"Transformers: Age of Extinction": The Best Transformers Movie

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

Age of Extinction is hands-down the best film in the modern Transformers franchise.  This isn’t to say that it’s a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least I didn’t find this one painful to sit through.  Michael Bay seems to be sick and tired of making these damn things, and paradoxically, his laziness is taking over his baser instincts and he’s directed a better film than when he’s actually tried in the past.  The film is still over-long and unnecessarily padded, but the action is at least somewhat fun and if explosions are your thing, they’re still here in abundance.

The plot starts off focusing on new characters, headed by Mark Wahlberg as a down-on-his-luck inventor and his teenage daughter.  These characters are just as one-dimensional as any of Bay’s past Transformers characters, but the major benefit here is that since Wahlberg is supposed to be the relatable character, we’re saved the adolescent objectification of our female lead, since creeping on the protagonist’s teenage daughter apparently crosses a line.  Anyway, Wahlberg accidentally comes across Optimus Prime in hiding from the U.S. government, who is now in league with a robot bounty hunter that is after Optimus’s head for some reason or another.  Wahlberg, Optimus and company must now flee the government and also prevent it from creating a knock-off Transformer army of its own.  Whereas the previous films had one very simple plot that took convoluted and circuitous routes, this film has too many plots overlapping and competing for screentime.  As a consequence, the film feels bloated with too many new story elements that function primarily as teasers for sequels.

On the flipside, however, the film has done away with the franchise’s fascination with nameless dudes in military regalia, and so now the brunt of the film’s storytelling and action falls on the metallic shoulders of the Transformers themselves.  With a cast of five main Autobots that have colorful designs and distinctive voice actors (if not unique personalities), this is the best that the robots have ever looked in their own movies, and while I recognize that this isn’t much of an endorsement, the difference is noticeable.  They actually engage in dialogue with each other and aren’t relegated to simply being military lapdogs; there’s actually an attempt to acknowledge their alien background and their relationship with humanity as a whole.  The characters aren’t quite fleshed out enough to make it work, but it’s a step in the right direction, and one that I hope future directors in the post-Bay Transformers films will deign to capitalize on.

Despite the bulk of this review focusing on the improvements this film has brought to the franchise, I still want to emphasize that Age of Extinction is not a good film by any means.  The plots are simultaneously dumb and overcomplicated, the characters are cardboard cut-out archetypes that offer nothing interesting to the narrative, the editing still jumps around so much that you have to piece the shots together with your imagination rather than comprehend what’s actually happening, and the whole experience feels phoned-in and lazy.  But if that’s all the negativity I can force myself to muster at a Transformers movie, the franchise’s status has been elevated from abysmally awful to simply below-average.  It certainly wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen this year, and its stupidity is, at worst, inoffensive.  I don’t recommend seeing it, but perhaps the groundwork has been laid for better installments to come.

Don’t believe me?  Disagree vehemently?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Hell's Half Mile Film & Music Festival 2014: Thoughts and Impressions

This weekend, I had the pleasure to attend Bay City, Michigan’s 9^th Annual Hell’s Half Mile Film & Music Festival.  As of this writing, the festival is in its final day, and unfortunately this means that I was unable to attend today’s showings due to scheduling conflicts.  However, I thought that I would offer some quick thoughts on the films I did see.  These aren’t going to be fully fleshed-out reviews, mostly because most of these films don’t have a distributor yet, so the chances of the average person seeing them outside the festival circuit are pretty slim.  However, I offer you my audience participation scores and my reasoning so that if these films do get picked up for distribution, perhaps you’ll remember what a Pretentious Best Friend once told you.

Feature Films

Arlo and Julie – 1/5  With no understanding of comedic pacing, some truly amateur camerawork, and a bizarrely discordant soundtrack seemingly comprised entirely of budget-saving public domain songs, this film is a trainwreck.  I wouldn’t be surprised if director Steve Mims listed Tommy Wiseau among his directoral influences.

Patrick’s Day – 3/5  An interesting look at the life of a schizophrenic in love, yet the film has some serious first act focus issues, jumping back and forth in perspective so that it doesn’t ground itself with a protagonist or central conflict.  When a protagonist does emerge in the second act, though, the film takes a turn for the better and is heartbreakingly tragic as a result.

Der Samurai – 1/5  A disgusting film that equates gender non-conformity with violent psychopathy by placing its male villain in a dress and lipstick and offering no subsequent explanation.  The film suffers from an overly convenient plot and nonsensical twists, and while well-directed and shot, this film has one of the worst screenplays I’ve ever seen.

OJ: The Musical – 4/5  A cute, if quite predictable, story of a stage director trying to get a crazy musical idea off the ground with the help of old childhood friends.  There’s a running joke about suicide that is truly unfunny, but the rest of the film’s charm makes up for that.

Wild Canaries – 3/5  It’s hard for me to measure this one since there were technical difficulties during the showing of this film.  However, while the mystery plot was engaging, the characters’ intersecting love lives made them all unlikeable to a certain extent, and the romantic subplots could have easily been cut in favor of more sleuthing shenanigans.  Not a bad movie, but more like half of a good one.

BFFs – 4/5  Probably the best film I saw, this one analyzes where the line is drawn between best friend and romantic partner.  While I don’t think the film was as funny as intended, the story is strong enough to support the film’s faults.

Short Films

The Gunfighter – 5/5  A funny joke that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The Crumb Of It – 2/5  Well acted and directed, but hell if I know what it was trying to tell me.

SPONGE – 1/5  A pretentious musical romp that wants to be profound but ultimately feels idiotic.

The Telegram Man – 4/5  It perhaps takes too long to get to its point, but the emotional gut-punch ending works.

Breaking Chains – 5/5  A strong message film that brings awareness to a critical global issue.

Universal Language – 3/5  Overlong and utterly predictable, yet quaint in its earnestness to tell a love story.

The Zombie’s Trip – 4/5  Shortest film of the festival, biggest WTF surprise.

Directors on Directing – 4/5  The joke perhaps runs a little too long, but to sustain five minutes of film on one joke isn’t easy.

"We Are The Best!": Good Enough Critic Candy

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

We Are The Best! knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and it does it quite well.  As a study of adolescence and what makes rebellion so appealing to the youngest of budding adults, the movie knows its stuff, and it comes off as genuinely knowledgeable and heartfelt.  Critics almost universally loved this film in its festival circuit and U.S. theatrical runs, which should lend to its credibility all the more.  After all, that’s why I chose to review this particular film in the first place.  And yet, I feel pretty ambivalent about this one.

Just to clarify, We Are The Best! is a good film.  There’s really nothing particularly wrong with it, for the cast is perfectly suited to their roles and the themes are resonant.  In 1982 in Stockholm, two thirteen-year-old best friends are really into punk rock.  They cut their hair short and don’t pretty themselves up like the other girls; after all, punk is not as dead as everyone says, at least not to them.  Fed up with being called ugly and strange for not conforming, the girls start to vent their frustrations by writing and playing their own punk song.  They realize that they’re not very musically talented, so they recruit a third member, a quiet Christian girl with no other friends who is good at playing guitar.  The oddly-matched threesome grow as friends and try their best to be as adult as possible, though their confused feelings at any given moment may get in their way.

So yeah, the film portrays adolescence pretty accurately, from the mood swings to the misunderstandings between well-meaning friends to the use of creative outlets to cope with their burgeoning adulthood and everyone’s insistence that they’re still children.  Yet I’m still pretty nonplussed by what should be a well-received experience.  Is it that I feel like this has been done before?  Spielberg is perhaps the most notable director to show young teenagers as naturalistically as possible, yet this film doesn’t share his penchant for youthful romanticism.

No, I think the issue is that the film doesn’t really hold itself up on more than its theming.  This isn’t really a film about getting a band together or overcoming other peoples’ expectations; it’s a snapshot of a bunch of pseudo-kids learning to say “Fuck you!” to everyone’s expectations of who they should be.  And yeah, that’s fine and all, but it feels a bit shallow in its thematic depth.  There’s some feminism interwoven with the primary message as well, but it feels like the obligatory subtext inherent in having three female leads rather than a fully fleshed out theme.  I guess I felt unsatisfied because I wanted the film to show me something more, something new, something that hasn’t been the subject of just about every coming-of-age story ever, albeit with a punk rock aesthetic this time around.

We Are The Best! seems to me like a film that’s being praised right now upon its release, but nobody’s going to remember it in the years to come.  It hits the sentimental soft spots that the film press really seems to gravitate toward, but it doesn’t do much with that sentiment other than tell a fairly standard coming-of-age tale.  I still think it’s a well-done film; I’m just disappointed by its lack of ambition.

Is punk dead?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.