Transformers Dark of the moon will be out soon, tho the tagline dark of the moon has got to be the clumsiest in fictional histroy, i keep wanting to say dark side of the moon,apologies to pink floyd so i hope its not just some cool ominous sounding one and actually congruent to the story. Judging by the trailer it certainly is, theres some other collosal transformer thats been kipping there for sumtime, il wager hes an ancient one or sumthing that holds the key to something or other
Megan fox was nowhere to be seen on the poster , ive heard she was dropped. Ill bet good money its because i still remember micheal bay fuming when megan fox announced that Transformers 2 was “just” special effects and obviously micheal bay is such a delicate flower that he made sure she never darken his door again. Irrespective of her calibre as an actress that most elitist dime store critics dismiss , I think she was merely the only one to actually call it while everyone else attached to the project was sucking it off inside out. Give her credit for her frank honesty, i imagine its written into most actors contracts that they have to do their best to sell the movie at every given opportunity, like when those insufferable entertainment journalists ambush them on the red carpet shoving a microphone in their face, asking them the safest questions like “what can we expect from (insert film title here) “ and so on and so forth. If I had a quid for every time ive heard an actor say “ its got everything, action, drama, suspense romance etc ( if that statements true, wheres the kitty porn and cockroaches playing pacman , i mean you said its got EVERYTHING, false advertising tut tut)
personally,as refreshing as it is to see a new female lead, i actually associate transformers films more with megan fox than the films lead shia labouf or however the fuck you spell his stupid name ( thats one name that should have adopted a pseudonym once the acting career took off, goodbye Jennifer Anistonopolous, hello Jennifer anistoN) Many guys dislike this actor, especially since hes somehow supposed to resemble the EVERYMAN (a fact out- of- touch- with- todays -youth Hollywood film producers need to seriously rethink before we all come to their high priced mansions wielding pitchforks and torches ) Id have preferred to see them drop shia belouf and have him be replaced by the female lead thats replacing megan fox, think it would be more interesting to see the dynamic of two very different girls going against each other than the romance of shia and megan which is less believable that the idea of alien robots turning into conveniently marketable automobiles . And no, im not suggesting any sexual tension in my imaginary film scenario between the two female leads, which is of course so predictable in us typical males who cant multitask and drive as good as our double x chromosome counterparts. Chances are, transformers 3 will end just like transformers 2, where by the climax fuck all has changed except for the fact that the film has gotten a lot less sexy after the absence of Megan fox
Let me first clarify that i did find Transformers 2 very entertaining, which at the end of the day is kinda why these kind of films exist at all in the first place. To clarify this statement further becaus e im about to lunge with a scythe and some powerade into its gargantuan flaws. it s entertaining in both a normal sense of how you watch a film and also in the spectacle of its mistakes , the same kind of thrill you get by watching a young child botch up their piano recital and reveling in the uncomfortable squirms of the people in the audience.However ,Not because im so married to the transformers mythos or anything but i did share many of the same obvious gripes about it that most people did. To say its just “special effects “ might sound like an insult, but can micheal bay credibly argue that she couldn’t see the timeless endearing thru the ages heroes journey of loss and redemption or something academy award sounding past all the astonishing , if a little exhausting , special effects? Fuck no, because there isn’t one! She didn’t misunderstand his vision, The plot there was merely a string of events for the vivid special effects to dangle from like lady gagas laundry line.
As ive already said , micheal bay is a spectacular commercials director and he mostly applies the same sensabilites to his movies ie the scenes of cars and megan foxs gynaecology exam as she spray paints the motorcycle, is taken exactly from a commercials pack shot, which makes micheal bay a fitting director as the movie itself is based on a cartoon which was essentially a commercial for toys.As a child the only transformer I had was a megatron figure that turned into a tank, i recall it was for my birthday which i peeled the wrapper off when it was hidden in my moms cupboard and feebly tried to conceal my peek with prittstick
One of my pet hates is the notion that spectacular special effects cant beat a good storyline well told( i wont name names, but if ur in my family u know who u are). That statement , while true, I think is more a shield for those who are so married to reality that any kind of flight of fancy makes them dive under the duvet with a flashlight like that weird kid from six sense. People don’t realise it because they are so commonplace these days, but making effects driven movies like Transformers 2 is really damn difficult and micheal bay is not a hack but a seriously talented director of commercials. When Trey Parker and Matt stone undertook Team America, they came to the realisation that even an action movie with marionettes was a technically challenging affair, and in this scenario , it was the mediocrity of the effects that added to the humour.
Transformers 2 lacked some serious subtlety, i know its expected of sequels to up the game a lot, but in this movie, its not just the SFX that have been injected with horse steroids. I read somewhere that the humour was to be moderated in Transformers 2, whereas the end result turned out to have near every single character being a closet vaudeville comedian just waiting to burst out, from the university teacher, the latin American roommate, the parents , sam himself, john turturo to spongbob squarepants playing a Mafioso remote controlled toycar, old annoying war veteran type figure Jetfire and lastly and most of all ,the universally despised Mudwheel and skids autobots.
These two acting as the comic relief figures begs the question of why do we need comic relief when everything else in the film is densely saturated in tortured giggles? Comic relief figures generally work better in films where the entire narrative is so dark and grim that perhaps it would be a nice touch to add a little humour to make the film slightly more bearable,not in a film which jumps schizophrenically around between hilarious comical hijinxs to even more laughable robo wars drama. In the end The humour in the film feels overdone, not to say there aren’t any generally funny moments, theres some great dialogue as usual, and i suppose it is preferable for a film to try too hard to be funny than to have every character sound like Gordon brown going on about facts.
All this devotion to trying to squeeze laughs out of the audience at every opportunity gives me the distinct impression that this movie is being made to pander to people who don’t see many movies that often. You know the type, youve settled into your nice comfy seat ,coke in hand and scarfing popcorn in the other, then you hear the cackling of a menopausal mid fifties women come storming in the theatre blurting out “ooh this is so exciting, we should come to the movies more often” to sit conveniently right in front of you, laughing hysterically like lobotomized hyenas at the all the comedy gold moments of the upcoming romantic comedy trailer and once the film starts they never cease to whisper comments to their mates concerning this and that, not realising that their cretinous views are audible to everyone around them , especially by me. And to put the rotten worm infested cherry on top of the cyanide laden cake, they usually all have ridiculous hairdos resembling a rats maze designed by Jackson pollock, obscuring most of the screen like a solar eclipse! Not having respect for the unspoken protocol of film watching makes me think if i had it my way, kids would get their own special allocated movie times( probably set in the garbage laden alleyway behind the theatre,with the film itself being projected onto a mad hobos bare white bottocks, which will provide a whole new dimension for the 3D gimmick ) this will allow adults not to get distracted by the kids in the cinema who cant sit still and shut the fuck up and in regards to old bags with absurd hairdos,if they don’t pass the pencil test, theyll get shaven right there in the lobby like its aushwitz.
Its a staple of the film critic to look way too much into things that most cool people could barely give less of a shit about and even more common for them to want to exploit all the plotholes in a film in an effort to seem observant and slightly interesting . ( by the way, saying that avatar was basically a hybrid of pocohantas and the smurfs does NOT make you observant , although saying it was an overhyped and overpraised ,money siphoning black hole when there are so many other already established and more deserving sci fi stories that deserve the same financial backing not only makes you observant but possibly one of the only sentient human beings on the planet that can see the forest for the trees) It wouldn’t be fair to point out all the holes in transformers 2, because there are so many holes in that script that by the time your done all the holes would have congealed into one mega –singularity of a hole with the potential to affect the orbit of celestial bodies in outer space!
Going back to the god awful Twins of the film, my first question is how exactly are they twins at all? its not ever explained how robot reproduction actually works(thankfully too, giant wrecking ball testicles is enough, i don’t want to have to sit thru micheal bay showing us the beauty of child birth by Mother Prime squeazing one out like a horse shitting a wheelbarrow, i hope micheal bay isn’t reading this becase im sure hes contemplating what line of taste he wants to cross next) . Theres a brief scene where we see hatchlings growing but they need energon or else they will keep dying , but how do they manifest in the first place? Do they get planted in the ground as seeds and watered everyday,perhaps they grow better when u talk to them, like those demented fools who think talking to their plants will help them grow into big strong saplings. Going with that analogy , maybe the transformers are like apples, where they have seeds of another transformer inside them, so when the transformer dies, another one can grow once theyve buried the stupid rusting carcas of the former. It might even take it to the next level if the decepticons reproduce by injecting a robot maggot into an autobot and let it grow into a larva and once it hatches, it devours the autobot from the inside( i amaze myself with my ideas)
Ive heard a lot of people call the twins racist, but i think it defames more the character of the viewer than any black ganster type people. Makes me wonder what’s to come in transformers 3, stereotyped Asian transformers that are good at maths and standardised tests? These two definitely belong in the same category as Jar Jar Binx from the phantom menace, a tiresome and needless accessory to the story that doesn’t ever fulfil a purpose or make themselves useful, the best purpose for me would be to see them getting killed in the most hilariously satisfying way an autobot can be killed five minutes before the end.Had that been the case , i would have left the cinema feeling that the price of the admission was money well spent.
Most of all, these two hog up SOOO much screen time, time which would have been better spent with Ironhide and ratchet , whose roles were supplanted by these colossal idiots to minor characters. In what little time ironhide actually gets to show up, hes basically repeating lines from the first movie with perhaps one word replaced
Transformers one
Iron hide~ sam! Get to the building!
Transformers 2
Iron hide” sam! Get to the pillars!
Weak.
Besides the geographical inaccuracies of placing the pyramids by the ocean as well as try to imagine the carbon footprint of that massive explosion in the desert, the prime scene which encapsulates the movie is when the decepta-slut attacks the main characters in the library, in essence an effort to destroy knowledge itself ( hows that for reading to far into things). I don’t knw what college that is, but i wanna go there, ive never seen so many samey beautiful women in one dorm!
The robots themselves are so complex its hard to tell the damn ones apart except the deceptacons have sharp teeth . the optimus prime fight scene in the forest was really spectator but it kinda reveals that megatron isn’t that powerful if optimus can take on both him and all his goons at once. Id have megatron be powerful enough that it would take all the autobots and their dog to give him a splinter. Bumble bee is the most endearing character, i think people would have cared more if he had been the one killed and, as he has both the qualities of a formidable fighter and a loyal dog. Im always riveted when optimus transforms, not so much when the little Hump leg bot pops up, if hes inspired by wall-e , id imaginepixar would probably go around to shoot all their staff between the eyes to be even the slightest bit responsible for bringing this character to life in the most indirect way. By the way, after they go to the pyrimids, wheelie disappears inexplicably without a reason, but i wont begrudge the editor for that. I love the robot which is created by ball bearings that meld together and can be invisible when viewed by the side,not unlike most actresses. The scene where we meet fallen on the meteor suggest that micheal bay is paying homage to his other movies aka Armageddon. The people who worked on the special effects on the movie should be very proud, id be rpoud to have my name on this movie , as anything but the screenwriter of course
I reckon transformers 3 will be going in a much darker direction. This is inevitable in movie and book franchises these days , see the Harry potter, twilight, spiderman progression if you don’t believe me . In an effort to be taken more seriously and to prove its not just for kids, movies and books that do well start to go seriously bleak and kill crazy directions , i mean up to the 3rd harry potter film ( which is my honest favourite) , after that all the magic, wonder and childlike innocence of the films it form the fourth one on turns into something from the landings of Normandy The bodycount at the end of the harry potter story would make even tarantino think he probably went a little overboard with the gratiutious death toll.
. There have been seven harry potter films, and every time one comes out ,in the build up leading to it i hear something along the lines “this will be a lot darker than the last one”. By the seventh movie i seriously expected to be staring up at a pitch black screen with only hermiones sultry soothing voice to let me know whats the dealio. Casting Helena bohman carter as belatrix is pretty obvious because any movie where we need a cooky off beat female ,shes your go-to gal ( Not to mention, it seems Tim burton couldn’t make a powerpoint presentation without including his lovely wifey or johny depp in it )
The sexualisation of twilight by the last novel sits perfectly well for me because by then she was so comically horny by Edwards clunge tease attitude to marital propriety over 4 books that I half expected her eventual sexual climax to instigate the second big bang . but the part where bella gives birth to renessme is described in such a way which sounds like it belongs to a script written by eli roth(if the name rings unfamiliar, hes the maker of hostel for all your fans of soccor, i refuse to call it football, if thats the case it should be feetball, you do use both ur feet right? What would i know about a game where you kick a sphere into a net and the whole world erupts in orgasmic glee?)
Spidermans approach to going dark was to make tobey Maguire muss up his hair and dance in the streets like a bell end , a scene where a perfectly timed lion decapitating him would never have ever been more appropriate. Lest we forget the beloved villain venom has only fifteen minutes of shoe horned screentime at the end presumably because he either picked the short straw or perhaps sand person slept with the sexless producer. Interesting enough i recall going to see spiderman one and they were actually turning little kids away even those that were being escorted by their parents! I was amazed that they were so ruthlessly adhering to the pg 10 age limit. This even made the local tv news, where a spokesperson for the cinema said that the film showed to quote his words” man on man violence” or rather he should have said man on man wearing a stupid green plastic mask violence”
To close this article , I expect transformers 3 to impress and to be as entertaining if not more than the other two. I think because unless they follow all the mistakes of the second one verbatim, by comparison it will seem like a diamond studded golden statue of Nelson Mandela when put next to the second one. Lastly some people debate whether upcoming The dark knight rises will possibly disappoint because how can it ever hope to top the dark knigfht, the supposed citizen kane of super hero movies, not to mention the wild praise of heath ledgers last performance which is well deserved but gets a little bit tainted when plebs tend to agree. Well first off A : theres not even a trailer yet so shut up, and 2: no it wont. Why? Because Have you seen this pic of Bane ? if it does disappoint then ill just say, haha sucks to be you.
No comments:
Post a Comment