Sunday, June 28, 2009

What you really need to know before you see "Transformers"



Since my only "readers" are my friends, and most of my friends will never see "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen," I thought I would entertain you with the more hilarious parts of the movie. I am not sure any of these were intended to be hilarious, since I am relatively sure that director Michael Bay thinks everything he does is AWESOME, including taking a pee.

1) Rainn Wilson is featured as a sexually aggressive college professor who wears a scarf. In his scene, which like everything in this movie, seems to last forever, he takes a bite out of an apple, lets it drop to the floor and suggests that one of his adoring "fans," a gaggle of hotties who hang on his every word, "finish it" for him. If there was a an Oscar for most misplaced cameo in a motion picture, Wilson would walk off with it, and I am sure he would enjoy every second of it.

2) Speaking of those hotties, Bay takes his objectification of women to new heights in this movie, even sexualizing Sam's (Shia LaBeouf's) MOM, during a campus visit, which again, is endless, considering this is a movie about transforming robots, and none of the bots are even in the college scenes. After a student gives Mom some pot-laced brownies, she trips around campus and ends up led away by Sam's dad. Is it Sam or Shia, who recently confessed to Playboy that he is in love with his own mother, who doesn't seem to care that his mother is tripping her brains out all over campus?

3) One more thing about the women. There is a female Decepticon and when she is revealed, it's about as subtle as something out of Pink Floyd's "The Wall." As she mounts Sam, her Decepticon tail first comes out of her back, revealing her still-hot body and perfect rear end, but she is interrupted. A couple seconds later, it emerges from a her tongue! It's the most obvious case of misogyny since Robert Rodriguez put the vampire monster head on Salma Hayek's still-hot body in "From Dusk 'til Dawn," and yes, I hated that too. At least that was rated R, though. This is a movie for 6-ear-olds? Why are my first 3 items about sex?

4) Yes, as you have heard on NPR, there are two bots called Skids and Mudflap, and it is exactly like having TWO Jar-Jar Binks in your movie. They are given way too much screen time, their "riffing" is nails-on-the-chalkboard irritating, they are never around during the action (suggesting no real purpose), and your innocent kids will think they are funny. Mine did, anyway. I did not see the gold tooth, but all the rest is true, unfortunately, and it is painful.

5) The whole thing reeks of an indulgent Hollywood system. Couldn't someone have suggested that we didn't really need to see the racist stereotypes for 20 minutes? Or the long college scenes? I watched "Synedoche, New York" the same night, a movie I had been warned repeatedly by my good friend and great critic Josh Larsen not to watch if I was in a depressed state, because I was depressed about the state of movies. It cheered me up.

1 comment:

Mindy said...

Thank you for this. I'm hoping it'll be enough to save me from watching this with Stu when it's out on cable.