The Golden Globe nominations are in and have proven what a strange year it has been for Hollywood. While two nods for Meryl Streep is usually an annual affair, two for Sandra Bullock is just about unheard-of; Matt Damon makes the third actor with two nominations. In the non-acting categories, Jason Reitman and Quentin Tarantino received two nominations for directing and writing. As usual, the nominations were all over the board, giving recognition to films most people would would argue don't deserve it (Nine, Avatar, Tobey Maguire... at least if early word is accurate). But the two best moves the Hollywood Foreign Press made were ignoring both Lee Daniels and Rob Marshall in the directing category. I've discussed Daniels previously, but Marshall is quite possibly one of the worst directors in Hollywood. Chicago worked (for the most part) as a result of its source material and Catherine Zeta-Jones, but pay attention to any of the non-musical scenes, and you'll see that the guy can't direct for shit.
So who was missing, in terms of expectations? Invictus for picture, even though ol' Clint got a directing nod; Jeremy Renner; A Single Man in any non-acting category; Samantha Morton and Ben Foster; In the Loop, period; the Coens and A Serious Man in the Musical/Comedy category; and of course Tilda Swinton, though Julia came out so early this year, all the award folk have forgotten. Oh, and also, Mariah Carey. Full nominees, including the television categories and film music ones (Karen O. is now a GG nominee), via the press release.
Best Picture - Drama
- Avatar, d. James Cameron - The Hurt Locker, d. Kathryn Bigelow - Inglourious Basterds, d. Quentin Tarantino - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, d. Lee Daniels - Up in the Air, d. Jason Reitman
Best Picture - Musical/Comedy
- (500) Days of Summer, d. Marc Webb - The Hangover, d. Todd Phillips - It's Complicated, d. Nancy Meyers - Julie & Julia, d. Nora Ephron - Nine, d. Rob Marshall
Best Director
- Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker - James Cameron, Avatar - Clint Eastwood, Invictus - Jason Reitman, Up in the Air - Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Best Actor - Drama
- Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart - George Clooney, Up in the Air - Colin Firth, A Single Man - Morgan Freeman, Invictus - Tobey Maguire, Brothers
Best Actress - Drama
- Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria - Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side - Helen Mirren, The Last Station - Carey Mulligan, An Education - Gabourey Sidibe, Precious
Best Actor - M/C
- Matt Damon, The Informant! - Daniel Day-Lewis, Nine - Robert Downey, Jr., Sherlock Holmes - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer - Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man
Best Actress - M/C
- Sandra Bullock, The Proposition - Marion Cotillard, Nine - Julia Roberts, Duplicity - Meryl Streep, It's Complicated - Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia
Best Supporting Actor
- Matt Damon, Invictus - Woody Harrelson, The Messenger - Christopher Plummer, The Last Station - Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones - Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress
- Penélope Cruz, Nine - Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air - Anna Kenrick, Up in the Air - Mo'Nique - Precious - Julianne Moore, A Single Man
Best Screenplay
- Neill Blomkamp, District 9 - Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker - Nancy Meyers, It's Complicated - Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air - Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Foreign-Language Film
- Baarìa, d. Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy - Broken Embraces [Los abrazos rotos], d. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain - The Maid [La nana], d. Sebastián Silva, Chile - A Prophet [Un prophète], d. Jacques Audiard, France - The White Ribbon [Das weiße Band], d. Michael Haneke, Austria/Germany/France/Italy
Animated Feature
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, d. Phil Lord, Chris Miller - Coraline, d. Henry Selick - Fantastic Mr. Fox, d. Wes Anderson - The Princess and the Frog, d. Ron Clements, John Musker - Up, d. Peter Docter, Bob Peterson
For something like three years, Mike Hassler and I suffered working for the same horrible company, which is where we met and where my first impressions of him were from another co-worker who informed me that Mike really liked the movie Electra. Thankfully, I soon learned that his admiration for the Daredevil spin-off was neither a fluke nor indicative of his taste on a larger scale (thankfully). Shortly afterward, we would spend most of our time on the clock creating a real-time commentary for the Sister Act saga, throwing themed music nights (the soundtrack night/weekend was the highlight of which), making up elaborately perverse fantasy lives for the motley crew of customers we had to encounter every week and occasionally convincing one another to take home DVDs we wouldn't give a second look (sometimes out of curiosity, other times out of malice, often just to fuck with one another). Mike occasionally updates his blog Heteroerotica with film and music write-ups (and, yes, he was the one who chose his Amy Winehouse Halloween costume photo). Thanks, Mike.
On Film: I like to think I hit middle ground -- not too snobby, but people can point fingers. I haven’t had the time to watch or rewatch all that I would like to, but I’m happy enough with my list. I know I’ve forgotten things, and I’m positive I’ve jumbled the order so many times that they’re probably not in any particular order outside of the first few. Congrats to Greengrass for making it twice. [Editors note: Quentin Tarantino only made the list twice due to Mike including a 1999 film in the 25th spot.]
01. Oldboy, 2003, d. Park Chan-wook, South Korea 02. The Piano Teacher [La pianiste], 2001, d. Michael Haneke, Austria/France/Germany/Poland 03. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2001, d. John Cameron Mitchell, USA 04. The Squid and the Whale, 2005, d. Noah Baumbach, USA 05. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Le scaphandre et le papillon], d. Julian Schnabel, France/USA 06. The Shape of Things, 2003, d. Neil LaBute, USA/France/UK 07. Fat Girl [À ma sœur!], 2001, d. Catherine Breillat, France/Italy 08. The Beat My Heart Skipped [De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté], 2005, d. Jacques Audiard, France 09. Inside [À l'intérieur], 2007, d. Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, France 10. Rachel Getting Married, 2008, d. Jonathan Demme, USA 11. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies [OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions], 2006, d. Michel Hazanavicius, France 12. Once, 2006, d. John Carney, Ireland 13. Bloody Sunday, 2002, d. Paul Greengrass, Ireland/UK 14. A Bittersweet Life, 2005, d. Kim Ji-woon, South Korea 15. Inglourious Basterds, 2009, d. Quentin Tarantino, USA/Germany 16. The Incredibles, 2004, d. Brad Bird, USA 17. Chopper, 2000, d. Andrew Dominik, Australia 18. Murder on a Sunday Morning [Un couple idéal], 2001, d. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, France/USA 19. Ip Man, 2008, d. Wilson Yip, Hong Kong 20. Love Exposure, 2008, d. Sion Sono, Japan 21. House of Sand and Fog, 2003, d. Vadim Perelman, USA 22. Mulholland Drive, 2001, d. David Lynch, France/USA 23. There Will Be Blood, 2007, d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA 24. The Bourne Supremacy, 2004, d. Paul Greengrass, USA/Germany 25. Grindhouse, 2007, d. Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth
On Music: Likewise here, I'm positive I've missed things, but decided to go with what I believe have had the most spins.
01. Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007) 02. Kings of Leon - Youth and Young Manhood (2003) 03. Lupe Fiasco - The Cool (2007) 04. Portishead - Third (2008) 05. Clipse - Lord Willin’ (2002) 06. Muse - Origin of Symmetry (2001) 07. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (2006) 08. Coldplay - X & Y (2005) 09. PJ Harvey - Uh Huh Her (2004) 10. Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R (2000) 11. Thrice - Vheissu (2005) 12. The Damnwells - Air Stereo (2006) 13. Kanye West - College Dropout (2004) 14. Espers - II (2006) 15. Sigur Rós - Takk... (2005) 16. Louis XIV - The Best Little Secrets Are Kept (2005) 17. Doves - Lost Souls (2000) 18. Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple (2008) 19. The Strokes - Room on Fire (2003) 20. Iron and Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (2004) 21. Ray LaMontagne - Trouble (2004) 22. The Roots - Rising Down (2008) 23. Interpol - Turn On the Bright Lights (2002) 24. The Darkness - Permission to Land (2003) 25. Depeche Mode - Sounds of the Universe (2009)
Grindhouse – dir. Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth
Probably the most rousingly effective ode to bad taste that graced the cinemas over the past ten years, Grindhouse provided its audience what so few of the exploitation films it honors only hinted toward: the meat (and outside of Antichrist, my Decade List entries have been a little too “respectable” lately). With both the meat and the sizzle on the plate, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino (as well as Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth who directed shorts that accompanied the double-feature) recreated the spirit of the films they both love so much with their back-to-back sleaze fests, Planet Terror and Death Proof, both of which just so happen to be two of the best films either director has ever made. The former is the best thing Rodriguez has ever done; with Tarantino, it’s not as certain.
As its intended theatrical double-feature, both Planet Terror and Death Proof hilariously play off one another, despite aligning with different subsets of exploitation films. Planet Terror is blissful mayhem from the Rose McGowan go-go dancing credit sequence to its absurd (in the good way), utopian ending. Death Proof, however, takes its time, alienating certain viewers with its incessant long-take dialogue and Tarantino pop culture references. Yet, however you feel about the rest of the film, Death Proof offers the most exhilarating finale for not just the Tarantino entry, but Grindhouse itself. The positioning of the films is almost as crucial as the films themselves, not to mention that both sort of play off one another. In Planet Terror, we hear a radio dedication to one of the characters in Death Proof, not to mention that McGowan appears in both films as drastically different characters and Marley Shelton as the same one. And in a way, Grindhouse is just as much an ode to the specific charms of Rose McGowan as it is grindhouse films of the past.
While I generally lean toward Death Proof as the superior of the two, I suppose it really boils down to a matter of (dis)taste. Planet Terror is about as faithful as you can get to a zombie-infused nuclear apocalypse film. The script, by Rodriguez, would have probably been ranked as one of the more efficient and skilled (in a screenwriting sense) of the time, had it came out during said period. Everything obnoxiously and hilariously comes back in the end, from corny life lessons to disputes among characters, one in particular involving a barbeque recipe. The screenplay is so artless that it reaches a level of tongue-in-cheek beauty.
Death Proof, however, functions drastically differently. I, personally, haven’t felt like Quentin Tarantino has ever really followed up Pulp Fiction; the tepid Jackie Brown and overrated Kill Bill series don’t feel like films as much as they do time-wasters, even though time wasting is what Tarantino does best in Death Proof. In hindsight, one realizes that Death Proof only exists for its final fifteen-minutes, its utterly invigorating car chase. Once again, I’d like to quote my friend Tom, who hilariously described James Gray’s We Own the Night as “a car chase in search of a movie;” that particular statement would perfectly describe Death Proof, only in this case its not a criticism. While some might disagree with it not being a criticism, the chattiness in Death Proof isn’t merely a Tarantino motif as it is intentionally unintentional suspense. There’s an overcast of fear and terror that runs throughout the film which heightens with every silly talk-fest that is seemingly just leading up to the film’s stunning climax. When the film reaches its second act (Death Proof itself is something a double bill), there’s a real uneasiness about what is about to transpire. The excessive build-up to the game of ship’s mast that stuntwoman Zoë Bell and Tracie Thoms want to play is both irritating and alarming. Their chatter, which just fills screen time to the act itself, makes for brilliant danger, which Tarantino will execute like, really, no other in the scene that follows. I appreciate the long stretches of dialogue that seem to be about nothing, because it feels like an authentic exploitation film that wrote some semblance of a screenplay around a single jolting car chase sequence. Pop culture references from Lindsay Lohan to Vanishing Point (and the best of the lot, when Rosario Dawson tells her girlfriends that her director boyfriend fucked Daryl Hannah’s stand-in) become permissible not because Death Proof is so good but because modesty doesn’t really have any place here.
I mentioned in the piece on Children of Men that I pity those who missed it in the theatre, as the home theatre experience could never fully recreate the cinema experience, and this statement applies just as much to Grindhouse (and it would even if The Weinstein Company had released Grindhouse officially on DVD instead as two separate films). I don’t mean to suggest that the best cinematic experiences come in the form of bold “action flicks;” I still regret that I had to see the majestic Flight of the Red Balloon on television and not in the theatre (and I also defended the theatre-going experience with Mulholland Drive as well). But anyway, I can’t really think of another theatrical experience I had in the past 10 years that was more entertaining to the point of beatific exhaustion than Grindhouse.
With: Rose McGowan, Kurt Russell, Marley Shelton, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, Freddy Rodriguez, Josh Brolin, Sydney Tamiia Portier, Vanessa Ferlito, Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn, Jordan Ladd, Naveen Andrews, Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Eli Roth, Rebel Rodriguez, Tom Savini, Omar Doom, Michael Parks, Electra Avellán, Elise Avellán, Stacy Ferguson, Marcy Harriell, James Parks, Jay Hernandez, Udo Kier, Sheri Moon Zombie, Nicolas Cage, Sybil Danning, Tom Towles, Bill Moseley, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Katie Melua, Matthew Macfadyen, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, Will Arnett Screenplay: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth Cinematography: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Phil Parmet, Milan Chadima Music: Graeme Revell, Robert Rodriguez, Carl Thiel, Tyler Bates, David Arnold, Nathan Barr Country of Origin: USA US Distributor: Dimension/The Weinstein Company
Here's a quick DVD update for you. The bad news? I discovered that Sony's beautiful Blu-ray cover for sex, lies and videotape won't be displayed in your living room until 17 November. I guess the good news is that Sony also announced Luc Besson's Léon for the same date, to this day the only film I've ever been able to tolerate Natalie Portman. The most exciting title listed below is Milestone's release of Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles on 17 November. The website I got that from may have the date wrong, as DVDs are typically released on Saturdays, but maybe this is a special occasion. I'll let you know if anything changes. Thanks for the date correction, Dennis
- Brüno, 2009, d. Larry Charles, Universal, also on Blu-ray, 3 November - Expired, 2007, d. Cecilia Minucchi, Asylum, 3 November, w. Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Teri Garr, Illeana Douglas - Familiar Strangers, 2008, d. Zackary Adler, Phase 4, 10 November - Aaron… Albeit a Sex Hero, 2009, d. Paul Bright, Water Bearer, 17 November - The Boy with the Sun in His Eyes, 2009, d. Todd Verow, Water Bearer, 17 November, w. Marcel Schlütt - The Exiles, 1961, d. Kent MacKenzie, Milestone/Oscilloscope, 17 November - Like a Moth to a Flame, 2009, d. Toby Ross, Joe Rubin, Hornbill, 30 November - The Girl in the Park, 2007, d. David Auburn, The Weinstein Company, 1 December, w. Sigourney Weaver, Kate Bosworth, Alessandro Nivola, Keri Russell, David Rasche, Elias Koteas - Into the Storm, 2009, d. Thaddeus O'Sullivan, HBO, 1 December, w. Brendan Gleeson, Janet McTeer, Iain Glenn, James D'Arcy - Live!, 2007, d. Bill Guttentag, The Weinstein Company, 1 December, w. Eva Mendes - Inglourious Basterds, 2009, d. Quentin Tarantino, The Weinstein Company, also on Blu-ray, 15 December
Canyon once asked me if I defend Michael Bay just to be difficult and controversial, and I admitted that the most all-caps-boldiest exclamations that I trot out are just nonsense. If I were to rank directors in a huge list from good to bad (don't tempt me to do that. I probably would if prompted), he'd be nowhere near the top, but more importantly he'd be nowhere near the bottom either. He's lazily blamed for everything that is stupid and awful about spectacular Hollywood product, and for tainting the cultural well so much that the whole world suffers. The hatred aimed at him is startling. I halfheartedly defended him on the AV Club once, and was told by another commenter that I obviously knew nothing about cinema, and should keep my opinion about everything else to myself. I'll admit I'm no Bordwell or Thompson, but my opinion on Bay is a little more nuanced than, "Me like when hot broads dance and the house blow up".
Any filmmaker who becomes successful enough to achieve name recognition status is bound to attract critical dismissal, and that will intensify if the filmmaker has annoying quirks that are overused. For example, Paul Haggis' inability to keep subtext subtextual, instead making his characters voice motivation or revelation out loud, drives me up the wall. Even his rewrite work on Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace makes that mistake. Tarantino's magpie tendencies irk a lot of critics, especially when he steals from disreputable pop culture artifacts that they already dislike. Spielberg has had his knocks many times in the past. I can imagine he's never going to invite Henry Jaglom around for dinner, as the guy has been bitching about him being a poor filmmaker for decades now.
Bay is a different beast altogether. He's directing movies by a set of rules he has made up for himself, and that style bears only a passing resemblance to the work of others. As if brought up watching nothing but early Tony Scott movies, he seemingly has no idea of how the big picture will flow, choosing instead to focus on each individual shot, making them pop as much as he can. As a result, it's not just the whole movie that doesn't flow. Even relatively short scenes are haphazardly paced. This car chase from The Rock has great individual moments, but stops and starts with no understanding of how jarring that must be for the viewer.
I would never think to defend Bay as a man who makes great films in entirety. Even my favourite Bay movie, Armageddon, is full of embarrassing, and indefensible, flaws. Even so, he's no Robert Luketic, or Shawn Levy, or Jon Avnet, three directors right off the top of my head who have never been responsible for even a single memorable shot, let alone scene or film. Of course, he's also not James Cameron (I make this point because True Lies is on ITV2 right now, and, as shaky as that film is, the action scenes are almost perfection). I think Bay's movies are fascinating, and with regards to the criticism he draws, Drew McWeeny brilliantly (and, obviously, accidentally) summed up how I feel about him in a Tweet I just spotted.
[To another Twitterer] How can you rail against the excess? Bay is what we have PAID Hollywood to evolve into. We reward the escalation of the absurd, then cry about it when it reaches its logical conclusion.
In the interest of not misrepresenting McWeeny, I'll point out that he later adds that he doesn't think he's the best action director in Hollywood. Neither do I, but he is the most spectacular director in the whole world, a Cecil B. DeMille with subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and FHM. When Bay gets to do his thing right, you are getting to see something that no other filmmaker on Earth would or can do. He shoots fast and loose and spends his money on the outrageous stuff, and can conjure up images that sear themselves into your brain.
As McWeeny says, this is not the same as saying he's a good filmmaker. He's just a unique one, and I feel an obligation to articulate my conflicted feelings, especially considering almost all critics are dismissing his movies with such kneejerk vehemence that they're not even bothering to fact-check, which is often a sign that the reviewer considers the movie beneath contempt. I've reviewed films in an almost professional capacity before, and I've had press packs, so I know most of these errors can be avoided*. (Though being annoyed by overly complex plots that make little sense are another thing: see below for my own problems with T:ROTF.)
So I was desperate to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, mostly because I was hoping he would get right the things he got wrong in the first one. As those flaws were the usual things (pacing mistakes, clunky humour, Jazz being a terrible racial stereotype, etc.), I was basically hoping that this would be Bay's best movie, removing some of the clutter but keeping the crazy. That's the key: keeping the stuff that he does better than anyone. Even though I want other filmmakers to create coherent movies with a steady, escalating pace, I want Bay to do what Bay does best. The worst thing he could do would be to play into the hands of those critics who say his movies are all BOOM and no plot, racing from one scene to another without a pause, doing nothing more than amping up every moment with no concern for character development. Sadly, that's exactly what he has done with T:ROTF, and the result is a deeply frustrating experience.
For the first ninety minutes, I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing. Even more so than the shocking and ramshackle Bad Boys II, Bay is throwing the kitchen sink at the audience (and then shooting it with a sabot round). The first scene in the movie features a tribe of Cro-Magnon fighting early Cybertronians, for crying out loud. Okay, so they look more like they should be hanging out with Zoolander than hunting bison, but still, kudos to the man. For the next section of the movie, the film throws so many peculiar and outrageous visuals and concepts, that I drove Canyon crazy with my various quiet exclamations of joy. By the time Megatron and Starscream hang out on one of the moons of Saturn (seriously), I was convinced that this was going to be my favourite movie of the summer.
And then it all goes horribly wrong. The moment that the action abruptly shifts to Egypt, the movie slams into neutral, with scene after scene falling flat. The novelty of the early scenes disappears, replaced by a tedious crawl across numerous deserts, seemingly to showcase the cars that have been mostly missing by this point. Several scenes could be excised completely, and should have. It was nice to see Deep Roy as the ha ha ha so tiny border guard, but the movie would have been so much better without it. This is not the first time he's made this mistake, but usually he doesn't put so many of these extraneous and excruciating scenes in the final hour.
In fact, the endless trek from Egypt to Jordan and back again (I think that was the route) seems to only be there because, for some baffling reason, Bay and the writers thought that having the characters just appear at the Pyramids for the big finish would somehow be unbelievable, so we have to see their full trip. Why is he getting squeamish about this now? I don't care how they get there, especially if the trip seems to have been filmed in real time. If I want a travelogue, I'll watch a Michael Palin show. This is a Bay movie. If you're going to use a "Space Bridge" to teleport the main characters to Egypt, then teleport them to the exact spot needed to maximise the action. And yet no. Because audiences have been clamouring to see National Lampoon's Egyptian Vacation.
The desert setting also steps on the toes of the earlier film. Transformers had a perfectly fine and short action scene set in a desert, as the survivors of the opening base attack fight against Scorponok. It was about five minutes long, had Tyrese bellowing "BRING THE RAIN!" into a walkie-talkie, and featured a bunch of exploding buildings. Those wide open spaces worked well for a mid-movie action scene, and made the final city scenes even more exciting, as we got to see a bunch of robots fighting in contrasted dark and cramped streets with no respite. That scene remains one of my all-time favourites.
The finale of Transformers 2 just looks like a bigger version of that desert scene, with little of the original's intensity, though it does have some fun stuff involving the Pyramids¹. Sam and Mikaela make their way very slowly through a village, with intercutting of Josh Duhamel looking frustrated. No one says BRING THE RAIN!, though it does crop up on a napkin or something earlier on. Everything seems to move at normal film speed, which is like half Bay-speed. At this point in the movie my ass was really hurting from sitting in the crappy Waterloo IMAX seats, and instead of being riveted I just kept fidgeting. Yes, I use my ass as a guide to how exciting a movie is.
More exasperating than the inappropriate locale, even though Bay's movies have not been known for their well sketched character arcs, the finale is littered with momentum-robbing scenes such as the whole "I love you" thing between Sam and Mikaela (really? This is a big deal?), Kevin Dunn telling his son to go and do the right thing (an emotional beat that makes no sense as Dunn, at the start of the film, couldn't care less about his son leaving), and Sam's "death", which reflects the big "death" midway through the movie (I won't spoil it). Why does Bay suddenly care about these things? I can barely remember The Island, and maybe there was an arc in that, but I don't even think there was one in Pearl Harbor, the most conventional movie he has made. I expect tonal errors from Bay, but this was worse than usual.
Only after leaving the cinema with a deflated heart (it sounds like a deadly condition, but the only symptom is whining on the internet) did I realise that there was a lot more wrong with the movie than just the broken finale. McWeeny recently hinted that the first sentence in his forthcoming HitFix Motion/Captured review would be, "I have never felt more like a third nipple than I did, as a screenwriter, while watching Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen." I can't wait to find out what he means by that, though I think it might have something to do with how the excessive plot -- and I do mean excessive -- is crammed into about three five minute-long scenes filled beyond breaking point with insane amounts of exposition, while huge stretches of the movie would probably, on paper, look like a list of fight scenes. It's that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously overcomplicated and embarrassingly simplistic.
Instead of just trying to come up with a simple way to orchestrate some robot fighting, we get tons of backstory. Cybertronians have visited Earth before, and one of them was going to destroy us in order to harvest energy, but a civil war broke out and then there were a bunch of Primes, and they are magic or something, and the All-Spark is in Sam's head, or it's something else, and there is a key, and a cipher, and a Matrix of Awesomeness, and an afterlife, and probably a bunch of elves, and... It's absurdly complicated stuff, with one very silly plot-thread (Megatron demanding the world hand over Sam so he can extract his brain, or something) that takes over the latter half of the movie. For every quirky moment and fun concept, there's ten stupid complications that mean nothing. By the time Jetfire turned up for his shot at the Exposition Of The Year award, I had completely lost the plot, not helped by my efforts to guess the identity of the British actor playing the elderly robot².
To me, these are big problems, even when taking Bay's singular style into account. However, it's becoming clear that the biggest problem people are going to have with the movie are Mudflap and Skids, the comedy relief duo who shuck and jive through much of the finale. Why am I using this outdated African-American phrase? It seems apt considering that these two robots are the most startling racial stereotypes I've seen on the big screen since Crash, only this time they're meant to be funny and not "educational".
While sitting in the cinema I had huge difficulty reconciling what I was seeing with what I thought Bay was trying to do (have a couple of affable idiots break up the tedium of the cross-country trek with their wacky exploits), and for a while after I wondered if they were meant to be a spoof of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys (a Bad Boys II poster is on display in one character's room, and their banter is as forced as that between Smith and Lawrence). Now, with hindsight, that I realise that's even worse than just two racist caricatures. Is he personally attacking two people he has worked with before? And the guy doing the voices for them is white? We're talking about Jar-Jar Binks-esque wrongness on an epic scale.
The disconnect I suffered during the movie was similar to the shock I felt during Star Wars: The Clone Wars when Ziro the Hutt appeared, but my overall opinion of that character is astonishment that Lucas could have thought that was all right. With Mudflap and Skids, I was uncomfortable during the movie, and now I'm outright pissed off. It's made the dreadful caricaturing of Jazz in the first movie (a black Transformer that breakdances and then gets ignominiously killed in the final act) seem even more glaring. Bay deserves the shitstorm that's heading his way.
I mean, it's becoming fairly obvious that he has a real problem with women, so much so that you could almost forget it's happening until the camera shoots so far up plastic "hottie" Alice's skirt that it qualifies as a proctological exam. Megan Fox does little more than pout and get dragged around the desert by LaBeouf and Duhamel, not even getting a hero moment like she did in the first film³. Other than Fox and Isabel Lucas, the only other female characters with any dialogue are the holographic women on the transforming motorbikes (ZOMG is Bay saying women are bikes?), and Sam's mother, played by Julie White.
Being the only non-simpering non-hottie in the film, she has to do several unglamorous things, usually involving pratfalls. One scene with her getting high on hash brownies is particularly uncalled-for. Nevertheless, she deserves all the credit in the world for managing to make these stupid moments work. She might give the best performance in the film. Maybe, in future, Bay should consider giving more roles to women who have talents beyond looking orange and pouty.
So, it was a washout, right? Except that for a while, as I said earlier, the film flies. Even with the inclusion of the awful Alice subplot, and lots of shenanigans involving kitchenbots, there is a lot to enjoy. The new set-up for the Autobots, working in conjunction with the humans to fight rogue Decepticons, is hugely promising, and the opening in Shanghai is astonishing and ambitious. Even better, the forest fight between Optimus and three Decepticons is one of the film highlights of the year, especially as it is filmed in full IMAX.
Seeing Optimus to actual scale is something I won't forget any time soon. Much is made of Bay's direction of action, and how the rapidly moving camera and quick cuts serve to render all of his scenes incomprehensible, but there are many worse action directors out there. Considering how overwhelmed I was by the terrible action in Eagle Eye, or by the much better but still swooshy Star Trek (both of which I saw on IMAX), this didn't upset me at all. That was something I was not expecting.
There is even some evidence of playfulness from the notoriously grouchy man. Considering his parodic sense of patriotism, it amuses me greatly that he manages to destroy Paris again (the first time was at the end of Armageddon, a scene that got a cheer here in England each time I saw it on the big screen), and I can imagine all sorts of noses being put out of joint by his destruction of a library about an hour in. If you're responsible for some of the most successful movies of the past fifteen years, you can afford to poke fun at your image like that.
As I've said, I did like a lot of it. I saw one person lazily Tweeting this morning that they thought this was as bad as Batman and Robin. Don't believe it for a second: this has much much more to recommend it, even if just as an occasionally exhilarating aural and visual assault. Also great: Glenn Morshower returning, this time as General Morshower (seriously); Tony Todd doing some great voicework as The Fallen, a robot with a fantastic gangly design; trying to catch sight of the cast on poor Shia's hand in early scenes; terrific sound editing, far better than critics are saying; a greater sense of the robots as actual characters, especially Starscream and Megatron. Plus, even if the finale is not perfect, it does feature some mind-boggling moments. I'm really hoping that the previous Academy snub of the Transformers effects team is not repeated. They've topped themselves this time out, especially as they're operating in IMAX for some of the most complicated moments.
Even so, it's a movie that wouldn't let me like it as much as I wanted to. If I'm going to defend Bay in future, the guy has got to meet me halfway. The awful Ebonicbots and the Auton women have got to go. Right now, I'd rather he tried to make another movie in the more sober style of The Island than keep this lower-than-lowest common denominator stuff going. It's becoming hard work waiting for him to grow up, but then, if we lose the racism and misogyny (which I'm sure he doesn't see as such), will we lose the rest? And is "the rest" worth keeping if the man is going out of his way to perpetuate bullshit jock philosophy like this? All of a sudden those Bay films in my collection look a little less appealing. Let's hope his next movie is either an adaptation of The Beauty Myth or a remake of Amistad.
* In fact, one of the first movies I ever saw at a press screening was Bad Boys. Maybe that's why I'm forgiving of Bay's films.
¹ Full disclosure. As soon as I saw the first trailer with shots of the Pyramids, my heart sank. A project I have been working on for some time had a big finale in the shadow of the Pyramids, and so I guess I have to scrap all of that. A shame, as it would have been so awesome that brains would have melted while watching it, even though the project involved a C-list comic character that no one likes. Nevertheless, my disappointment with the finale was not rooted in this, as I got over that frustration a long time ago.
² Amazingly, it's Jon Turturro.
This means he spends a lot of his screentime arguing with himself.
³ Though, to be honest, LaBeouf gets little more to do other than run into danger and get blown up. Another flaw of the film: adding human characters and not really knowing what to do with them, which particularly irks when you like LaBeouf, as I do.
ETA: Here is McWeeny's review of T:ROTF. Of all the reviews I have read in the past few days, this might be the only one that actually addressed specifics of what the film is like. Trust someone as perceptive and fair as McWeeny to watch the movie and review what he is seeing instead of just scribbling "Michael Bay is a douchebag" in his Moleskine a thousand times.
A couple of people have suggested to me that the theatrical version of Grindhouse, with allthetrailers, is coming to DVD and Blu-ray on 11 August. No official announcement has been made, so I don't know the specifics of the release. I'm pretty skeptical about any of the upcoming Weinstein Company's releases anyway.
The Golden Globe nominations are in and have proven what a strange year it has been for Hollywood. While two nods for Meryl Streep is usually an annual affair, two for Sandra Bullock is just about unheard-of; Matt Damon makes the third actor with two nominations. In the non-acting categories, Jason Reitman and Quentin Tarantino received two nominations for directing and writing. As usual, the nominations were all over the board, giving recognition to films most people would would argue don't deserve it (Nine, Avatar, Tobey Maguire... at least if early word is accurate). But the two best moves the Hollywood Foreign Press made were ignoring both Lee Daniels and Rob Marshall in the directing category. I've discussed Daniels previously, but Marshall is quite possibly one of the worst directors in Hollywood. Chicago worked (for the most part) as a result of its source material and Catherine Zeta-Jones, but pay attention to any of the non-musical scenes, and you'll see that the guy can't direct for shit.
So who was missing, in terms of expectations? Invictus for picture, even though ol' Clint got a directing nod; Jeremy Renner; A Single Man in any non-acting category; Samantha Morton and Ben Foster; In the Loop, period; the Coens and A Serious Man in the Musical/Comedy category; and of course Tilda Swinton, though Julia came out so early this year, all the award folk have forgotten. Oh, and also, Mariah Carey. Full nominees, including the television categories and film music ones (Karen O. is now a GG nominee), via the press release.
- Avatar, d. James Cameron
- (500) Days of Summer, d. Marc Webb
- Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
- Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
- Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria
- Matt Damon, The Informant!
- Sandra Bullock, The Proposition
- Matt Damon, Invictus
- Penélope Cruz, Nine
- Neill Blomkamp, District 9
- Baarìa, d. Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, d. Phil Lord, Chris Miller
- Avatar, d. James Cameron
- (500) Days of Summer, d. Marc Webb
- Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
- Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
- Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria
- Matt Damon, The Informant!
- Sandra Bullock, The Proposition
- Matt Damon, Invictus
- Penélope Cruz, Nine
- Neill Blomkamp, District 9
- Baarìa, d. Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, d. Phil Lord, Chris Miller
