Thursday, July 12, 2007

Transformers

Saw Transformers. I... I don't know what to say. I had extremely low expectations. Not "Plan 9" expectations, or even "Zardoz" expectations, but certainly Michael Bay expectations, and for the life of me, I felt like I was experiencing a temporal fata morgana, watching the South Park parody of this months in advance. No, wait, it's not a South Park parody, because all of the ridiculous plot devices are telegraphed and everything is in it's place. Here, the government is both a shadowy, conspiratorial monolith helmed by stooges like Special Agent John Turturro, and the realm of patriots and straight-talkin' heroes like Secretary of Defense Jon Voight. The nerdy high school teacher who puts down stuttering, extremely punchable hero Shia Lebouf wears a necktie and has no spine. The heroic soldier has a wife at home, who just gave birth to their little girl, who might otherwise be known as "plot leverage."

There are a number of terrible, warmed over jokes in the movie, (Bumblebee actually pisses on John Turturro. They call it "lubricating". Go figure.) which become a sort of anthropological device for observing those in the theater who laugh at them. I'm being too cynical and mean-spirited... I'll say this in a different way, I laughed hardest when the second line of the opening credits read, "In Association With Hasbro".

To be enjoyable, this movie had to be over-the-top and ridiculous like "Face/Off", which is a bad movie but a spectacle nonetheless because it is not often that you see too tremendous hams like Nic Cage and John Travolta mimicking each other and firing a thousand rounds at each other without hitting anything, or hearing Nic Cage at his most lamenting say, "Ooohhhhh, Tito....."... And it's all there! You have fucking robots that turn into cars! How is this logical? They come from a planet made by a box! You can't explain this away like you can superpowers, so why try? Just do a big fucking deus ex machina: One day, our cars stood up and walked, and apparently began taking vocal emoting classes from Laurence Olivier. Oh, and paid close attention to the vernacular of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

This movie had a chance to be awesomely, awesomely terrible. We needed goofy, batshit crazy , '80s anime-level plot devices, and we pretty much got Bad Boys on wheels.


Also, there was a preview for a new Rock movie where he plays the quarterback of a generic big-city football team and one day, cue record scratch and prepare "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", a smart-talking eight year old shows up and says he's her dad. This was actually the beginning of the South Park premonitions. I could imagine the doofusy movie trailer voice from the Rob Schneider episode doing the voiceover. I'm pretty sure the movie's title was announced as, "The Rock, in... Drr-dee-drr-dr-dee-dee-drr." And people laughed. Oh, how they laughed.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Come on! They made the Transformer noise when they transformed (sometimes). Tell me that alone didn't evoke feelings of awe and wonder reminiscent of third grade. You wanted to run home and make that noise as you played with your very own Autobots and Decepticons. Plus, I was there with you and I heard you whisper, "Cool," when our hulking bio-mechanical hero first declared, "I am Optimus Prime."

7/12/2007 11:49 PM  
Blogger ashby said...

Michael Bay vs. Carlos Mencia in a cage match to the death - who wins? More importantly, who do you want to win? Also, no mutually assured destruction, you fucking cheater.

7/19/2007 12:11 AM  

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