Looking Back At: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" & "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"

The Transformers franchise has a strangely unique place in our popular culture, almost universally panned by critics, popular media, and in general human discourse, and yet it’s still one of the highest grossing film franchises of the past decade.  Part of this we can likely attribute to intelligent folks going to see these films “ironically” just to see how bad the new one has turned out, but I think the majority of the people who go to the theaters to see these films see this as their stand against the so-called intellectual elite.  By going to see a movie with tons of explosions and mindless action that is so universally hated by those who think they’re so much smarter than everyone else, people send a message that it doesn’t matter how smart a movie is; they’re just here for some dumb fun.  And I love dumb fun just as much as the next guy, but dumb fun done well is intelligently put together, using the techniques of the trade to make a film that is coherent and entertaining.  Transformers has never been that, and Revenge of the Fallen is the perfect example to demonstrate everything wrong with this franchise.

I’m not even going to attempt a plot synopsis of this one, mostly because it’s so all over the place that to diagram it out would be mind-numbingly pointless.  Basically, Shia LaBeouf has a magic MacGuffin in his brain, the evil Decepticons want it, poorly strung-together set-pieces ensue.  The good-guy Autobots are now agents of the American military for some reason, even though they say they’re here to protect the entire Earth; it seems to me that director Michael Bay may have more than just a bit of an American superiority complex.  The Autobots are never really characterized either, letting their generically ugly designs take over instead of trying to give them any discernable personalities.  The only two robots who seem to get any descriptively noteworthy qualities are the supposed comic relief characters, The Twins, a couple of the most offensive racial caricatures I’ve ever seen on the screen.  They speak in Ebonics, have monkey-like faces, assertedly cannot read, and are prone to immediate violence and in-fighting.  I’ll let you do the math on that one.

So, without any contributions from the title characters, the weight of the script falls onto the human characters, as wonderfully one-note and dull as they all are.  An inordinate amount of time is devoted to LaBeouf’s first day of college antics, seemingly only to make him super relatable to the Gen-Y demographic, "brah."  The film’s tone swings wildly from comic relief to serious exposition at the drop of a hat, and editing never slows down enough for any of it to ever sink in.  It seems that Bay realizes this, so throughout the film, key plot elements are repeated over and over to make sure we’re following along, and even then, too little information comes in too late for me to possibly give a damn.  Fast shouting and quick cuts are used to give the illusion of witty banter, but it becomes tiresome quickly and never lets up.

The treatment of women in this film is also cringingly horrible.  Megan Fox returns as LaBeouf’s eye-candy girlfriend, and there are moments when this film cuts away from dialogue only to pan up and down Fox’s body or to show us Fox stripping down.  Her character serves no purpose but to support LaBeouf’s, and Fox’s presence is only here to provide the film’s alpha-male demographic some masturbation material.  Fox reportedly refused to be party to the next film precisely because of Michael Bay’s objectification of her, and I wouldn’t doubt that for a second.

When everything comes to a head in the climactic final battle, Michael Bay isn’t interested in showing us robots fighting one another, but instead brings in the military to show off their big guns.  This seems to me to be a complete waste of having giant robots on-screen.  Bay’s gone on record for his ambivalence for the Transformers source material, and he’s clearly got a romanticism for the U.S. military, so I have a sneaking suspicion that this was his attempt to sink his own franchise.  The only problem is that his glorification of the military tricked people into thinking he was a master of action scenes, when really he used smoke, explosions, and an overly-hyperactive camera to obscure the action that serves to resolve the film’s major conflict.

Now, it’s only fair of me to point out that Revenge of the Fallen is the low point of the original trilogy, for Dark of the Moon is an improvement in presentation if not in content.  Don’t get me wrong, the film is still a train wreck; the plot is essentially a rehashing of Revenge, with LaBeouf dealing with Gen-Y angst and an only-good-for-her-looks girlfriend while intrigue formulates around a different MacGuffin.  The major addition this time is a recovered Autobot who’s intent on betraying them all, but once again the Transformers are so insufficiently characterized that it’s impossible to care too much when the twist does come along.

However, where Michael Bay seems to have gotten his shit together is in his action directing.  The camera is much more stationary now, and when the robots are on-screen, they pop against the backdrop of the cityscape rather than blend into it.  It’s easy to tell what’s happening in any given shot, even if there’s no investment in the characters in any given shot.  That said, the climax, while impressive in its scope of destroying Chicago, still pulls its attention away from the titular characters in favor of following nameless soldiers who are there to blow things up.

And that’s when it starts to become clear that Michael Bay purposely worked to make things more coherent for a special purpose.  See, right before the climactic battle, the Decepticons hold the Earth at ransom so that the Autobots will leave.  The Autobots apparently leave, and the Decepticons destroy their transport and proceed to invade the great American city of Chicago.  And yet, the Autobots never really left, and swoop in to save the day in order to, and I quote, “protect freedom.”  Cue the National Anthem, folks, we have ourselves a Stay the Course message!  The blatantly out-of-place nationalism sticks out like a sore thumb in a film that’s ostensibly about giant, sentient, fighting robots, and it’s awkwardness cannot be ignored.

I’ve already rambled on about these films for long enough; if you’re reading this, you probably already know all the arguments that have been made about these films, and you aren’t the audience that these films are seeking.  The Transformers franchise has not been made with people like me in mind, and an inexplicably large subculture of fans has built up around defending these films from analysis by people like me.  Transformers is critic proof, and as long as people keep giving up their money at the box office, the series will continue.  I guess I just ask that those of you who go to the theater to enjoy the films “ironically” take a moment to realize the impact this has on the film industry.  If a piece of crap like Transformers can be such a huge financial success, producers are going to want to replicate that success in order to make more money.  This means a future of dumber and more poorly made films, which is a future that scares the hell out of me as a movie lover.  If you must watch these films, hold off for the Blu-Ray releases so that your dollar doesn’t have as big of an impact.  The future of quality filmmaking may depend on it.

Well, this one ran a bit long.  Am I a bit fatalistic in my view towards a film franchise?  Isn’t it all harmless entertainment?  And if so, what am I even doing reviewing any film?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Tusk": Perhaps The Strangest Film You'll Ever See

Now In Theaters

Let me start out by saying how incredibly bizarre it is that this film even exists.  Seriously, this film was made on a joking dare by Kevin Smith’s podcast audience, and it now has a wide theatrical release, headlined by well-known actors like Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, and Johnny Depp.  And this is a movie about a man who captures people and surgically transforms them into walruses.  I… I hardly even know where to begin with this one, folks.  This is one of the most bizarre films I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Justin Long plays a podcaster named Wallace (oh jeez, see what they did there?) who runs a podcast with his friend Teddy.  Together they exploit interesting people for hits on the internet.  While on a trip to Canada, Wallace runs across an advertisement for living space with a man who promises interesting stories in exchange for doing household chores.  The intrigued Wallace goes to meet this man, named Howard Howe (played by Michael Parks).  Howe subsequently drugs Wallace and begins the process of desecrating Wallace’s body so as to turn him into a facsimile of a beloved walrus from Howe’s youth, affectionately named Mr. Tusk.  Meanwhile, Teddy and Wallace’s girlfriend realize Wallace has been abducted, and they head to Canada to hunt him down.

That, my friends, is the strangest synopsis that I’ve ever had to write.  And you know what?  As ludicrous as that descriptions sounds, the film mostly works precisely because of how ludicrous it is.  This film has been billed as a horror comedy, which is a genre mashup that’s very difficult to pull off.  However, this film manages to walk the line of those two disparate film-types by sticking to one principle: shoot all the horror scenes with straight-faced sincerity, no matter how ridiculous.  Director Kevin Smith knows that this is an absolutely preposterous film that he’s making, so there doesn’t need to be any winks to the audience as the absurd plot unfolds before us; that absurdity speaks for itself, and the fact that we’re basically watching The Human Centipede with A FUCKING WALRUS is such a strange premise that the film sustains itself purely on that intrigue.

The only times I think the film really falters are in some of the scenes that require straight comedy to sustain interest, because sometimes the jokes fall pretty flat.  The first act is dominated by the douchebag Wallace, but most of his lines lack any sort of comedic timing, so he’s just aggravating to watch at times.  I realize that he’s supposed to be unlikeable so that we don’t feel too sympathetic for him as he’s mutilated later in the film, but I think the film perhaps dwells on his attitude to the point where he becomes unnecessarily obnoxious.  That said, Johnny Depp shows up in the scene-stealing second act role as an ex-cop to deliver a wonderfully bizarre monologue about his career of hunting the serial killer.  The resulting flashback, while perhaps a little overlong, is strangely hypnotic in its pure stupid grace.

Tusk is one of those films that is truly one of a kind.  I won’t pretend that it’s a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the kind of experience that really needs to be seen to be believed.  The final scenes will convince you of that if nothing else.  Kevin Smith has created something that will be burned into my memory until the day I die, and all-in-all, that’s an accomplishment worthy of commendation and a recommendation.  Go see Tusk.  I don’t regret it, but even if you do, it will be worth it to know just how weird that goddamn walrus movie is.

Kevin Smith has announced two more horror movies to come out in the near future to complete what he calls The True North Trilogy.  After this, I’m oddly excited.  Leave your thoughts and impressions in the comments below.

"The Fault In Our Stars": Acknowledges Its Faults

Now Available on Blu-Ray and DVD

The Fault In Our Stars is exactly the type of movie you think it is, meeting pretty much all the conventions of the cancer-as-sentimentality genre.  Girl dying of cancer meets boy who is a survivor of cancer, a romance blossoms and fills the audience with happy feelings, and then an emotional punch to the gut takes over the third act and everyone walks away bemoaning the tragedy of this young love.  This movie hits all those notes fairly spot-on.  And yet, I felt fairly satisfied by the time it was all said and done.  In fact, it’s not a bad movie at all, and that’s a surprising thing for me to say, given my reprehension for shallow, emotionally manipulative storytelling.

That’s probably because, despite the film relying on tried-true tropes of a genre that thrives on the emotional insecurities of teenagers, it’s self-aware of these tropes and actually goes out of its way in its narration to point out exactly what’s happening.  See, narrator and main character Hazel is savvy to the tropes of teen cancer fiction because she herself lives a life as a teen cancer victim, and she’s aware that her story follows a path that lazy writers have used for decades.  Meta-confessing its own tropes doesn’t automatically excuse them, but it does mean that the film is willing to lay its cards on the table and admit exactly what kind of story it’s telling.  That goes a long way toward making what would otherwise be a cash-grab adaptation of a teen weepie novel into a well-told story in its own right.

And well-told the story is, with likable characters often engaging in witty banter that is endearing and funny without being condescending or overly sentimental.  As previously mentioned, Hazel’s narration provides a great meta-textual overview to a plot we’ve seen the basic outlines of many times before, and it makes her that much more relatable.  She recognizes that her love story is one of fairly standard transformation from reclusion to finding the love of her life, but that doesn’t matter because within her universe, it’s still happening to her.

Now, that isn’t to say the film is entirely devoid of its faults and genre trappings.  When I say that the characters are likeable, that proves to be problematic in two separate respects.  The first that I’ll mention is a surprising appearance by Willem Dafoe as a character who is supposed to be extremely unlikable, and yet Dafoe brings such bizarre energy to the part that I couldn’t help but laugh in a scene where, frankly, I really wasn’t supposed to. More importantly to the film as a whole, though, is the disgustingly perfect representation of love interest Gus.  This guy is a handsome, scholarly, athletic, and eloquent teenage straight girl’s wetdream, and it gets to a certain point where he becomes so unrealistic that it serves as a reminder that his existence serves only to further Hazel’s character arc.  The film attempts a token scene toward the end where the emotional hardship of events starts to break through his always-cheerful exterior, but it’s resolved so quickly that it feels that scene only exists to give justification against an argument that he is too perfect.

That being said, though, The Fault In Our Stars is about as good a version of what it’s trying to be as one could reasonably expect.  Its self-awareness and refusal to shy away from the actual gravity of its subject matter elevates it above standard attempts to use cancer as an exploitative tool to take teenagers’ expendable income.  It’s subject to the limitations of the genre and doesn’t quite transcend them, but all in all, I’d say it’s worth checking out.

No question today.  Just a statement: Fuck Nicholas Sparks.  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.