haha, it's a great review by Roger Ebert....
As Greg and rolo have said, it's good to have him back.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
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Mister Tee
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Yyyyyup...
Bad Boys and Toys: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Michael Bay understands pop culture plenitude better than anyone
By Armond White
WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen.
Who else could compose a sequence where characters (albeit robots) go from the bottom of the sea to another planet in one seamless, 30-second, dreamlike flow? That transition typifies the storytelling in this sequel to 2007’s Transformers.
Teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), on his way to college, is drawn back into the first film’s battle between mechanical aliens. Sam innocently acquires the secret code of the aliens’ cosmic history—something to do with his American kid innocence and appreciation of middle-class life’s abundance.
Based on the original 1980s Transformer toys by Hasbro and subsequent TV cartoons and comic books, the Transformer movies expound on this cultural plenitude. Their fascination with technology—the way common objects rearrange, expand or shrink as if having a benevolent or malicious life of their own—drives the stories.
Bay is an ideal director to realize this peculiar genre, which remakes the surfeit of adolescent commercial media as a means of multimedia gratification.These cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes—both human-friendly Autobots and dastardly Decepticons—metamorphose fast, but their transfiguration is like the mechanical toy descriptions in E.T.A. Hoffman: fantastic and uncanny.
Bay’s post-nuclear version of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker stirs emotion from our pop culture, industrial experience then connects to ancient spiritual myths (like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It’s too much the production of industrialization to be considered magic, yet Bay’s sheer fascination with seeing is impressively communicated.
In the history of motion pictures, Bay has created the best canted angles—ever. The world looms behind a human protagonist with the enormity of life itself. (My favorite: a windblown Megan Fox facing the audience as a jet fighter slowly, majestically glides behind/above her). Bay already has a signature: the up-tilted 360-degree spin (gleefully parodied in Hot Fuzz). Here, he flashes it whenever Sam kisses his girlfriend.
Bay photographs Fox and luscious/vicious rival Isabel Lucas like pin-ups—a pop culture joke encompassing what every young girl, post-Madonna, is told is OK. (They’re girls “with options” as Sam says.) There’s still advertising porn in Bay’s soul, but it’s so expressive of the media norm that it’s funny—proof we’re watching nothing more than fantasy.This commercialized life force “Cannot be destroyed, only transformed,” as a Decepticon warns.
Transforming is the capitalist dream of rebranding. It’s not transcendence—thus, the need for the basic sci-fi story of good vs. evil, where Revenge of the Fallen alludes to the story of Lucifer.
Transformers doesn’t simultaneously critique pop culture like Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race or Joseph Kahn’s near-miraculous Torque (none of Bay’s mechanical anthropomorphism matches the wit of how Torque’s human characters live through their vehicles), but there is satire in Sam’s roommate Leo’s (Ramon Rodriquez) Everynerd chatter: “The Internet’s pure truth! Video doesn’t lie!”That breathless naiveté indicts Transformers’ target audience, yet there’s something in scenes of an overturned carrier ship, of alien assaults on the Great Pyramids or Sam’s Clockwork Orange torture that is close to wonderful. Bay’s skills have found their appropriate subject now that he’s abandoned fake history (Pearl Harbor) for fantasy.
Bad Boys and Toys: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Michael Bay understands pop culture plenitude better than anyone
By Armond White
WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen.
Who else could compose a sequence where characters (albeit robots) go from the bottom of the sea to another planet in one seamless, 30-second, dreamlike flow? That transition typifies the storytelling in this sequel to 2007’s Transformers.
Teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), on his way to college, is drawn back into the first film’s battle between mechanical aliens. Sam innocently acquires the secret code of the aliens’ cosmic history—something to do with his American kid innocence and appreciation of middle-class life’s abundance.
Based on the original 1980s Transformer toys by Hasbro and subsequent TV cartoons and comic books, the Transformer movies expound on this cultural plenitude. Their fascination with technology—the way common objects rearrange, expand or shrink as if having a benevolent or malicious life of their own—drives the stories.
Bay is an ideal director to realize this peculiar genre, which remakes the surfeit of adolescent commercial media as a means of multimedia gratification.These cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes—both human-friendly Autobots and dastardly Decepticons—metamorphose fast, but their transfiguration is like the mechanical toy descriptions in E.T.A. Hoffman: fantastic and uncanny.
Bay’s post-nuclear version of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker stirs emotion from our pop culture, industrial experience then connects to ancient spiritual myths (like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It’s too much the production of industrialization to be considered magic, yet Bay’s sheer fascination with seeing is impressively communicated.
In the history of motion pictures, Bay has created the best canted angles—ever. The world looms behind a human protagonist with the enormity of life itself. (My favorite: a windblown Megan Fox facing the audience as a jet fighter slowly, majestically glides behind/above her). Bay already has a signature: the up-tilted 360-degree spin (gleefully parodied in Hot Fuzz). Here, he flashes it whenever Sam kisses his girlfriend.
Bay photographs Fox and luscious/vicious rival Isabel Lucas like pin-ups—a pop culture joke encompassing what every young girl, post-Madonna, is told is OK. (They’re girls “with options” as Sam says.) There’s still advertising porn in Bay’s soul, but it’s so expressive of the media norm that it’s funny—proof we’re watching nothing more than fantasy.This commercialized life force “Cannot be destroyed, only transformed,” as a Decepticon warns.
Transforming is the capitalist dream of rebranding. It’s not transcendence—thus, the need for the basic sci-fi story of good vs. evil, where Revenge of the Fallen alludes to the story of Lucifer.
Transformers doesn’t simultaneously critique pop culture like Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race or Joseph Kahn’s near-miraculous Torque (none of Bay’s mechanical anthropomorphism matches the wit of how Torque’s human characters live through their vehicles), but there is satire in Sam’s roommate Leo’s (Ramon Rodriquez) Everynerd chatter: “The Internet’s pure truth! Video doesn’t lie!”That breathless naiveté indicts Transformers’ target audience, yet there’s something in scenes of an overturned carrier ship, of alien assaults on the Great Pyramids or Sam’s Clockwork Orange torture that is close to wonderful. Bay’s skills have found their appropriate subject now that he’s abandoned fake history (Pearl Harbor) for fantasy.
"How's the despair?"
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Mister Tee
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http://movies.nytimes.com/2009....=movies
Manohla Dargis' review. Her opening paragraphs are something I wish Bay's fans (and they're out there) would address. You hear so many people defend him with "Lighten up, it's just entertainment", as if those of us criticizing him were demanding everyone instead sit through a marathon of von Trier or Rivette movies.
Bay's movies are not entertainment. Jaws, Raiders, even War Games or Men in Black were entertainment; you come out of those movies energized. Bay makes adolescent, over-testosteroned, often-racist and misogynist crud that, whenever I've had the misfortune of seeing one, I've exited feeling unclean. Somehow this formula has enough appeal to (chronological and mental) 12-year olds that the goddamn things make money, and, by usual Hollywood logic, this is translated into "He has real talent".
God, I hate summer.
Manohla Dargis' review. Her opening paragraphs are something I wish Bay's fans (and they're out there) would address. You hear so many people defend him with "Lighten up, it's just entertainment", as if those of us criticizing him were demanding everyone instead sit through a marathon of von Trier or Rivette movies.
Bay's movies are not entertainment. Jaws, Raiders, even War Games or Men in Black were entertainment; you come out of those movies energized. Bay makes adolescent, over-testosteroned, often-racist and misogynist crud that, whenever I've had the misfortune of seeing one, I've exited feeling unclean. Somehow this formula has enough appeal to (chronological and mental) 12-year olds that the goddamn things make money, and, by usual Hollywood logic, this is translated into "He has real talent".
God, I hate summer.
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rolotomasi99
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:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:Sabin wrote:The first American review, Todd Gilchrist of Cinematical, reported...it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time." It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.
There is the Roger Ebert I love so much. He seemed to be missing for awhile, but it is good to have him back.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
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The Original BJ
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Box of marshmallows Roger Ebert gives it ONE FUCKING STAR!
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
// / June 23, 2009
cast & credits
Sam Witwicky Shia LaBeouf
Mikaela Banes Megan Fox
Capt. Lennox Josh Duhamel
USAF Tech Sgt. Epps Tyrese Gibson
Agent Simmons/Jetfire John Turturro
Leo Ramon Rodriguez
Ron Witwicky Kevin Dunn
Professor Rainn Wilson
Judy Witwicky Julie White
Megatron Hugo Weaving
DreamWorks and Paramount presents a film directed by Michael Bay. Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on Hasbro's Transformers action figures. Running time: 149 minutes. MPAA rating: PG-13.
Printer-friendly »
E-mail this to a friend »
by Roger Ebert
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.
The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.
The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.
There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.
The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, except for Starscream®, who is so ancient he has an aluminum beard.
Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "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). The first American review, Todd Gilchrist of Cinematical, reported that Bay's "ambition runs a mile long and an inch deep," but, in a spirited defense, says "this must be the most movie I have ever experienced." He is bullish on the box office: it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time." It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
// / June 23, 2009
cast & credits
Sam Witwicky Shia LaBeouf
Mikaela Banes Megan Fox
Capt. Lennox Josh Duhamel
USAF Tech Sgt. Epps Tyrese Gibson
Agent Simmons/Jetfire John Turturro
Leo Ramon Rodriguez
Ron Witwicky Kevin Dunn
Professor Rainn Wilson
Judy Witwicky Julie White
Megatron Hugo Weaving
DreamWorks and Paramount presents a film directed by Michael Bay. Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on Hasbro's Transformers action figures. Running time: 149 minutes. MPAA rating: PG-13.
Printer-friendly »
E-mail this to a friend »
by Roger Ebert
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.
The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.
The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.
There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.
The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, except for Starscream®, who is so ancient he has an aluminum beard.
Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "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). The first American review, Todd Gilchrist of Cinematical, reported that Bay's "ambition runs a mile long and an inch deep," but, in a spirited defense, says "this must be the most movie I have ever experienced." He is bullish on the box office: it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time." It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.
"How's the despair?"