles at him as acid is dumped on her head and her face melts away. Following her programming to the bitter end.

That part is heartbreaking, but not half as much as the earlier scene when mommy Monica ditches David in the woods. She’s actually supposed to return him to the manufacturer to be dismantled, but she can’t stand the thought of it. It’s kind of like a woman leaving her baby in front of a church or at least abandoning a dog. She can’t bring herself to have him deactivated so it’s actually somewhat an act of compassion to dump him like this with Teddy to guide him and maybe he can survive. But of course he doesn’t understand that and he freaks out, trying to figure out what he can do to stop mommy from leaving him there. “Please mommy! Please mommy!” It’s rough.

And Monica’s crying too and she says “I’m sorry for not telling you about the world.” And if this is the first time you see it you think Oh shit, what did he need to know about the world? What’s out there, anyway?

What kind of world is it? One where there’s guys dressed like a combination of TRON and the Leathermen from BARBARELLA driving around on motorcycles with metal dog’s heads on the front. You sort of see it from the naive boy robot’s perspective. It’s dark and you don’t know where you are and there’s crazy shit going on all around you. A fuckin nightmare.

My favorite character is still Teddy, the “supertoy” teddy bear that becomes Jiminy Cricket to David’s Pinocchio. He sounds and moves like a weary old man. He’s long since outgrown his novelty status and is resigned to accept the cruelty of his life, or whatever it is he lives. Just like all the more advanced robots he has a programming, it is to be loyal, so when David gets snatched for the Flesh Fair he holds onto the net and comes along even though he could get away. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading this wrong but I think this is somewhat of a choice for Teddy, because there’s a scene where the dickhead brother tries to make Teddy choose between him and David. He should still be programmed to be loyal to his original owner, shouldn’t he?

When David and Teddy make it to Rouge City they meet Gigolo Joe (Whaddaya know?), played by Jude Law. You kind of expect Joe to be a little wiser about the world. He’s an adult, after all. He works in the big city. He’s experienced alot more. But he’s kind of like a little boy too. He only knows what he knows. He follows along on David’s quest just as naively. David’s gonna find the Blue Fairy to “make me a real live boy” and Joe’s gonna “make a real woman out of her.” He’s programmed to give women pleasure, so that’s what he’s always looking for.

The last section of the movie seems to be the least popular, and I never got that. Judging from the comments I’ve heard I think some of that is because people misunderstood what was going on. The shape of the robots made them think they were supposed to be aliens, even though they explain who they are. And even though they have TVs in their heads.

I love that section because it’s an imaginative portrayal of a future we can’t understand. It’s a future past humans, so civilization isn’t entirely based on human concepts. Vehicles are strange, shifting geometric puzzles. The ruling robots have a technology far beyond our understanding, but tragically the best they can do is use it to give David one night of what humans programmed him to want two thousand years ago.

Or is that all? I suppose the last shot could mean many things. William Hurt, as David’s creator, believes he is special and human-like because he has the ability to chase down dreams. Maybe he’s done that. Shit, I’m still trying to do some of that. I hope it doesn’t take me that long.

I love A.I. because it’s a summer event type movie full of great sci-fi concepts and special effects, but it leans much more heavily into somberness and making me ponder my own life than you’re really supposed to do in a movie like this. It hits me in the emotional balls because I feel like we’re just like these fuckin machines. The first mecha we see in the movie is shown putting on makeup, and then it cuts to human Monica doing the same damn thing. Both of them need to be loved.

At the Flesh Fair people are surprised to see David, because “No one builds children. No one ever has. What would be the point?” Well, the point is that somebody like Monica needs to be loved by a child, and needs a child to love. The doctor built David to look like his own son, because he lost his son too, and he needed to fill that hole. We all have these holes, the machines are an imprecise way to fill those holes. It kinda works for a while but then it leaves mommy and son both tragically unfulfilled.

How much of us is in our programming? How much of it is just us? How much of it can we overcome, or do we even want to?

A.I. is not just thought-provoking for a movie that came out in fucking Summer of 2001, it’s thought-provoking for a Summer Popcorn Movie in general. It does lean heavier into the cerebral and emotional side than the thrills and excitement side, so I can see how that might violate the rules for some people. But it’s exactly the awkward but amazing offspring I want out of a Spielberg-Kubrick marriage.

* * *

datedness: the World Trade Center is shown in the post-apocalyptic future. I don’t know about Ministry being in the Flesh Fair scene, or Chris Rock. But the opening section has a perfect late ’70s/early ’80s Kubrick look that makes it feel timeless.

would they make a movie like this today? No, this is pretty much a one-time-only type of movie

Summer of ‘01-’11 connections: Spielberg has his name on a pretty different type of robot movie this summer

ELECTROMA is a movie with no dialogue, no human characters, and no Daft Punk music. It does star the two robot-masked Daft Punk characters (with their band logo studded into the back of their leather jackets), but apparently they’re not even played by the actual guys.

It has little moments that remind me of other movies that I happen to love: a drop of THEY LIVE, a slight whiff of HOLY MOUNTAIN. But mostly it reminds me of BROWN BUNNY remade with robots and no blowjob. There’s about 10 minutes of plot stretched into 74 minutes of movie. It’s not for everybody, or most, or very many. I thought it was great though.

The movie (or “movie”?) begins with a bunch of long shots of rocks. Then a car sitting in the desert for just a little bit longer than you would normally want to show something like that in a movie that you were planning for people to sit and watch. Then the two robots get into the car. Then they drive around on roads for quite some time.

It’s out in the desert, there are no other cars or people/robots seen anywhere, just this one car driving and driving and driving. Alot of different shots. Inside the car, outside the car, helicopter shots, etc. If you were hoping to get a good look at this car driving around, this is your lucky day. You are gonna see it pretty good.

By the way, the license plate on the car says HUMAN. But it looks like they’re not humans, I’m pretty sure they’re robots. Write that down, it’s gonna come up later.

Eventually they come to a small town and you finally see other lifeforms. It’s all the type of people you would see in a picturesque town: kids playing, old men watering their lawns, businessmen on their lunchbreaks, cops on the beat. But they’re all robots, wearing the same masks as the Daft Punks. That’s the part that reminded me of THEY LIVE.

(I wonder – since this is a world of robots, does that mean it’s in the future? I hope so because it would mean Daft Punk survived that explosion in the Tron movie.)

But the Daft Punks think they’re cool with their leather jackets and their love of humans, so they strut on through, they’re too big for this town. And they go to some weird laboratory or something. It’s just them and two chairs and two machines in an otherwise entirely white room. A room of negative space. They sit down and are approached by technicians who are completely white silhouettes, and are invisible except when parts of them pass in front of the machines or the Daft Punks. They cover the robots’ bodies with aprons and begin to pour latex on top of their helmets.

Up until this point it’s been very dry and intentionally uneventful, but the next scene, where the Daft Punks return to town now made into “humans,” gave me the biggest laugh I’ve had in a while. Definitely a weird visual joke for the record books, hilarious and kind of sweet and kind of sad, and quickly it turns more sad.

And since it’s a movie where nobody’s yammering and not alot’s happening you get plenty of time for the images to float around in your brain and soak in the thought fluids and with its simple themes I think there’s alot of poetical type ways to read it. I think these two robots are endearing because of the way they strut around together, they have a sort of kneejerk rebellious and individualistic spirit, but one that they enjoy the comfort of backing each other up on. I don’t fit in here, and neither does my friend. I am a loner, and so is my friend. They dress the same and walk almost in rhythm together and they seem to be on the same page about what they want in life, where they want to go, where they want to drive or walk.

I mean, alot of this movie is just these two walking through the salt flats for a long god damn time. And they don’t have to think about it, they just walk, confident in their agreed destination, or lack thereof. And when one of them gets sad and slows down walking the other one senses it and stops to wait.

In their dream of being human I see reflections of some of us white people who become fascinated with black culture. This interpretation is underscored by the use of Curtis Mayfield’s “Billy Jack” for their triumphant walk through town. And by the suspicious looks they get from the robots on the sidewalks and sitting on their porches. These two love this idea of humans and they create their own ridiculous caricature of it. And it’s kind of pathetic but also you root for them because fuck those townrobots giving them the stink eye. Or stink visor or whatever. You could argue that they’re not being themselves by wearing those faces, but you could also argue that they are being themselves. They don’t want to be like everybody in town. And they should be able to be who they want to be.

“Human” doesn’t have to represent a race or a culture. It also could be a symbol for anybody that dreams of being something, anything, that other people might not want them to be, or tell them they can’t be. They are like Icarus flying too close to the sun, or at least Darkman wearing his artificial skin outside for more than 99 minutes. Destined to fail but god damn it I give them credit for trying. Because they want it and they go for it.

ELECTROMA is a strange little experimental arthouse robot movie, but if you can succumb to its slow hypnotism it’s pretty great. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s about the human condition, it’s about robots.

The robots aren’t alive, they are controlled by jox. Robot jox, if you want to be specific about which type of jox they are. These robot jox train in the martial arts and what not to prime their bodies to do moves that will be duplicated by the robot body around them. They have teams of course to build their robots and work on new weapons and help train them. So it’s like a futuristic cross between UFC, NASCAR, and war.

They had to change ROBOTJOX to two words because of ROBOCOP. But they were pissed about it.

The American fighter is called Achilles, he’s played by Gary Graham (the main earthling cop from the ALIEN NATION tv series). He has a fat old redneck in his corner named Tex Conway (Michael Alldredge), a guy that used to be the champ and wears a cowboy hat with his futuristic jumpsuit. One more fight and Achilles gets out of his contract, and that’s a good thing. Robot jocking is dangerous and he’s getting old and obsolete. They got these new kids that are test tube bred for robot fighting. He doesn’t understand them because they don’t think like humans.

Let me give you an example. In his fight with the Russian (Paul Koslo from MR. MAJESTYK and OMEGA MAN) the other robot fires its arm as a projectile. Achilles sees that it’s heading right for the spectators, so he walks into it, tries to block it. But it knocks his robot into the stands, many people are killed and it’s a huge tragedy. He’s traumatized and refuses to re-do the fight, causing a scandal and branding him a coward across the world.

Afterwards, in a bar, the test tube robot jox tell him they don’t understand why he tried to protect the fans. The people who sit in the stands sign liability waivers, so why would he care? It just doesn’t compute for them, this trying to save human lives business.

So it becomes a reluctant fighter story. He eventually decides to help train this new test tube girl Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson). There is some intrigue about who’s leaking intel about their new weapons, and some question about who will actually fight. It’s a nice lean story, short and simple and classically entertaining, using a cool concept to good effect on a super low budget.

The futuristic sets are cheesy but the robot fights hold up better than I expected. They’re done with stop motion and I think miniatures that are actually pretty huge. (They’re miniature in the sense that they’re not really giant robots, just regular sized robots.) They move really slow, they don’t zip around like the Transformers, so they really seem to have some weight to them.

The tone of the movie is like a non-sarcastic STARSHIP TROOPERS – kind of naive and rah-rah ready for adventure. Gordon actually wrote the script with the esteemed science fictional novelist Joe Haldeman, whose book “The Forever War” I am very familiar with, not in the sense that I’ve read it or know what it’s about but in the sense that the Ain’t It Cool boys have name-dropped it about a thousand times over the years to show that they used to read books. I think Ridley Scott is making a movie out of it. Anyway, Haldeman didn’t see eye to eye with Gordon on the movie, and compared his script being rewritten by Gordon to his child getting brain damage. Gordon later realized that Haldeman thought they were making a movie for adults and Gordon thought it was for kids. Whoops.

I read in the book Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, the Bad and the Deviant Directors [shameless capitalistic link] that the movie was kind of a disaster for Gordon. The production company went under after filming but before doing the robot stuff. He had to wait around for the new overlords to decide if they even wanted to finish it. Then when they did it took way longer than expected. By the time it was out it was 2 years later and they’d missed the transforming robot toy fad they wanted to cash in on. But it did good on video.

Gordon says it was made for 10 year old boys, and sure enough it has a PG rating. But I gotta admit – I enjoyed it. Still, this is the rare movie that I’d actually like to see a remake of. I think with today’s technology and a mid-sized budget and (here’s the hard part) a tasteful, competent director this could be incredible. Get into way more detail on the fights – the same lumbering, hulking style but with the robots strategically taking each other apart piece by piece, still functioning with broken pieces hanging off. Kind of like an MMA fight. If they want to they can work in some out-of-robot fighting, since the jox are martial artists anyway, it’s already set up in the premise. If they need the story to be bigger that can be arranged too. There’s a whole post-apocalyptic landscape to explore. Maybe he’s transporting his robot somewhere and gets into some scrapes along the way. Or he could start as a scrappy small time fighter with a home made rig before he fights his way to the big time and the glorious job of securing ownership of the Alaskan territories.

If people are actually excited for a new TRON movie then I say there’s room for something like this too. I don’t know. All I know is that the world is ready to start saying the phrase “Robot Jox” again.

[ratings]

The movie takes place in a future where 98% of the world’s population sit lazily in chairs (with things over their eyes – looks just like the cover of THE 6TH DAY) operating beautiful looking robot duplicates that go out into the world for them. So it’s kind of like THE MATRIX, if everybody knew they were plugged in and did it willingly, and instead of being a computer simulation it was robots. Which if this were real would be kind of better. Everybody knows the old rides at Disneyland with the animatronics are better than the new ones with computer animation projected on stuff. But this is not real and this is no THE MATRIX.

Bruce Willis plays Greer, a cop. When he’s a robot he has hair, when he’s not a robot it must be said that he looks kind of like Billy Joel. Fortunately he doesn’t sing any Billy Joel songs, or I would’ve walked out. Greer is one of the cops on the scene for an incident at a night club where a couple surrogates (surries for short) were destroyed and their eyes exploded. It would be pretty much like some cars got trashed or something except that when he goes to talk to the operators it turns out they’re dead in their chairs, their brains turned to mush. Until now having a surrogate has not been like being in THE MATRIX or in a Freddy dream – the whole point was that you could put your robot into danger and not have to worry about it. Except I guess you sort of would because who can afford to buy a new one, and what with insurance rates and all that, I’m sure.

Basically he has to solve this mystery about a weapon that can kill people through their surrogates, which may be connected to a movement on “the reservation” where the last remaining people who don’t use robots live. The movie seems to agree with those people about the technology, but it still portrays them as ignorant fundamentalist nuts.

There’s plenty of cool stuff in this movie. It’s not the breathless TOTAL RECALL sci-fi actionfest I was hoping for (or even TERMINATOR 3), but there’s a pretty good human vs. robot chase or two. Nothing as good as the bathroom fight or the truck chase from TERMINATOR 3, but fun. There’s a whole world of people with doll hair and digitally airbrushed complexions moving around stiffly and not emoting quite enough. There are little details to the world like how robots get high, that the people on the reservation string up dead robots to make an example out of them like pirates, a joke about what you look like when your surrogate is in the shop. And I like the image of organic Bruce Willis, his face covered in cuts and stubble, limping around this artificial world, getting used to what it’s like to get up off your ass and leave the fuckin house.

Obviously there’s a subtext here about this here internet and how much of our lives these days takes place from a distance through electronics instead of just a couple of people standing in the same place having a conversation. You’re definitely supposed to think about all these headsets and handheld devices and newfangled gizmos that me – and I gotta admit, most likely Andy Rooney – are suspicious of. And it has pretty good logic about what would happen after living through these things, that you could become very vain and begin to hate your actual physical form and not want people to see what you really look like.

But the movie is pretty underwhelming. The mystery feels both too convoluted and yet not complex enough. It gets a little hard to follow since different people are controlling other people’s robots (there must be something in the Bible against that) but at the same time it comes unraveled too quickly, there doesn’t seem to be much to it. And maybe this isn’t fair to Mostow, but the advertising kind of fucks the movie, because the trailer shows the ending. In the context of the trailer I thought “whoah, then what happens?” but the answer in context is “the end credits with a cheesy rock song.” So it feels anticlimactic.

It also has that same problem from so many sci-fi movies where it always has to be about the most monumental thing that ever happened, something that affects the whole world and changes everything. Why couldn’t it just be a mystery that takes place in this world? I think that would be more meaningful. I’m sick of people having to save the fucking world. I mean that’s not exactly what this is, but it’s close. How ’bout we scale it down a little bit there, fellas?

And come to think of it I don’t think they even establish the world of the surrogates as well as they could. They go through a bunch of the history but they don’t really show you much of why people wanted to use these in the first place. The idea is that the world is too dangerous for a human to go into, but the robots don’t really take advantage of their safety. A guy jumps off a platform in a night club, that’s about it. Mostly they just go about their business. I mean you can’t tell me people wouldn’t be parkouring all over the place. They’d be doing whatever crazy shit they normally couldn’t. I guess it’s implied that the robots just go out and fuck stranger robots, but being PG-13 there’s not much elaboration. And there’s only a couple shots of weirdos on the subway to show that robots can have inhuman physical appearance if they want to.

This is not a criticism of the movie, but there are obviously lots of questions about what goes on here. They mention surrogates for kids, but you only see one and it’s controlled by an adult, so who the fuck knows where the kids are or who takes care of them or if they have to buy a new surry every six months. And you have to wonder what the protocol is with these things, where do you draw the line with using them? Do you sit in your chair to control your robot sitting in a chair to watch TV or something? Do surrogates jerk off, or does their perfect looks and flawless safe sex make porn obsolete? Do any humans like to fuck surrogates and vice versa? There’s gotta be some new fetishes developing in this world. Do some pervs have websites with spy photos of real women in their chairs? Are there even websites? Do surrogates sit down at a keyboard looking at a screen? If so do they recognize the irony? Do they have different outfits or just the one they sleep in? Does anybody have to iron those suits? If so is it through a surrogate or just some poor working class dude in that 2%? Are there aborigines using these things? Because 98% is alot of the world population. You have to wonder how it works in different cultures, how their histories and beliefs affect their use.

Also, how do you take a shit.

As for Bruce, of course he’s good, but this is not one of his better characters. He doesn’t get to use the charm and sense of humor much, but it’s not one of his deeper gloomy roles either. I like that it’s kind of about his relationship with his wife (Elizabeth Banks Rosamund Pike) and trying to reconnect without robots, but he doesn’t get a chance to mine the emotions of that too much.

Not bad. But not good. Not even as good as I, ROBOT, as far as flawed robot movies go. Better than DISNEY’S THE KID I bet, as far as Bruce movies. I haven’t seen that one though.

[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.

[ratings]

I’m no cartoon fetishist, but I’m not blind. Pixar is America’s most consistently great studio, and on first glance this is probaly the best they’ve done so far. You never thought you’d see something like WALT DISNEY’S 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, but that’s what the first act of this feels like. This movie is deep. There is a poetically tragic beauty to it that has never been captured in any cartoon all the way from PINOCCHIO to BARBIE’S FAIRY MERMAID CASTLE 2 or even (arguably) OSMOSIS JONES.

Here is this godforsaken shitpile of a planet, literally covered in garbage, the sky brown with garbage dust, a ring of space litter surrounding the atmosphere. Humans left this place behind 700 years ago, and the only things still moving around are one cockroach and the one remaining robot that was left behind to clean up the garbage.

So there WALL-E is picking up garbage, crushing it into cubes, and building structures out of them. I’m not sure whether this is what he was programmed to do, or whether he is using his crushing/stacking job to create art, but either one is interesting. He’s been doing this for 700 years and had to cannibalize all the other dead WALL-E’s to survive, so either he’s Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, finding his way in an abandoned world, or he’s the robot at the end of A.I., missing his mommy thousands of years after humans have gone extinct. Cleaning up garbage is what he was built for, so maybe he doesn’t know that nobody needs him to do it anymore.

At any rate he has no idea that the planet is a shithole, this is just what he was built to do. To him garbage might as well be oxygen. But he does have these little quirks that are most likely not part of his programming. He finds things in the garbage that amuse him, and adds them to a collection. He especially likes the movie HELLO DOLLY which he found on a beat up VHS tape that he converts to digital, runs on an iPod and watches through a giant magnifier. One society’s garbage is another machine’s individuality.

So here is a world with no humans, no life at all except for one roach and one tiny sprout. A dead world. The planetary equivalent of an apartment somebody gets kicked out of and they don’t clean anything, they just leave all the shit they don’t want or can’t carry piled on the filthy carpet. And yet there’s still humanity there! The garbage that lives in the garbage has a spark of humanity. It’s a dystopia but it ultimately has an optimistic view of humanity. If that rose could grow from a crack in the concrete like Tupac talked about then why couldn’t an obsolete keep the concept of love alive? Humanity will prevail.

Somebody pointed out to me that if Pixar puts out a movie like CARS that’s amazing in alot of ways but not as appealing as a TOY STORY or something then everybody gets mad and says they lost it. But if the other companies put out something like KUNG FU PANDA people bend over backwards to compliment it just for being watchable and mildly amusing. It’s easy to imagine a KUNG FU PANDA type non-Pixar movie that would have some of the later human parts of this movie in it, and people would go nuts for it. Once you get to the animated humans in this movie there’s some broad satire about rampant consumerism and laziness. People are so obsessed with their computer screens they forget there is anything else to look at. They don’t know about the other people around them. They’re so fat they can’t stand up and their bones have disappeared. The babies are all corralled together and they leave it to your imagination how exactly mating works in this world, but you know whatever it is it’s some fucked up shit. In a Brand X Animation Studio movie all this would seem shockingly subversive. That would be the part that people always talked about and what made it a decent movie. In WALL-E though it’s easily the weakest part of the movie!

I would say that’s the movie’s one weakness, and something weird about it. The second part of the movie is the type of excellence we’ve come to expect from those Hawaiian shirt wearing nerds. But the first part is something even better, it transcends the normal Pixar movie. I bought into that world so much that it was not animation in my head, it was the real world, so once you got to animated humans it was a bit jarring. But still pretty damn good. Alot of this part seemed deep to me too, like the way Wall-E accidentally inspires a robot revolution, the misfits in the repair shop decide to stop following their directives and provide the much needed chaos within a rigid system to literally save the world. When a cleaning robot becomes confused about whether to follow the laser he’s programmed to follow or the mud tracks he’s programmed to clean up it’s a funny visual joke that gently destroys the notion of being able to get through life just by following the rules. Sorry, Forrest Gump.

(isn’t it funny when a reviewer bitterly attacks some other movie out of the blue and you think “where the fuck did THAT come from?” I thought I would throw one of those in there.)

It’s cool because there’s no bad guys really, there’s just machines that are programmed to do something we disagree with. The course of humanity is decided by this mistake somebody made 700 years ago. In a world of rules, only one machine, his girlfriend and a fatass can change the course of history forever.

Obviously the story is saying something about consumerism and the environment, but it never seems preachy because the characters themselves don’t even know about it. The captain of the ship does figure out that it’s bad and try to do something about it (”I don’t want to survive, I want to LIVE!”), but the main characters WALL-E and EVE actually never know that there’s anything wrong with the world or that they need to do anything. They’re too busy falling in love. Please note that computer animated humans kissing in FINAL FANTASY was terrifying, but two buckets of bolts romancing each other in this one is heartwarming.

I got no doubt in my mind that this will still be considered a classic when we’re all dead. Its biggest flaw is to end up merely EXCELLENT when it starts out TRANSCENDENTLY BEAUTIFUL. It’s true, I would be happy to watch 2 1/2 hours of this robot sifting through garbage, and there is a certain poetry that comes from the absence of the humans. But at the same time it’s inevitable that he’s gonna see where he comes from, meet his maker. It’s like in a mystery movie there is an indefinable feeling that comes from not knowing what the answer is, and you’re always gonna lose a little something when the mystery is solved at the end. But hopefully it will come together well, and in this case it does.

Shit, I’ll take WALL-E warts and all. And these are some small warts. This is one of the all time great robot love stories, way better than HEARTBEEPS.

[ratings]

Usually if a movie is already playing in theaters I don’t send my review here, I just use it at my geocities.com/outlawvern sight, but jesus, SOMEBODY had to say something. I can’t believe how many positive reviews I have read of this. I think Harry’s was the only negative I saw, but he was polite about it. I read Moriarty’s review before the screening and I thought wow, what if I actually like this movie? Like me, Moriarty hates Michael Bay’s movies from head to toe, style and content, and me and him agree on all kinds of stuff. I don’t remember too many cases where I thought he was being too easy on a movie, at least not a big one like this (only one that comes to mind is the much smaller DAREDEVIL). I never thought I would like this movie until I read his review. He had me about 80% convinced that it would surprise me and win me over, like LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD did. And I might have to seek counseling after enjoying those two movies in a row, but that’s life.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that I have a buddy who loves Michael Bay. But before you rush to judgment, let me say that he’s not some stereotype that just loves to see things explode and hear black guys joke about being “negroes” while a camera rotates around them. This is a smart guy with varied tastes. He gives me tips on older action movies I haven’t seen, but his favorite movie so far this year is some documentary I never heard of. He watches more movies than I do, and is much more fickle than I am. I could not possibly list how many movies I thought were good, or at least okay, that he out and out despised. But still, somehow, he loves that fucking Michael Bay garbage, especially ARMAGEDDON and BAD BOYS 2. He describes BAD BOYS 2 as “the most hateful movie ever made” and always mentions how Bay’s directing credit is over a shot of a burning cross. So his enjoyment seems like kind of a rebellious fuck you to the world, like a kid listening to punk rock or stabbing his grandparents in their sleep. He’s been excited about this movie all year, and I’ve been shaking my head and grumbling about it. I definitely wanted to see it out of morbid curiosity, but felt it would be morally wrong to pay for it. I paid to see GHOST RIDER because I thought it would be funny, and I still feel guilty about it.

So when my buddy invited me to a free screening of TRANSFORMERS I couldn’t resist. He said we had to have the area’s biggest pro and anti Michael Bay forces together at the same screening. Sounds like a fitting sequel to my peace initiative from last summer where I watched BAD BOYS 2 and TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE to set a positive example for the Israelis and Palestinians.

So it’s fitting that the movie begins in “QATAR – THE MIDDLE EAST.” (Need to establish location and tell the audience you think they’re idiots at the same time? Try subtitles!) An American army base is attacked by a big robot. These guys are apparently trained in a similar manner to the soldiers from THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE 2, because they all just run away and don’t fight. When you see all the military hardware fetishistically on display it seems kind of weird, because the robot doesn’t look like it has a chance. But then some tanks fly through the air and you find out later that all but the handful of main characters were killed and nobody knew it was a robot that did it.

At this point I was trying. I secured my brain safely in a locker at the Greyhound station like you’re supposed to and I attempted to lower my standards. I am a guy who enjoys Brian Bosworth movies so why not enjoy this shit? Plus, if I’m gonna watch a Michael Bay movie again it might as well be one about robots. They won’t joke as much as Martin Lawrence and they’ll either look cool or funny. At least the effects are in good hands. And ever since I heard Michael Bay was hired for this job I thought it was tailor made for him. The dude is obsessed with sports cars and has never felt a human emotion, how could you do better than hiring him to make a huge expensive movie where the main characters are cars? It’s like God made up The Transformers just to get some use out of Michael Bay.

But Michael Bay told God to fuck off, and he went and made a movie about people. After that opening attack you get literally an hour of kiddie movie horse shit about Shia LeBeouf being a nerd and trying to hit on the adult car mechanic Maxim cover girl with a troubled past from his high school. He buys an old yellow Camaro which turns out to actually be a robot from space in disguise. I don’t know if I need to explain this to you guys, but Transformers are robots from space and you know those Cirque Du Soleil type weirdos in the car commercial who contort themselves into the shape of a car? It’s like that, they crash land on earth and are worried people will make fun of them so they pretend to be cars and planes and shit to fit in. Anyway, for the first hour of this movie his car is alive but mostly is not a robot, he just causes a ruckus by driving around doing donuts and playing funny songs on his radio.

I have learned while this movie was being made that many grown adults grew up on this toy cartoon and hold its characters and concepts deep in their hearts, and were concerned about their portrayal in the movie. And I myself revere the filmatic language, and was worried that I would get dizzy and confused by Michael Bay’s double-flip-off approach to editing and camera movement. Well let me tell you, he probaly blows it on both counts, but both are entirely irrelevant. By the time the movie gets to a second robot or action scene it’s already way too late to turn things around. This painful first hour shows that the movie’s main problem is the same one as BAD BOYS 2: constant, embarrassingly unfunny jokes. Is it too difficult to take anything seriously anymore? Everything’s gotta be wacky: Shia has a little dog with a cast and he feeds it painkillers. He rides a pink girls’ bike and crashes in front of the girl he likes. A robot pulls his pants down so he’s in his boxers. Anthony Anderson eats a bunch of donuts. Bernie Mac’s mom flips him the bird. A fat guy dances. When robots attack later, there are lots of half-assed “jokes” about little kids saying “cool!” or comparing it to ARMAGEDDON or thinking a robot is the tooth fairy. The “jokes” are more rapid-fire than a DTV Leslie Nielsen movie, and with an equal or lesser success rate. Even in that opening robot attack they don’t have the discipline to take it seriously for 60 fuckin seconds, they have to have the guy from TURISTAS who looks like Johnny Knoxville on the phone arguing with a cartoonish Indian operator (ooh, topical) while Tyrese keeps yelling something about his left ass cheek. The music sounds like John Carpenter or TERMINATOR but the composer seems to be the only one making any effort to create drama. Everybody else is assuming the effects people will put that in later.

For a movie produced by Spielberg it’s surprisingly low on awe. People are supposed to be surprised to see robots, but they always turn it into jokes. There’s not one second in the movie where you believe people are really reacting to seeing robots. In JURASSIC PARK or in WAR OF THE WORLDS or many other Spielberg movies, you believed these people really were having their minds blown by what was standing right in front of them. In TRANSFORMERS they say things like “It’s a robot. You know, like a super advanced robot. It’s probably Japanese,” and you’re supposed to laugh.

And half the time nobody even notices the robots. I should mention there is one other robot in this part of the movie, a little bad guy robot who makes wacky troll noises while hacking into the Pentagon computer. I think he’s supposed to be the cute comic relief character, a bad idea since there is no drama or tension to relieve. He crawls around, over and through hundreds of humans waving his many limbs all over and making loud grunts and power tool noises without ever once being detected. Either these robots are invisible or the people in charge of our national security are even more incompetent than anyone ever imagined.

So you got this hour of waiting for it to get to the god damn robots, and then when it happens you realize you don’t like them that much more than the people. Admittedly, they are the one thing that makes this more watchable than the other Michael Bay movies. From the ones I’ve seen I think this is his worst movie, but it’s bad in a more fascinating way, like a $200 million version of that tv show “Power Rangers.” After a good hour fifteen of failed jokes, the probably-meant-to-be-serious introduction of the good guy Transformers is finally laugh out loud hilarious. They just look so fucking silly posing and saying their names and they talk in voices just like the old cartoons, so it almost seems like one of those meta-ironical type movies like FAT ALBERT or THE BRADY BUNCH where TV characters come to life in the “real” world to show how goofy they are. And this is one of the great “did I really just see that?” moments when one of the robots says something along the lines of “Yo yo yo wussssUUUUUUPPPP Autobots REPRESENT!” and I don’t think he was eating robotic chicken or watermelon but I swear to you on my mother’s grave that he started breakdancing. And I’m sure black stereotype robot was in other parts of the movie but the next time I was sure it was the same character was at the end when Optimus Prime was casually holding his broken-in-half corpse like it was the pieces of a plate he dropped.

But before it gets to the fighting, buckle up for a whole lot more “comedy.” There’s a section, probaly originally planned as a sitcom pilot but then used as part of the movie, where the robots hide in Shia’s backyard. They break things and say “funny” lines and try not to be spotted when Shia’s parents look out the window. This seems to support the “Transformers are invisible” theory because they’re fucking 50 feet tall and shaking the earth with every step but nobody sees them. In fact, they might be like the Velveteen Rabbit or whatever the children’s story is where only a kid can see them and adults can’t because they don’t have the magic of childlike innocence in their hearts or whatever. Anyway, Shia is able to get into his bedroom and his parents accuse him of jerkin off, and you can imagine all the “comedy” “gold” they are able to squeeze out by riffing on that one. I think it’s supposed to be funny to see the serious Transformers characters involved in this sort of wackiness, but since they have not yet portrayed in a serious light there is nothing to contrast it with.

At this point the movie is beyond feature length and then they introduce a new villain, John Turturro as a Men In Black type agent under the mistaken impression that he’s being funny. His performance is over-the-top enough to fit in in a movie like SPACE JAM or ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE, that is what they would like to do with his talents. And it keeps cutting away to a parallel storyline about a team of NSA analysts (all shaggy-haired twentysomething hipsters) and secretary of defense John Voight and Anthony Anderson playing Kevin Smith’s character from LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD and a giant alien cube discovered in ice by Shia’s great great grandfather. And all the robots are here on earth to find a pair of glasses, which are in Shia’s bedroom in a backpack, so it should probaly have taken 30 seconds of screen time to get to them instead of 90 minutes. There is a part that I almost think I might’ve dreamed but I remember it so vividly, where there is a cartoon BOING! sound and then there’s a long shot of one of the robots proudly pissing all over John Turturro. This guy has toiled away in independent film for decades, done so much great work and in order to get a pay check he has to get R. Kellyed by a fucking cartoon robot. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny or if it’s supposed to be sexy but it failed on both counts. And then all the sudden Shia’s car/robot/pet gets shocked and dragged away on cables and the score turns into violins like it’s SCHINDLER’S LIST. It is an understatement to say that this heartwrenching music is not earned. It’s like if Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character in GARFIELD found out she had cancer and we were expected to get choked up.

Towards the end the movie starts to be more about Transformers. But if any of the filmatists were interested in turning them into actual characters they must’ve been too busy running errands or something to add that into the movie. Optimus Prime is pretty funny because he speaks almost entirely in platitudes. My guess is they didn’t have time to write or record dialogue for him so they just used a key chain where you push buttons and different Transformers soundbites come out. His voice is awesome, the only thing resembling gravitas in the movie. He is shamelessly corny and old fashioned, while every other element of the movie is trying to be irreverent and self aware. So it’s so out of place you gotta laugh any time he speaks.

I guess this is the part that people wanted, the BIG ACTION SEQUENCE where robots chase a boy carrying a cube over buildings. Some robots do flips and fight each other. The effects are obviously very expensive and somebody worked a long time on making them, so way to go, E for Effort. But I think the Lord would agree with me when I say Jesus Christ, if this is what you guys consider exciting action sequences I don’t even know how to relate to you anymore.

Imagine you took apart a whole bunch of cars, mixed the parts up and welded them all together into a giant ball maybe 15 or 20 feet in diameter, then rolled it down a hill. Shoot that in closeup and you got every fight scene in this movie. I’m sure the Michael Bay style is a huge contributing factor, but I’m pretty sure you could’ve shot these fights with a stationary camera like a boxing match and I still would have no clue what the fuck was going on. I am no expert on robotics but to my untrained eye, these robots look like shit. Their designs are so overly complicated you can’t tell which part is which. One robot (I think a bad guy robot, but not sure) goes flipping through the air in slow motion and while staring at it I was not entirely sure which end was up. There are scenes that are close on Optimus’s face while he’s talking where I could not even make out a face. I never knew which robot was which or who was a good guy or bad guy or what vehicle was what robot. Luckily Optimus has a shiny blue part on him, occasionally I would see shiny blue and know that hey, that’s Optimus! I spotted one!

What Michael Bay has already done to action editing and staging he has now done to character design. If Walt Disney really was a frozen head he would probaly be driven out of hiding to bite Michael Bay’s nose off for what he has done here. I don’t think the animation is very good either, they all move too fast and seem kind of weightless and don’t know how to stand still, but it’s kind of pointless to even get into that when they just look so god damn ugly and confusing that even in slow motion they disgrace the many talented artists who were roped into working on this shit. If you’re gonna make us wait two hours for a big dumb robot fight at least make robots that we can tell apart or can distinguish what they are doing or which part of their body is the head. In a Godzilla movie I can tell which one is Godzilla and which one is Mothra without studying it frame by frame and comparing it to charts and diagrams.

In the interest of balance, I will say some nice things about the movie. There’s a part where the Transformers are in car form and they are driving around, they are all brand new and shiny stupid looking vehicles and it’s shot like a car commercial. That was pretty funny. Also, it was nice that the horrible rock music only came on about four or five times, not constantly like in the cartoon version. The military stuff, sometimes that reminded me of the old ’80s action movies, all this military hardware they were showing. The constant ludicrousness of every single aspect of the movie makes it less boring than many bad movies, like a GHOST RIDER or a NATIONAL TREASURE. And, the, uh– I guess I haven’t seen a side wheely in a movie in a while. I don’t know. I’m sure there are other positive aspects.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that left me this befuddled that it actually existed. Now I know how your parents felt when they took you to see TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE. “Well, I guess this is what kids like now. Huh.” I mean look, Moriarty’s main argument was that the movie “delivers” and you can’t argue with a movie “delivering.” But fuck man, I guess I don’t know what “delivery” is then. To me, this was an awe-inspiringly awful mess from start to finish, with no good characters, no sense of tension or drama, an asinine plot, badly told, full of constant, annoying attempts at humor, muddled action sequences and effects that hurt your brain trying to look at them. If you people are complaining about something like SPIDER-MAN 3 being too silly and then giving this one a pass, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The best “characters” in the movie are the robots during the 5 or 10 minutes when they’re trying to be serious, and those scenes come off campier than SHOWGIRLS. I haven’t seen FANTASTIC FOUR 2 but I can’t imagine it could be THAT much more moronic, poorly executed and groan-inducing than this one. I mean this one really is off the charts, it’s a record breaker. It probaly required alien technology to make it like this.

I know it’s not fair to drop the B&R bomb, it’s like comparing people to Hitler in political discussion. But TRANSFORMERS is honestly approaching BATMAN AND ROBIN proportions of horribleness. You can’t say it’s as bad, because the lighting is nice and nobody’s wearing rubber fetish costumes or pink gorilla suits, but it’s a similar type of minding-numbing machine gun barrage of moronic, inept garbage. And it goes on for almost 2 1/2 hours, longer than some interrogations.

So in a way, that does explain to me why some people might enjoy this. Some people like to be whipped and peed on. And it’s an instant camp classic. I know people who get a good laugh out of shitty movies like INDEPENDENCE DAY, and I will definitely demand that they see this shit on video, because it makes INDEPENDENCE DAY look like 2001. It’s so full of quick cuts and preposterousness I’m sure I missed all kinds of things. They were already onto the next scene by the time my brain processed the fact that I had just seen a Mountain Dew machine transform into a bad guy robot. Hopefully he will be the main villain in the sequel. But he’ll be defeated by a good guy Nike truck. I can’t see enjoying this on anything other than an ironic or anthropological “human beings really made this!” type level. No matter how it plays this summer, this movie is so full of bad taste and “what the fuck?” moments that I do believe it will live on. Ten or fifteen years from now, when some theater in a college town plays it as a double feature with ROADHOUSE, it will absolutely kill.

Did the movie work on my crowd? I’m not sure. Some of the lame jokes got laughs. Some got none. There were parts obviously meant to be crowdpleasers where you would hear one person clap or laugh in the back somewhere. There was definitely alot of sarcastic wooing and clapping. But there was also some applause at the end, which I’m gonna assume was sincere. We have already seen enough reviews to know that some people can enjoy this. I talked to a guy who loved it, said it was the best movie he’s seen this year, that it knew what it was and was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and what do you expect, it’s The Transformers, it’s a summer blockbuster movie, it’s awesome. I’m glad he enjoyed it, but none of those arguments hold water with me, and I can’t help but be sad that this is what we are willing to accept as entertainment. BATMAN AND ROBIN knew what it was and was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and what did we expect. And if just because it’s Transformers it’s allowed to be inept, moronic garbage, then why are we going to see a movie based on Transformers in the first place? I know DADDY DAY CAMP is gonna be awful but I don’t expect these same people running out saying that was awesome because what do you expect, it’s DADDY DAY CAMP.

And I know I made this point in talkbacks, and so have others, but it bears repeating. DIE HARD was a blockbuster/popcorn/summer/event movie. So was ALIENS. And TERMINATOR 2. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. STAR WARS. JAWS. ROAD WARRIOR. PREDATOR. ROBOCOP. TOTAL RECALL. THE MATRIX. LORD OF THE RINGS. You people who like your BATMAN and SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN and SUPERMAN and James Bond and LETHAL WEAPON… these are all big event movies, many of them timeless, many of them clever, well-crafted, some of them masterpieces. I am not being pretentious, I am not expecting too much, these are mainstream, crowd pleasing movies and they are what you used to hope for when you went to a summer movie. You can’t realistically expect a movie as good as ALIENS every time, but that’s better than resigning to the idea that “summer movie” equals “horribly made infantile disposable pap” and being excited about it anyway. If a summer movie is meant to be like TRANSFORMERS, then why the fuck aren’t you people embarrassed to be going to see summer movies? At least have the decency to admit that it’s a strange, possibly deviant hobby.

Everyone expects this movie to be a huge runaway hit, a moneymaking juggernaut. It happened with ARMAGEDDON and INDEPENDENCE DAY and I lived through election 2004, so certainly I can see that happening. But man oh man do I not get it. Women, especially, I have respect for, and I cannot understand them getting any sort of enjoyment out of these goofy cartoon junkpiles wrestling each other and saying things like “One shall stand and one shall fall!” If this is accepted as good entertainment then we’re another step closer to the world of IDIOCRACY and the hit movie ASS.

If America loves this movie, I want a fuckin recount.

But what about my Michael Bay loving buddy? Did he like it? I wasn’t sitting near him at the screening and as the movie went on I started to get concerned about what I was gonna say to him afterwards. I hoped he was having a good time, and I mean, I cannot comprehend his love for the other Bay movies. So I couldn’t predict what he would think. But at the same time I could not actually picture him walking up to me with a straight face and saying “That was awesome!” And I couldn’t guarantee that if that happened I wouldn’t shake my head sadly, turn and walk away, our friendship forever weakened by a feeling that we just weren’t from the same planet.

The credits roll. I find Mr. Armageddon. He smiles and says, “That was a piece of shit! That was fucking garbage! Terrible!”

So thank you Michael Bay for bringing the world closer together. We can have peace some day. We just can’t have good robot movies.

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33228

[ratings]

In the old days, like, say, seven years ago, what we would do is the President would make some phone calls, send some diplomats, try to figure out how to get those assholes over there to chill the fuck out. “Come on guys, it’s not worth it.” Like when your buddy’s had a few too many drinks and starts getting in a guy’s face in an argument over a girl or a shoe or a slice of pizza or something. You gotta give your buddy some perspective before things get ugly.

Well, Bush is too busy clearing brush or dumping out stem cells or something. You know how he is, if the world is teetering on the precipice then you bet your ass that asshole’s on vacation. I heard he’s supposed to be reading Camus’s The Stranger on his vacation, which is interesting. Future embarassing off the cuff remark: “Well it’s interesting, in existentialism it says I can kill an Arab.”

Anyway, the point is he’s not gonna do shit. Therefore, I feel it is my duty as an American to step up and set a positive example for our brothers and sisters around the world.

Now, I know you have plenty of reasons to hate each other. The other side kidnapped some of your soldiers, or arrested a whole bunch of people, or blew up your house, or hate your religion, or stole your land, etc. I’m not saying you don’t have cause to be angry. But what you gotta understand is, this shit goes back hundreds of years. So far, blowing shit up has not helped in any way. Maybe, perhaps, it is worth considering that blowing shit up only ever makes it worse, and you gotta stop.

So here’s what I’m gonna do to help. I am not a soldier, I cannot offer a military solution. I am not a politician, I cannot offer a political solution. I am an outlaw film Writer, I Write about films. So I will work within my particular medium. Within my medium, I also have an enemy. You know how you guys feel about the other side of this conflict? That’s kind of how I feel about Michael Bay.

Michael Bay has not committed crimes against my people, but he has committed crimes against my action movies. More than any other person he is responsible for the destruction of the filmatic language. What was once a genre that pulled you in and put you in the shoes (or cut up bare feet) of its hero, now distances you and whacks you over the head with a giant dick made out of strobe-light edits, whooshy camera spins and indecipherable action spectacle. He took Bruce Willis, the star of the greatest action movie of all time (DIE HARD), and put him in ARMAGEDDON, one of the most retarded big budget movies I’ve ever seen. He took the trademarks of one of our greatest action auteurs, John Woo (the slow motion hero strolls, the double pistols, the melodrama) and chopped them up into snack sized fast food bites, turning them into American cliches that people would later ridicule Woo for. His movies are idiotic, their values are vile, and worst of all they’re completely boring to me. Even in his early, not as retarded movies like THE ROCK and BAD BOYS, the filmatics of the action scenes make them completely uninvolving and confusing for a guy like me to watch.

Once Bay had had his way with my beloved genre, the motherfucker bought up the rights to my favorite horror movie, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, and hired a crazy German video director who had been fired from END OF DAYS to do a shitty remake. To get me more worked up, he went to the press and started making statements that made it clear he had never seen the original movie and had no idea what it was all about. Talking about how the new one would be less gorey and ignorant shit like that. Just trying to work me up. Trying to psyche me out.

What I’m saying is I hate this motherfucker. I HATE this motherfucker. After ARMAGEDDON, I called it quits on the shit he directs. Sometimes I’ll go see a movie I don’t think I’m gonna like. And obviously I believe in giving people a second chance. But Michael Bay, in my opinion, as well as in scientific fact, is not curable. It’s just not worth it. If it says “Michael Bay,” I must stay away. So I didn’t watch PEARL HARBOR, didn’t watch BAD BOYS 2, didn’t watch THE ISLAND, didn’t feel like I was missing out.

But today, in the name of world peace, universal brotherhood, understanding and giving each other high fives as well as down low, etc., I am prepared to make concessions, sacrifices and compromises. I am striving for excellence in the area of peace. I can’t just blow up Michael Bay, especially since he would set up a camera that would rotate around the explosion and cut to a closeup of sweat dripping down Josh Hartnett’s shoulders reflected off the back of a Lamborghini made out of cocaine and it would be unclear whether he was in the explosion or not and I would just be confused so it wouldn’t be worth it. So I decided instead to do something I never thought about doing before… I watched BAD BOYS 2.

I gotta be honest, I don’t remember a god damn thing about BAD BOYS PART 1 except that there was Sergeant Whatsisdick and Detective Whoevertheguyiscalled and they kept saying things like “Hello we’re negros” while fighting diamond thieves or kidnappers or somebody. I don’t think it was as offensive to my sensibilities as ARMAGEDDON, but it was more forgettable. The jokes weren’t funny except for the one about how you were supposed to accept these two skinny jokers from TV sitcoms as tough guy cops. I’ve actually never heard of anybody who liked BAD BOYS 1. I know Will Smith was in it and he’s popular. But they didn’t make MADE IN AMERICA 2 or even INDEPENDENCE DAY 2, so you just don’t expect this. And honestly you’d think America would have safeguards in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

But I know people who enjoyed BAD BOYS 2. I had heard legends about some of the crazy shit in the movie. Michael Bay actually put his director’s credit over a shot of a burning cross, no joke. There’s a chase scene where cadavers fall out of the back of a truck and bounce around the freeway getting crushed and beheaded by cars. It’s the first movie with the balls/poor taste to mention 9-11, and has a scene where the heroes drive a yellow Hummer over about a hundred hovels in Cuba. They call them “drug dealer shacks” so that we know they are all for sure evil and we don’t have to feel bad about it, and I am positive that none of this was intended as an ironic commentary on our foreign policy or attitudes toward the world. At least as far as Michael Bay knew. (One of the many writers who had his way with the script [think WORLD'S BIGGEST GANG BANG] was Jerry Stahl, the Permanent Midnight/ALF guy, so who knows.)

There are other evil Michael Bay touches for the Bush era. The Bad Boys are supposed to be cool and rebellious because they bribe a guy to help them do a “highly illegal” wiretap. There are also some attempted laughs about drug dealer Klansmen always saying, “I have my rights!” Ha ha, what a whiner, thinks there’s supposed to be civil rights in this country. Only a drug dealing Klansmen would believe in civil rights. Also, Will Smith’s character drives a Ferrari, because Michael Bay is obsessed with rich man toys that no ordinary human being would have a chance of owning. In MIAMI VICE they drive a Ferrari because they’re undercover as drug dealers and they confiscated it from a real drug dealer. In BAD BOYS they drive a Ferrari because Michael Bay has the mentality of a 12 year old boy. (He also has a cameo driving a crappy car. Ha ha, it’s funny because Michael Bay would never drive that car. Michael Bay only drives cars that cost more than your house and ten years worth of food and electricity.)

One of my associates informs me that Will Smith’s character was supposed to have inherited a bunch of money in the first movie, that is supposed to be how he affords the dick lengthening vehicle. Which sort of blows my theory that he is supposed to be taking bribes and selling dope from the evidence locker. At any rate, I’m not sure how he can keep tailing people in that thing. It’s not exactly inconspicuous.

The movie ends with Will Smith and Gabrielle Union making out at Gitmo. I felt like an unlawful combatant watching this shit.

So I watched this shit and in the spirit of understanding I hoped maybe to get into the crazy, over-the-top spirit of the movie. In concept, I liked the black humor of them having to search a bunch of dead bodies for hidden drugs. There were some giant explosions here and there, including one caused by a remote controlled car. In the car chases, there’s definitely some spectacle with cars flipping around and flying through the air although just like all of Bay’s movies, I just couldn’t get involved in it no matter how hard I tried, because the whole approach to shooting and editing pulls me out of it.

The editing actually isn’t as bad as ARMAGEDDON, though. For the first ten or fifteen minutes I thought it might kill me because of that Michael-Bay-strobe-light-editing where literally no shot lasts for more than 4 seconds and is usually between 2 and 3. So you get this bump-bump-bump-bump-rhythm where you can never solidly focus on anything and you just feel like the guy is trying to murder your eyeballs. But at some point either I got used to it or it started to calm down a little to the point where it wasn’t as distracting. Which is helpful.

What surprised me is that even though this is a terrible movie, it’s not a terrible movie in the same way I thought it would be. What I didn’t expect, somehow, is that this is a really bad comedy. Maybe if they cut out an hour and treated it seriously you could enjoy it like THE TRANSPORTER 2 or something, but the emphasis of the movie is not on action as much as it is on horrible, painful, inexcusable comedy. There’s almost no point in criticizing it as an action movie because most of it is all about these two whiny bitches bickering.

The story is mainly about the relationship between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and how Martin wants to break up. Will is sad but he decides to accept it. Then they bond by doing a wacky comedy skit that involves pointing a loaded gun at Martin’s daughter’s boyfriend. Then he quotes what Martin wrote in his high school year book (”Bad Boys for life”) and they make up. But the thing is, there is no fucking way Will would want to be around this guy. There is no person on earth who would want to be around this guy. He’s supposed to be a cop, but during every action scene he runs around like a coward whining and begging for his life and dancing around like a minstrel. I forget his character’s name but I think it’s Detective Stephen Fetchit. During the first shootout he announces “It’s the negras!” He’s afraid of rats, they make him scream and cry. The dead bodies make him puke and cry. When he has a gun pointed at his head he cries and gives up. When he’s in a car chase, he cries and gives up. I’m surprised they didn’t find a place for him to be scared of a ghost. If he’s not crying or running like a coward he’s yelling things like “Shit is crazy!” during a shootout so you remember the movie is supposed to be “fun.”

These clowns make Anthony Anderson and Tom Arnold in all those Andrjez Bartkowiak movies seem like the fuckin Marx Brothers.You know how Will Smith has his “serious voice” and his “I’m trying to be funny now” voice when he starts busting out the slang? Both Will and Martin use the “I’m trying to be funny now” voice for most of the movie. Most of their dialogue seems improvised and it seems like everybody involved must’ve thought they had struck gold. But scene after scene has that embarrassing, uncomfortable feel of a bombing Saturday Night Live skit. There is this one “joke” about how Martin doesn’t know that Will is seeing his sister. Will is supposed to tell Martin but is scared he’ll disapprove (what’s he gonna do, cry and bitch some more?) so he keeps stumbling on his words and lying. They do this same joke over and over again throughout the movie, as if they thought it was hilarious the first time and can only grow in its power the more they do it.

Then there’s the joke about how the pool breaks and water goes everywhere. Craziness! This could’ve happened in that movie where Malcolm in the Middle painted Paul Giamatti blue, but Michael Bay wanted in on some of that action. And then he was so happy with the results that he did it again at the end of the movie.

And of course there’s the “Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do” song. In the first BAD BOYS they sang that song from the show COPS. COPS came on the air in 1989, so this was a six year old reference. Even Leslie Nielsen wouldn’t have touched that shit, but they did it. Somebody somewhere said, “You know what, it’s named after the song from COPS. So people are gonna expect them to sing the song from COPS.” So they put it in there. Then BAD BOYS 2 comes along in 2003. And somebody said, “You know what, it’s a thirteen year old reference, it wouldn’t be funny even if it was current, it was just one of many bad decisions we made in the first one, but you know what? It was in the first one. People are gonna expect them to redo the same thing they did in the first one, if there is anyone who remembers that we made a first one.” So they had them sing it again. And then they were shooting the end of the movie and they said, “You know what, we did it in the beginning of the movie. People are gonna expect us to redo what we did in the beginning of the movie in the end of the movie.” So they fucking did it again, they sang it twice in this movie alone. That is the kind of quality control we’re talking here, they let that get in there twice.

Probaly the worst scene in the entire movie is the Circuit City scene, which makes no sense on about 25 different levels. The Bad Boys have found a drug dealer’s video camera, but it has a bullet hole in it so they can’t just play what’s on it. They have to bring it to a young salesman at Circuit City. Being an electronics expert, he is able to plug it in and that I guess magically repairs the bullet hole in a way that the Bad Boys could never have done on their own. But he accidentally plays the tape on every TV in the store. So of course the tape has footage of Will Smith (off camera) screwing Martin’s sister and everyone in the store thinks it’s porn. So then there is mayhem and outrageousness and Martin and Will retreat to another room inside the store. For reasons maybe explained in part 1, the tvs throughout the store now switch to a camera in this room and broadcast a conversation that out of context sounds like they’re talking about buttfucking each other. And this goes on for a long time while everybody in the store is shocked. I was disappointed that nobody fainted or spit out a drink.

Get it though? Fags. Ha ha.

I thought I sort of understood why some people liked this movie, but now that I’ve seen it I’m completely befuddled. This is like a David Spade movie that costs $130 million and has cars flying all over the place and blowing up. Even if you have one of those brains that can translate the Michael Bay spazzovision into real filmatic language, I still don’t understand how you could enjoy this shit. So what if it has big explosions if you gotta sit through two hours of painfully unfunny shtick to get there? This movie is fucking terrible.

But, you know, peace be with you. So as far as reaching out to my enemies, I would have to say that my viewing of BAD BOYS 2 was a failure. I don’t have much nice to say about that one. After I saw it, I wasn’t sure if I had achieved my goal of creating brothership and understanding around the world by watching this horrible, horrible movie. So as extra credit for peace, I decided to watch TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE, the cartoon movie that Bay is currently turning into his next horrible, horrible movie.

TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE tells the story of The Transformers, a race of robots from the metal space planet of Cybertron. Like humans, the Transformers robots are bitterly divided into two groups, Autobots and Republicans. The Republicans control Cybertron, much like they control the White House, the congress and the courts here. They have forced the Autobots to move to the space moon where they are planning some kind of rebellion.

One thing I should mention is that the Transformers have the power to “transform” into a car, plane, or appliance. It’s similar to how a hide-a-bed transforms from a couch to a bed. Transformers can also fly so there is no reason why they should ever turn into a car or plane, unless they are trying to impress Michael Bay, because he gets a boner for that shit. The cars are pretty good cars though because in one part they can drive underwater and fight robotic piranhas and sharks from space.

The Autobots are planning some kind of big something or other, but a robotic bird finds out so he tells Maggotron, the head of the Republican party and also a member of the NRA I believe, since he transforms from a huge evil robot to a small handgun that you could fit in the back of your pants. So the Republicans attack the Autobot moon and they all battle the shit out of each other.

The leader of the Autobots is Optimus Prime, who turns into a red semi-truck and talks like John Wayne. He says some kind of dramatic deal about stopping the Republican agenda “no matter the cost,” in other words he’s gonna die heroically and it’s gonna be awesome. Sure enough after some punching and guns, Optimus gets cracked and he dies peacefully surrounded by his loved ones including Microscope Robot and Girl Robot. As he dies he turns black and grey and his chest opens up so he can pass on the glowing “matrix of leadership” to some other dude.

But the Republicans are in bad shape too (see that? the endless circle of violence) so they retreat on a robot that turns into a train that turns into a space shuttle. Maggotron is dying, so everybody fights over who should take his place, kind of like when Alexander Haig tried to say he was in charge after Reagan got shot. The robotrainshuttle is damaged though and Republicans don’t believe in social programs, so they just toss the smaller or sicker robots, including Maggotron, out the side door. Sorry, suckers. Cybertron is not for socialists.

MEANWHILE, IN SPACE, there is yet another metal planet, this one called Unicron. If they just switched two letters and made it Unicorn then alot more girls would like this movie, but I guess they weren’t going for box office, they were staying true to the original vision of the executives who came up with the idea of toy cars that turn into robots. Anyway, the Unicron planet has a big octopus type mouth on it and is alive and it likes to eat other planets. It’s played by Orson Welles (CITIZEN KANE) and in my opinion it’s kind of an asshole thing to do to cast a guy as a planet just because he’s fatter than he used to be when he was young. Maggotron floats into Unicron so Unicron makes a deal with him, he gives him a new body and Leonard Nimoy’s voice and sends him to crush “the matrix of leadership” so that nobody can stop him from doing whatever it is that evil planets like to do.

There was one part I thought was pretty funny, the new Republican majority leader Whiny Airplane is making everybody throw him a coronation party. But just as the crown goes on his metal head, the new Maggotron shows up. Whiny Airplane says, “Is that you, Maggotron?” and he says “Here’s a hint, cocksucker” (or words to that effect) and transforms into a magic laser cannon. Then he shoots the airplane and the guy disintegrates into ashes. But here’s the cool part. His crown falls to the ground and Maggotron steps on it and crushes it like a Dorito. This I would consider to be a definitive statement about the airplane’s poor leadership.

Then I think there was a big battle or something, I can’t remember what happened.

The universe of Transformers is kind of like CARS, everything is machines and you can’t figure out who the fuck built these guys or how they reproduce. What would happen if girl robot got it on with robot bird? or is that gross? I’m not sure. Are the small robots considered pets to the big robots? Or are they just unique and beautiful, like snowflakes?

Unlike CARS though there are exactly two hunks of flesh in this movie. But both of them wear robo-suits and one of them even transforms into a car. He is kind of a poser in my opinion, why doesn’t he just drive a car like a normal person. You gotta stay true to yourself, you don’t have to copy somebody else’s culture.

I should note, by the way, that this has some of the worst ’80s rock music you ever heard. It even has the song that Mark Wahlberg recorded in BOOGIE NIGHTS, “You Got the Touch.” In that movie it seems like a really funny exaggeration of the type of music we had in the ’80s, but it turns out it’s a serious song from this particular movie, and it is talking about how Optimus Prime “has the touch” and is “a winner.” There are lots of awkward montages set to bad rock music and one part where all the robots dance.

Now, if you watch this movie and carefully study it, after a while you will figure out who this movie is for: nerds. First of all, it’s a cartoon. Second, it’s about robots. You got all this fancy mythology and what not. And the characters are constantly talking about The Matrix. So it’s definitely for nerds.

That’s why The Transformers is exactly what Michael Bay deserves. Because no matter what he does, he’s now cursed to be plagued by nerds from today until the day the coke does him in. If the movie makes nerds happy, he’ll be their hero and they’ll worship him like Peter Jackson or whoever, they’ll follow him around and he won’t be able to shake em. “Michael Bay, why can’t you do the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. Michael Bay, why can’t you do Halo. Michael Bay, come to my house and re-enact Monty Python skits with me.” But in the more likely event that he shits all over their dreams and passions and makes them angry, they’ll plague him in a worse way. And this is a guy accustomed to taking his Ferrari and doing donuts on a military base while two high priced hookers shoot coke into his balls (at least, that’s my impression. I cannot prove this). He’s not the type that’s gonna have patience for these nerds.

It’s so beautiful. It’s like the bad guy from REVENGE OF THE NERDS having to referee a Magic: The Gathering tournament. I don’t think he knew what he was signing up for. Much like the kids who he claimed, in an interview for Air Force Television, would sign up for the military because the movie is a good “recruitment tool.”

But you know what, I’m trying to make peace here, so my heart goes out to Michael Bay. Even though you’re horrible, I hope you can keep them off your property. And I can see why the guy wanted to do this movie. It’s very personal to him, because it has cars in it instead of people. He can relate to cars more than people, they think the same. Ever since his senior thesis film which was apparently about frat boys driving around really fast in a yellow Porsche, he has related to cars more than people, and in interviews he has said that TRANSFORMERS is a personal story to him because it has a part where a kid buys his first car. This is probaly the movie he was born to make, the one he could really knock out of the park. So instead he’ll probaly make it more about people than robots and fuck the whole thing up.

I’m against BAD BOYS 2, I guess I’ll say I’m neutral on TRANSFORMABLES. For that type of robot/car cartoon movie, I guess it is probaly pretty decent, as far as those go. But please understand that I made an effort. I reached out. We’re all grown ups here, that’s what we do.

Israelis, Hezbollahs, Americans, Iraqis, unlawful combatants, transformers, and everybody else out there with a gun or a bomb: please learn a lesson from this. It’s time we all got together and said “what the hell, the world is big enough for all of us assholes.” We gotta be less stubborn and more humble and acknowledge that co-existing with somebody you don’t like isn’t the end of the world. BAD BOYS 2 may be shit, but it’s not the end of the world. Life goes on.

let’s do this everybody,

–VERN

[ratings]

Before I go on, I gotta warn everybody, just because a movie is in IMAX doesn’t mean it’s in 3-D. I saw GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS and POLAR EXPRESS there and the 3-D made those worthwhile, and I swear on THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: RENAILED that is the one and only reason why I went to see this ROBOTS. Now obviously I would prefer if a 3-D movie was a horror or a part 3, something where either a shark or an eyeball is gonna pop out of the screen at some time. But I have accepted that now 3-D is for kids movies only so a man’s gotta settle. I didn’t mind payin my ten bucks but then when I walked into the theater and there was no goggles, I realized that I was finally suffering the consequences of my ignorance about Imax. I knew this day would come. ROBOTS is not in 3-D. Sheeit.

ROBOTS is a computer animated one about a world where everybody is robots. They have dreams, goals, etc., and you could see where it would go from there.

I mean seriously, every single god damned thing that happens in this movie, you would already figure would happen in this movie. Except maybe the character who has a giant ass who farts all the time, I didn’t see that one coming. Farting robots in this one.

A cartoon rabbit’s mom once said if you can’t say something nice, shut the fuck up you thumpery little piece of shit cartoon rabbit (paraphrased) so I will start by saying two nice things. Number one, the designers of this movie are very clever and creative, building an entire world and population out of junk parts. Number two, there is about three or four mildly amusing jokes spaced out throughout this movie. One detail I liked, the villain listens to Kenny G in one part. Somebody should steal that for real live action, that’s a good one.

What you got here though, a bunch of celebrity voices playing “characters” such as Ewan McGregor as Hero Robot, Halle Berry as Hot Girl Robot, somebody else as Kid Sister Robot. Then there is dad robot, mom robot, wise old inventor robot (Mel Brooks), Lovable Flying Pet-like Robot, and Miscellaneous Robot “Characters”. The main problem with this movie, every single god damn element of it except the design comes straight out of the How To Make Boring Generic Kiddie Fluff handbook.

Hero Robot (who probaly has a name, but who gives a shit? not anybody who didn’t get paid to work on this, that’s who) has no personality quirks. He is a mathematical formula. The formula goes like this: boy robot + dream to become inventor = let’s try to stretch this out to feature length if possible. When he’s a little boy he sees a tv show that makes him want to invent. So he invents a thing, then tries to meet the guy from the TV show. But Villain Robot has replaced the tv guy. So for the rest of the movie he has to run around saying things about following your dreams and going for it and now is your time to shine and that type of bullshit. And to stop an evil plot by Evil Robot and his mom. That’s all he ever does. There is nobody in the world, no adult, child or animal, who has any amount of feeling for this stupid character. He is a complete blank. He is nothing.

That was enough to sink the movie but just in case, they also threw in Robin Williams as Wacky Robot. What he does is wacky stuff. He jumps around and says his lines in different accents, makes references to anime, etc. I think we all can agree, that stupid motherfucker is not funny. What is he doing polluting our children’s minds with that crap. There is alot of time during this movie for you to let your mind wander, and one of the things I started to wonder about: if Robin Williams was born now, would his parents put him on ritalin or something? It would suck to lose POPEYE but it might be worth it to avoid more incidents like Wacky Robot and Various Award Shows.

Another thing, I heard there’s gonna be an unauthorized TV movie coming up about the making of MORK AND MINDY. And they deal with his drug problems and he has some big emotional moments. Or at least, the guy playing Robin Williams does. I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if they have a big emotional breakdown scene where he realizes he’s hit rock bottom and he’s admitting his drug problem, and he’s crying and all, and then all the sudden he starts to get self conscious so he starts mugging, riffing off of it, making references to Reaganomics and E.T. and Rubik’s cube and crap. And it’s so pathetic and embarassing that it makes the scene just completely devastating. This might be the greatest tv movie of all time, if they get the brilliant actor that could pull that off.

Anyway, I value your time, so I’ll wrap this up in three (3) more paragraphs. Some of you might be saying Vern, this is a kid’s movie, who the fuck cares. Well I’ll tell you who cares, I do. Because if I have a commitment to excellence then America should have a commitment to excellence, and by extension Hollywood should have a commitment to excellence and to sharing excellence with the children. They are spending millions of dollars and all these people are working so hard on it, and this is what they make? The Pixar guys wouldn’t do that. They know that it’s about creating strong characters with personality and telling compelling stories about them. Not just saying “it’s about robots!” and stacking up 250 half assed ideas about what robots do in robotland. “Ooh! Ooh! What if they have to go through a metal detector? But they’re all made out of metal! Ha ha ha, it’s funny because robots are metal!”

Let’s not have another one of these, please. Yes, Pixar made one about a world of toys, and a world of bugs, and a world of fish, and a world of monsters. But they made good characters and stories for most of those. They didn’t just leave it at the world. The way things are going, I bet they really will do my idea first introduced in the OSMOSIS JONES review I believe, about a world of laundry where a sock is searching for his lost twin brother. It’s called LAUNDRY. Because it’s about laundry. The one sock, he always believes in following his dream, but then there is a setback and he almost gives up, but his loyal pair of panties girlfriend reminds him of how he taught her to be confident even though she is not lacey and has a regular ass covering area instead of a thong (the thong panties are the popular girls in school, isn’t that clever, it’s a world of laundry). And so he realizes that he should always follow his dream and he goes out there and finds his sock brother, hooray for everybody and then they dance and get folded which to laundry is a really big deal like getting married or knighted or something.

The only problem with LAUNDRY, and also a problem with ROBOTS. Some kids are gonna see it when they’re real little and they’re gonna like it, because they don’t know any better. But then when they’re older they want to recapture that magic, they rent the movie and they can’t even sit through the god damn thing it’s so bland. That is a sad state of affairs not as much in LAUNDRY as in ROBOTS. Because everybody knows robots are cool. They shoot lasers, they crush stuff, they go inside a building after a stand-off to find out if the snipers hit the gunman or not. So this movie should be alot better in my opinion.

[ratings]