highlight of your day?

[mr. arcade]

is this a frank loyd wright restaurant?

[mr. arcade]

that's EXACTLY what the tattoo guy was saying from the beginning. stoopid....

she should have gotten a mike tyson one instead.

[ChickenMug]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pcAOyBzDo

[SHARPPIE]

^^^
if that's a joke -->

if that's real -->

Less Than Meets the Eye

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up — and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble a point, save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful. And if the above resonates with anger ... no, not at all — only the extreme annoyance born of absolute disappointment.

Plot? There’s a plot? You don’t say! Directed by Michael Bay and co-written by the men responsible for Star Trek, ROTF is rumored to have something to do with a matrix keymajiggy that unlocks the sun-killing whoziwhatsis and the never-ending smash-up derby pitting Autobot against Decepticon. You may recall that its 2007 predecessor was a mostly capable commercial for Transformers toys and for Bay’s previous films, from which most of the iconography was lifted as Bay continued to pay homage to his favorite filmmaker. Transformers was actually Bay at his most surprisingly reflective and unexpectedly restrained — the domestic scenes involving Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) felt particularly sincere — and also his most ingenious, as he merged man and machine in beautifully choreographed fight sequences and literally has us wondering, “How’d he do that?”

Well, he’s done it again — it, and nothing more — and so the trick no longer dazzles. Which isn’t to suggest that Bay’s not entirely into it — there are scant moments when he seems to be paying attention, such as a sequence during which a resurrected Megatron (hoo-boy) kidnaps Sam and fills the kid’s orifices with insectlike Decepticons who slither around his innards for a look-see. Bay’s in touch with his inner Cronenberg during this lone moment, the one scene during which you can actually tell what’s happening — and to whom, because he lets the gross-out speak for itself.

But why speak when you can SCREAM for almost two and a half hours? Why go subtle when there’s shit to blow up? Which is most of the problem: It’s astonishing how exhilaration can give way to boredom in movies starring special effects. Even the leading man is annoyed: Where Sam spent the first film as a wide-eyed, reluctant hero charged with saving the world with his yellow Camaro and weirdly too-hot girlfriend (Megan Fox, the sole survivor of the real Cybertron), here he’s just bothered by the whole scenario (and that’s well before the creepies crawl under his skin). The Autobots are now working for the government, rooting out Decepticons around the world (psst, one’s doing heavy labor in Shanghai), and Sam just wants to go away to college — where, of course, he’s saddled with an aggressively annoying roommate (Ramon Rodriguez) who accompanies LaBeouf and Fox for the rest of the movie. But a respite’s not to be — not when the Fallen’s gotten back up after a 19,000-year rest somewhere in orbit around the earth, which he’s looking to destroy, just because he can. Kind of like Michael Bay.

[touchy feely]

147 minutes

dear god

[touchy feely]

"Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian)
"Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail)
"A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror)

can't wait for the rifftrax commentary

[mr. arcade]

imagine how g.i. joe is gonna be like.

[uncooked meat]

"A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror)

Awesome...

^^^
if that's a joke -->

if that's real -->

[ChickenMug]

i think it's real, dudes
she's got a website and everything

[ReverseEngineer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pcAOyBzDo

Goodbye Horses, indeed!

[ReverseEngineer]

"Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian)
"Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail)
"A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror)

"a horrible experience of unbearable length" (Ebert, Sun-Times)

[SHARPPIE]

that's incredibly sad....her pain has made her blind & deaf.

...poor girl.

[crotchgrabber]

ok. i am totally gonna go see this.

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.


And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.


Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!
Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.
And yet — and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status — the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components — male enhancement and pure id — start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality — but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.


Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.
Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

[ReverseEngineer]

you got the touch, Phil.

you got the POWER.

[SHARPPIE]

I'm satisfied just reading the epic bad reviews. if it's so shit, a 2 sentence review would make more sense: "A waste of time to watch or write about. The end."

don't get me wrong...not complaining...these are better than the movie ever could be, but how long did that dude work on that?

[Eviltoastman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQKk99I3wTQ

[puppy]

i just sold a Jamiroquai promo single for $306 AND got paid for it!

[PattonBordin]

As if black people didn’t catch a bad enough one from the Jar Jar Binks character in Star Wars Episodes I-III, Bay’s Autobot twins, the “black”-voiced Skids and Mudflap, are the 2009 version of the Amos n’ Andy minstrel show. It’s hard to believe a big-money director would show his ass like this in what projects to be a much-watched blockbuster, but maybe he’s gotten too comfortable hanging out with his boy Black-Ty. Whatever the rationale, it’s clear that Bay is violating. How can we be so certain? Check out 7 reasons why Transformers 2 might be racist…

#1: “Skids” and “Mudflap” sound suspiciously like “skid-marks” and “mud people.” Tell us how you really feel, cracker!

#2: Skids not only has old-school Raekwon bucked teeth, one of them is actually gold! We’re assuming the rope chains and 40s for the action figures are sold separately.

#3: The twins constantly fight and snap on each other in inappropriate situations, like in the sacred tomb of the Primes. Sigh. Black robots just don’t know how to behave in public, do they?

#4: Skids and Mudflap refer to Leo, the Latino college student played by Ramon Rodriguez, as a “shrimp taco.” All black robots gotta be ign’ant though, right? That’s just like the white devil to put his secret racist thoughts into the mouths of black robots.

#5: In the twins’ vehicular incarnation, they’re flashy compact racing cars. Black robots aren’t concerned about the safety and security of their loved ones? Family sedans aren’t “urban” enough for you?

#6: The hip-hop jive that Skids and Mudflap spew comes from the mouth of WHITE voiceover comedian Tom Kenny, a.k.a. the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants. At least if Mike Epps was the one bamboozling, talking about “bustin’ caps,” we could take solace in a black actor getting work.

#7: The twins make R. Kelly look like an advocate for literacy. When Shia LaBoeuf asks if the twins can read ancient glyphs, they nervously respond, “Read?! Nuh-uh…” “No, we don’t really do much readin’!” (watch the exchange below) Well, not only can we read, we can also read between the lines: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t a blockbuster, it’s a black-buster!

maybe i will watch it....mmmaybe i will

[touchy feely]

[mr. arcade]

"hot enough for you?"

[NINFNM]

i just sold a Jamiroquai promo single for $306 AND got paid for it!

holy shit

congrats

[puppy]

i just sold a Michael Jackson single for $35. them fans are quick!

[crotchgrabber]

i just sold a Michael Jackson single for $35. them fans are quick!

i think my mom still has my red pleather jacket with all the zippers from when i was five. i wonder how much i can get for that.

[Eviltoastman]

The highlight of my day was knowing that Puppy sold a JayZee promo for a small fortune.

[puppy]

i just sold another one for $20! thanks Michael!