fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Michael Bay
Which one's the machine? Go on, guess
Michael Bay may be the director most movie reviewers and commenters on the tubes of the internets ridicule and belabour with the hate, but he is extremely successful, and thus virtually untouchable. He is like a shiny metallic titan from one of his movies: towering like a Colossus, legs splayed over the entirety of Hollywood, all his withered critics mewling and mouldering in his gargantuan shadow. The worst reviews, the lowest opinions of thousands, if not millions of people, are nought but ants at the feet of Alexander the Great. We cannot mark, let alone harm him.

If you were to run an algorithm or some kind of search on a review aggregator to find out what words are used most commonly by the majority of film reviewers who tackle his monstrous products, the list would run something like this: “visually spastic” or “incoherent”, “all shiny surfaces with no substance”, “nonsensical plot”, “aggressively violent”, “assault on the senses”, “women looking like glossy pornstars”, “way too long”, “painful, stupid dialogue”, “overedited”, “two dimensional characters”, and “breasts bouncing around in slow motion”.

In fact, that’s it, that’s the review, not only of this flick, but every flick he’s ever made. As entrancing as it may have been to watch Megan Fox’s breasts bouncing around as she and Shia LeBeouf ran across the sand in the latter stages of the movie (which takes up about an hour or so, out of two and a half of them), I couldn’t help but wonder as to the logistics of it. They seemed to jiggle around in such a particular way that I had to wonder whether Michael Bay devoted an entire production unit to achieving his desired level of consistent movement. Specialist gaffers, key grips, engineer costumers and tape experts devoted to structuring Fox’s “performance” in just the required fashion. Millions of dollars devoted solely to the momentum achieved in a woman’s rack.

I honestly wouldn’t put it past Bay. He is renowned for being something of a perfectionist, and he has virtually limitless budgets. What I can’t really figure out is why, since he devotes so much time and resources to achieving his ideal shots with no constraints upon his desires, why he then feeds all of these postcard shots through an editing woodchipper. Ninety per cent of the time, despite having focussed attention and no distractions, I could barely figure out what was going on at any given time by comparing the current scene with what occurred immediately before it.

That being said, part of me, perhaps a more immature part of me, still enjoyed this movie, as much as anyone can enjoy anything made by the premier hack director of his generation. Yes, Shia’s performance is even worse than anything else I’ve seen him in, and yes, almost all of the dialogue throughout this long-ass movie is purest nonsense. Yes the plot is deeply, deeply retarded, and yes, the movie is as shiny and vacant as Megan Fox’s expressionless face.

But it has giant robots fighting other giant robots. That’s what I expected, and that’s what I got. Robots fighting robots, robots fighting tanks and helicopters and such, shit blowing up, it delivers everything that it promises. In fact, in classic Bay style, it delivers too much, oversupplies more than we ever asked for or imagined we could ever endure.

What’s my point? Well, my point is, if one was ever to travel to Tijuana, and pay good money to watch someone have sex with a donkey, as I’ve heard is commonplace in that tasteful little town in Mexico, and then watch said person have sex with the donkey, it doesn’t really follow that, upon completion, you throw your Corona to the floor in disgust and bellow at the top of your lungs “That was an outrage! Never in my life have I been so disgusted and turned on at the same time. I was expecting something completely different from this abomination. Those responsible must be destroyed!”

By now all of us know what we’re getting with Michael Bay. His career is long-established. You know exactly what you’re going to get, and it’s not going to be good in any other sense than how it compares to his other drivel. To complain about Michael Bay being Michael Bay is superfluous.

The thing is, I’m not sticking up for Michael Bay, not for anything, not in any sense. I’m just agreeing with all the criticisms of him, because that’s what you do when you accept his lobotomised cinematic vision. You don’t reject the criticisms of his “work”, you embrace them.

As far as I’m concerned, this donkeyfucker delivers exactly what you imagine he would. And on top of that, it plays out as both an extended commercial for military recruitment, and, admittedly retardedly, even has the temerity to offer commentary on the current adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’m not kidding. The parallels are obvious, and underlined continuously just in case the more braindead members of the audience fail to grasp the patriotic nuances of donkeyfucker’s political stance. There are multiple scenes where gruff and loyal military types are just trying to do their job, but the new president hamstrings them. The government lackey who hinders and hampers the alliance between, I dunno, the Marines and the Autobots, expressly blames the Autobots for the continued conflict with the Decepticons, and references the idea that this war isn’t America’s responsibility because these sets of aliens brought the conflict to our world, and if we just get the Autobots to leave, then those terroristic Decepticons will just stop being so nasty, what with the killing and the maiming and such.

But even writing that implies that thoughts and ideas actually made it into the script. The script, or whatever there was of it, was only a set of signposts for the shots Bay wants to set up, no matter how tenuous the relations between the preceding and following ones.

The plot that follows from this probably never made sense even to the screenwriters, or Bay, or donkeyfuckers in general, but its purpose is generally to create excuses for a constant flow of action set pieces, as well as to display Bay’s heartfelt anti-intellectualism, and almost All-American disdain for other cultures and their history. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a Decepticon, masquerading as a human, who looks more fake when played by a braindead actress, destroys a library and half of a university. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that half of Paris is destroyed. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the antiquities of Egypt need to receive the full Bay treatment before journey’s end. This is, after all, the purest of fratboy experiences, and, just like binge drinking and date rape, only operates in top gear.

There are about only two things I found overtly funny about this film. The first was the title, which is Revenge of the Fallen. I reckon it should have been called Rise of the Fallen. That’s far catchier, and very poetical. It probably sounds a bit too intellectual to donkeyfuckers everywhere, so it’s understandable that it was rejected.

The second was a line Shia delivers about his car having been left in front of a frat house by a frat member who had to go find a tighter shirt. The belligerent fratboys hassling him tell him that’s impossible, because no-one could get tighter shirts than theirs. Extremely tight shirts being a contemporary part of fratboy culture is new to me, about the only new element in this whole morass.

The rest of the flick I only appreciated on a visual level, since nothing else anyone says matters. We need to do this, we need to do that: even Bay tires of humans talking unless they’re screaming at the top of their lungs. Although he does contrive for big moments like the Decepticons kidnapping Shia’s characters parents just so they can be there at the climax, so Shia can tell his dad to let him go, so he can be a man. And, the running conflict between Shia’s Witwicky character and Megan Fox is that he can’t bring himself to tell her that he loves her.

In truth, since we presume that Sam (Shia’s character’s name) has to beg for sex being the unbearably sweaty nerd that he is, the idea that he wouldn’t be muttering it, whether true or not, as the price of admission to her supremely glossy features, is ludicrous. She spends the entire film in a hyperreal haze that makes it look, in non-action scenes, like she is in one unending Playboy shoot, just about to lift this here or bend this over there. She looks like she’s been spraytanned and lipglossed to within an inch of her life. If anything, she’s shinier than the shiny shiny robots on display.

The robots are the same as always, although I had tremendous difficulty telling them apart. There’s loyal Bumblebee, there’s noble Optimus Prime, whose voice I find both commanding and strangely soothing at the same time, and then there’s the evil ones, who I can’t tell apart except maybe for the Fallen himself, who looks kinda like a metal version of the aliens from Aliens. As for how many there are, it depends on the scene. If Bay wants one or two duking it out, then there’s only a couple. If he wants a big brawl, then whole bunches of Decepticons appear out of nowhere. And there’s some illiterate jive-talking turkeys created in honour both of Jar Jar Binks and as an homage to blackface minstrel shows of a bygone era.

Sure, you could get outraged if you wanted to, but you have to remember, it’s Michael Donkeyfucking Bay. His entire career is an affront to human dignity. Complaining now is like deciding you didn’t want to have sex when you’re already lying in the wet patch. It’s too fucking late.

The plot hinges on both the idea that these shiny, shiny robots came to Earth thousands of years ago because they were going to destroy our sun, and that Sam becomes globally desirable because of some information uploaded into his brain, which makes the Fallen want him ever so badly. I won’t spoil the surprise for you by telling you whether they succeed in their dastardly plan or not, but I will say that it results in showdown after showdown, until the final set piece occurs at those mighty pyramids at Giza.
In the end, it becomes not about who said I love you, or about who achieved the necessary characteristics to become a leader, or who saved or resurrected who, or how robots have souls and can bolster a hero’s ego by telling him he’s great at the crucial moment, thousands of years after they died.

It’s about robots. And donkeys, don’t forget the donkeys. And this flick, this monstrous, wearying, intellectually dead, sporadically entertaining flick, is overflowing with donkeys. You have been profoundly warned.

6 times I’m sure plenty of donkeys were hurt in the making of this summer blockbuster out of 10. Hurt personally, by Michael Bay himself. Or at least his assistant.

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“We've shed blood, sweat, and precious metal together.”
- “Soldier, you're trained to shoot, not to talk!”
“Don't tempt me.” – biting political commentary, Bay-style, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.