Speed Racer
seriously OMGWTFBBQ
Jesus. I must be getting old or something, but I saw this goddamned movie like a week ago and I'm just now recovering from the experience. Headaches, nausea, dizziness: maybe it's the H1N1, or maybe the Anthrax, but I'm breathing normally so it must be this... this thing. It hurts, and not in the John Cougar Mellencamp "Hurts so good" way either.
I've been accused of typing too much lately, so I'll get right to it. I'll give you a succinct, all-you-need-to-know executive summary of this movie. Here goes:
Deeply dumb stuff, made for babies.
Actually, let me amend that: deeply dumb stuff, made for dumb babies. It's all just flash! and bang! and sproing! and bright colors splashed across the screen. It's not so much a movie in the normal sense (you know, where a bunch of disparate elements come together to create a whole narrative) as just a bunch of imagery occasionally interrupted by talking. It's kind of surprising, really, coming from the brothers Wachowski. Sure, The Matrix was also deeply stupid, but it had Hugo Weaving, and cool costumes, and it was pretentious. This has no Hugo, the colors hurt my brain, and... well okay, there's a hint of pretension where Speed Racer's mom calls him an "artist", but that's all.
So, what do you get? You get a chimpanzee dressed like a little boy which just pisses me the fuck off. You get a preternaturally irritating kid. Dear god I hate that kid. You get fight scenes that mostly consist of flunkies getting kicked in the sack. You get a bunch of "racing", in that there are long, long stretches where several cars are on the screen at once, crashing into each other and making funny noises. But you have no idea of how long the courses are, or where anyone is in the standings, or anything. Everything is so frenetic, the cuts are so short, the camera is so manic that you never know where anything is or where it's going, and all tension is utterly lost in the process. But worse: It's boring. It would be bad enough if the movie were a pretty-glittery, hollow shell to house some whopper action set-pieces, but the races themselves are tedious slogs of incomprehensibility.
On the plus side, the villain looks like Christopher Hitchens, and snarls a lot. But he's underpowered, never really posing any kind of menace, and that's the worst kind of villain. John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are in this for reasons I can't wrap my head around. Stephen Colbert's Korean nemesis, Rain, plays a Japanese guy. And Christina Ricci, who is so beautiful I'd kill my entire family if she asked me to, is in this, but even she can't save it. And Matthew Fox? I can only presume after shooting four straight seasons of Lost he really, really wanted to get the hell out of Hawaii for a while. All he does is stand around and look grim.
Oh, another thing that pissed me off about this movie: when a race car blows up (which happens often) the driver is conspicuously encased in foam and ejected from the wreckage in that G.I. Joe / A-Team kiddie-show-friendly bullshit way. If little Dustin or Madelynne or whatever you're naming your kids these days can't handle the thought of people getting hurt in car wrecks, don't take them to a movie featuring thousands of car wrecks.
See? I forgot what country I live in, and I forgot that this movie was made for babies. I'm still a bit disoriented.
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek. Shatner-free since 2009.
I kind of hate this movie, but only kind of. Actually, some of it is fine, but there's aspects of it that plain piss me off, so I'm ambivalent. It's not the retconning; I'm familiar enough with the Trek universe but by no means a committed Trekker, so I wasn't concerned about 'authenticity' or the like. It was the opening credits that got me started.
No, it's not that J.J. Abrams directed. I like pretty much everything he's done, except for the hilariously godawful Cloverfield. And yes, all the action sequences are in confuse-O-vision™, but that may or may not have been his fault. It was, rather, the names Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. If you follow the links you'll see that they are responsible for scripting that cinematic Auschwitz, that mortal offense against everything decent and worth defending in the world, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So let's just say we weren't off to a good start.
Lest there be any confusion, I'll state right up front that Star Trek is nowhere near as bad a movie as T:RotF. Damning with faint praise, maybe, but there are worthwhile aspects on hand here. Overall, the primary cast does a decent job. The young Spock (Zachary Quinto) is in particular a slightly more believable creature than Leonard Nimoy's iconic Vulcan, but this probably has more to do with the character reflecting modern sensibilities than anything else. I also like seeing Simon Pegg (as Scotty) and Karl Urban (as Bones) in movies; they're good actors and deserve the work, but they're given fuck-all to do here (for Urban, it's standing around looking pained, and Pegg is tasked with comic gurgling). Really, the only truly ridiculous character here is Anton Yelchin's Chekov; Bullwinkle cartoons had more subtle Russian accents. Chris Pine does fine as Kirk, but his character is insufferable by design. There's something of a running gag the film makes in a Freudian acknowledgement of this—young Kirk gets beaten and/or strangled by another character, on average, once every ten minutes. It happens with enough regularity to be the trigger for a drinking game.
Which leads me to the first of this film's fatal flaws. There's no chance, not even a mathematical one, of any main character dying, so there's no point in going to great lengths to show them in mortal peril, as the film's many action sequences do. Zero tension is generated thusly, because you know they will live long and prosper and all that shit. Abrams and crew try to inject the movie with the adrenaline of gee-whiz visuals and crash-bang-kapow in order to keep its heart beating, but it just doesn't work.
Because really all they have to work with are the memories of anyone who's seen any part of the Star Trek universe so far, which is statistically everyone. They can trot out a character, and no matter how clever they are with the winking and nudging, they simply have to reference that character's tropes. (Scotty's "I'm giving her all I can, cap'n!" actually sorta-kinda works, but McCoy's "Damnit, I'm a doctor not a physicist!" is 100% affectation. There was just no good place in the script for McCoy's "I'm a doctor" line, but that doesn't stop Orci and Kurtzman, our fearless duo. No, they just crammed it in there anyway.) This can make for good fun (like when Ensign Nobody picks the red jumpsuit for the aweigh team mission, you know he's gonna bite it) but it's not a way to build tension and it's not a way to generate interest in these people as human sentient beings. What you need, at the least, is a story worth telling, and Orci and Kurtzman don't have one.
Instead, what we get is some gobbledygook about time-traveling Romulans, led by a cat named Nero (Eric Bana), in a huge-ass spaceship, looking to destroy Vulcan and Earth because Spock failed, as very, very old man, to prevent Romulus from being burned to a crisp by a supernova. Key to Nero's plan is a giant laser drill that bores a hole to the victim planet's core, wherin "red matter" is injected, causing the planet to turn into a black hole. Said drill hangs from Nero's ship by a huge chain. Oh, and it takes like twenty minutes to drill to the planet's core.
And this is what leads us to the second, and really really unforgivable, of the film's fatal flaws. Because when Nero attacks Vulcan, of all places, the entire planet's 6-billion plus inhabitants just stand around with blank looks on their faces as if to say, huh, ain't that some shit. Apparently it occurs to no one to just shoot the stupid thing out of the sky (a tactic that proves unsurprisingly effective when Nero attacks Earth in the same manner). Because of this mass collective failure of (ahem) logic, Vulcan gets destroyed.
Now, let me be clear. It's not the time-travel retconning part of "Vulcan gets destroyed" that pisses me off; it's the mental crotch kick of the way the movie goes about destroying Vulcan that pisses me off. It's a middle finger jammed into your cerebral cortex. It's pure Orci and Kurtzman, and it hurts.
There's some minor-in-comparison WTFs here as well, like the third-year starfleet officer candidates getting motion sick on the shuttle leaving Earth, or Kirk's wide-eyed, unsophisticated, and totally out-of-character farmboy ooh-ahh routine as they approach the Enterprise for the first time. Harder to swallow, though, is the fate of old Spock. Nimoy returns as the aged Spock (God bless him and all that, but he's really really old now and his voice is distractingly 'denturey') who was marooned by Nero on a desolate, frozen Hoth-like world for thirty some-odd years. Now there's two things about this that make absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever:
- In a flashback, the movie shows Spock witnessing the destruction of Vulcan by merely looking up into the sky. Indeed, this was the reason Nero marooned him there, so he could witness the destruction of his planet the way Nero had to witness the destruction of Romulus. But Vulcan, in the sky of the other planet, is quite large, larger than our moon appears. Let's say that the moon was turned into a black hole suddenly. Would life on Earth be, shall we say, affected in any way by this eventuality? Because this frozen planet seems somehow strangely immune to the cosmic turmoil right next door. Note that this is not explained away; rather is is simply never mentioned.
- Come to that, how is it even possible in the Trek-iverse that this planet is all but uninhabited? There's a Starfleet friggin' outpost on the planet, some "fifteen miles" from the cave that Spock has lived in for thirty years. Why didn't Spock go to the damned outpost and get his geriatric ass saved? Why, for that matter, on a class-M planet less than a hour's travel from Vulcan, is there only one lonely Starfleet outpost? Why isn't the planet terraformed, climate-controlled and populated all to hell?
Never mind. It hardly matters, as no one involved in the production of this thing seems to give a damn about such matters. Then again, this is coming from the writers who brought you T:RotF. Here, the destruction of Vulcan (i.e., the deliberate genocide of billions) is only a plot device intended to get Spock to show emotion. Here, Kirk's backstory (including his notorious fiddling with the Kobiashi Maru simulation) is ham-handed, silly, and cliche-laden. Those of you looking for a little logical continuity along with your retroactive continuity are going to be sorely disappointed. Fanbois and the easily amused will find enough in-jokes and pretty shiny things to to keep them distracted for two hours, but everyone else can give this a pass.
Titanic
the loooooooooove boat...
I can remember thinking, way back in 1997, that Titanic epitomized a very disturbing trend society seemed to be following. Like the Super Bowl, it seemed like spectacle for the sake of spectacle, a vast shiny jewel in Hollywood's shimmery kingdom of desire. And so, out of counter-culturey disdain, I avoided, assiduously, ever watching it, claiming that dedicating the purchase price of a ticket and three hours of my life was akin to paying tithe to Pharaoh. My hipster credentials thus secured (having previously been placed in some jeopardy by my decision to cave in to pressure and watch Forrest Gump) I continued with my life, only to see Hollywood's offerings become baser and baser.
Well, fate has finally caught up with me. I can now say I've joined with the rest of the world and seen this movie. Yes, I watched it on purpose. No one held a gun to my head, though at times I'd wished they had. God help me, but I have seen Titanic.
I happen to think that a straightforward review is pointless, since I was obviously the last man in the world to have seen it. Instead, I have a lot of questions that perhaps you, dear reader, may be able to answer:
- What were they thinking?
- Why was it so very, very, long?
- Why did Billy Zane wear more makeup than Kate Winslett?
- Why didn't Jack just climb up on the door with Rose?
- What did happen to Sven, anyway?
And so on. There's a lot in this movie that's just plain silly, and I'm not talking about Jack's lampoony what's-a-matta-yoo Italian friend. You ever been to a funereal, and heard a well-meaning person say awkward weird things in a misguided attempt at consoling someone? And the bereaved, whatever they may actually think about the gobbeldygook that just came out of the well-meaning person's mouth, they just smile and say thank you and tell themselves well they meant well, that's what matters. I mean silly in that sense. For instance: at the very tippy-end of the movie, when Rose goes off to her reward, she meets up again with Jack, in the entrance to the rich people's ballroom. Why Jack's ghost would be allowed to dally about for seventy some-odd years with the ghosts of his social superiors, we'll never know. Why they'd all be waiting around for Rose to show up, that's another mystery. Why they would all applaud—let alone care, or even notice—when Jack and Rose kiss is a deep, fathomless enigma. Really, it makes no sense. And yet, like the polite bereaved person at the funereal, we are supposed to smile and say thank you and feel appreciative to that wonderful nice movie that meant well and just wanted you to feel better.
But all of that pales in comparison to the biggest WTF the movie has to offer. It's obvious early on that Rose is still, after all these years, in possession of the diamond, so I guess any tension around that plotline was supposed to be based around the "when will she reveal it" question. I mean, really, what else would she do with it, toss it in the fucking ocean OH MY WTFBBQ did she just do that ferchrissakes.
This is what takes Titanic from a mere overlong, overhyped, overpraised, tedious slog and into the realm of pure evil. Out of all of the things that Rose could have done with this extremely valuable jewel, this extremely valuable jewel of some historical significance no less, she decided to throw it in the ocean where it can do no good for no one. She could have sold it, started a charitable organization, and helped thousands. She could have eliminated vitamin-A deficiency blindness worldwide, or eased the tremendous (but easily treatable) suffering caused by anaemia in Southeast Asia. Hell, she could have bought iPods for deaf kids, or something, anything, but no. She tosses it in the fucking ocean.
This isn't a minor gripe. This is a big deal, all the more so because we're supposed to like it. It's supposed to be a grand romantic gesture; it's supposed to make to you go ahhh, isn't that lovely. No, it's not lovely. It's absurdly selfish. It's childish. It's plain stupid and despicable and you're supposed to like it.
Well, I for one don't like it. So there.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Holy Christ. I have never hated a film as much as I hate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'll get to the specifics in a minute, but first I need to just relax, collect myself, and breathe. Calm down before I break something. Soak in the Buddhadharma a bit; appeal to Avilokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, for wisdom and understanding; om mani padme hum...
look upon this and despair
Okay. It's not just that this film is dumb. It's not just that it's inchoate, sub-juvenile, noisy mayhem (it is a Michael Bay film, after all—what did you expect?) It's not even that it's an utter, damnably shameful waste of the talent of John Turturro, or that it's two-and-a-half hours of having your eyes getting kicked in their balls. No, what sets this film apart, what really distinguishes it from the rest of the loud ugly big-budget psychic junk food that Hollywood serves up year in and year out, is that T:RotF serves as a temple to the god of waste. This movie is so wasteful of everything, so shameful and atavistic, that it forments political instability. It raises the possibility of actual revolution.
I'm not kidding. One day, films like this will be looked back on as a major contributing factor to the collapse of the commercial-industrial order that created it. Sure, big-budget Hollywood crap is, practically by definition, wasteful. Perfectly good cars get blown up; gratuitous sets are assembled, then torn down and the materials tossed away; "actors" command obscene salaries; megawatts of electricity are squandered on rendering farms for useless CGI. Few films have such a concentration and volume of those wretched realities as does today's entry, but its distinction lies not just in degree, but in kind. There is a malfeasance at work here that transforms (ahem) this film from clangy-shiny-bread-and-circus mundanity to a sparkling exemplar of fascist art.
Yeah, I went there. I said it and I meant it. I know there has been something akin to a fad lately of declaring blockbusters "fascist", but that doesn't mean the assessments are necessarily off-base. Likewise, I think the charge that critics who claim 'fascism' are psychologizing their targets is overblown. Anecdotally, many of my film-buff colleagues claim that Bay is merely a buffoon: a hack, however overpaid. I claim here and now, however, that such a dismissal is wrongheaded, in much the same way that it was wrong to dismiss George W. Bush as some kind of affable moron. (Indeed, T:RotF could almost serve as a primer on the Bush years.) Bay is clearly in love with power, and that, more than anything, is what comes seeping through every frame. More specifically, it's not a simple fetishizing of the masculine form (ala 300) or the portrayal of violence as a path to redemption (viz. Gladiator); rather it's the power Bay has to produce so much waste. Aside from the real-world waste involved in producing such a film (staggering though it is) the film itself fetishizes and revels in waste and destruction. For instance, there is a scene where the Great Pyramid at Giza is ripped apart by a giant robot with huge, swaying, wrecking-ball testicles (for real). While this is clearly emblematic of what I'm getting at here, there's more subtle variations on the theme, as well.
Here's one. A central premise of the plot is that the Autobots (the good robots) are in a secret alliance with humanity to fight the Decepticons (bad bots!), and a key proviso of said alliance is that humans, for some utterly retarded reason, are to do "the majority of the fighting first", calling in Autobot reinforcements only as necessary. Hence, in the opening setpiece, the battle between puny humans and giant robot goes much as you'd expect: humans get stomped, and badly. Eventually, the Autobots are engaged and they quickly put an end to the shenanigans slaughter of defenseless humans. We then cut to a scene where military leaders are discussing the results of the previous action with Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. The gist of the conversation is that the casualty counts on such raids has been too high. Which means, supposedly, that this scene has played out before. So what we have here is a world in which super-intelligent space robots working with our top military leaders have devised an overall battle strategy little changed from that of the Somme. Here, it's human lives being wasted.
Want more? You know that stock character in most action films, the government bureaucrat meddling in the affairs of the noble military? The one who's imperious when he has the upper hand, but sniveling and useless when the chips are down? Yeah, he's here, laying waste to the notion that force isn't everything. (In Bay's universe, governments are useful only to the extent that they are paternalistic providers of military hardware, diplomacy always fails, intellectuals are craven, and opponents are motivated purely by spite and evil—which of course know no bounds and are therefore insatiable. Hence, the bad guy's plan is to "blow up the sun", a stupidity not seen since Plan 9 From Outer Space. No wait, that's unfair, because in Plan 9 the aliens were trying to prevent the accidental destruction of the sun, not the intentional destruction of the sun. So there you have it. This movie is actually worse than Plan 9. "This world will be forever dark!" rasps the baddy, apparently unaware that Earth would be more than merely dark were the sun blown up.)
Here's another. Nobody—and I mean nobody, not even John Waters—can make beauty creepy like Michael Bay. Most obviously I'm talking here about Megan Fox, but Bay has this notion that females in general are to be dipped in bronzer and baked in a tanning booth until they are both brownish-orange and have a hard shiny candy shell. There's no denying that Fox is an attractive woman, at least in real life. Here, she's a walking crème brûlée. It's Bay saying to his audience, "I know she's pretty. I'm going to paint her like a circus clown anyway." He gives the same treatment to Isabel Lucas, with the added indignity of a panty shot, a robotic tail, and not one, but two scenes in which she tries to seduce Shia LaBeouf. My god, what people will do to forge a career in pictures.
(FYI, "indignity" gets a new definition when you consider what Julie White, as LaBeouf's motormouth mother, goes through. While taking LaBeouf to college she eats some pot brownies and, instead of developing more appreciation for Charles Mingus, she goes beserk. Reefer Madness is vérité in comparison.)
That's how this film goes: it's 2+ hours of a middle finger in your face. Princeton University is an upscale and perpetual Spring Break bash (I went to Chico State and I never saw parties like that. I mean really.) Two dogs hump each other several times in the first half hour, and a robot humps Fox's leg. Somehow, there's nothing funny about either. Rainn Wilson is wasted in a brief role as the lamest stereotype of a arrogant professorial blowhard ever (seriously, Glen Beck's "comedy" is more nuanced). John Turturro isn't just wasted, he's humilated, literally embarrassed, in a scene where he not only drops his pants, but drops his pants to reveal he's wearing a scanty thong. Two new autobots—Wheelie and Skids—provide a shuck-and-jive routine so clownish as to shame Jar-Jar Binks, and, if that wasn't bad enough, they were voiced by Tom Kenny, a profoundly funny guy from the beloved Mr. Show. So now they've tarnished that memory.
But perhaps the most subtle waste is the way in which all the purported "entertainment" fails to entertain. The common apologia—"calm down, it's just dumb stuff for ten-year-olds"—falls down here, as well. There are numberless "battles" in this film, all filmed in confuse-O-vision™, and in every last one of them it's actually impossible to tell the autobots from the decepticons. I don't think, as many other reviewers apparently do, that this is an accident of Bay's "frenetic style" or the "whiplash editing". I think it's 100% intentional and not a byproduct at all. The film is saying, in effect, "Don't bother yourself with moral considerations, or following a narrative, or investing emotionally in character arcs. In fact, there's no point in even telling the combatants apart. What matters is (ooof!) there's big shiny (crash!) things beating each other up (kapow!) on screen. During one of the talky bits, go get another coke."
In fact, everything about this heap of shit says "fuck you" to the audience, and there will come a day when even the dopiest among us will tire of such treatment. That day may not be far off. While this movie has plenty of morons who claim to have thought it was "fun", there were many more who got the hint that they were being insulted. Children—ritalin-addled, always-entertained modern children—walked out of this thing thinking they'd been had. Parents by the truckload began to rue the day Bay was born, and though they shelled out the cash all the same, they became just a little bit less likely to do it again next time.
Indeed, I hate this film so much I actively despise anyone who likes even a part of it. My plan is to dedicate the rest of my life to building a time machine, so I can go into the future and get the technology to reanimate the dead. I will then take my time machine, go back to the present, and resurrect Bruce Lee, so I can get him to kick Michael Bay in the junk. Then Bruce and I will go back in time, find Bay's father, and Bruce will kick him in the junk, repeatedly, until he can't make babies anymore and then we won't have to worry about Bay being born and making these terrible movies.
I'll let you know how it goes.