Tag: crap

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Film Features Film/TV

Transformers: The Last Knight

Ah yes, we meet again, Michael Bay, my old nemesis. My Nemesis Prime, you might say. That’s what hero truck-bot Optimus Prime changes his name to when he turns evil in Bay’s latest bit of deviltry, The Last Knight. …

*sigh*

Okay look, y’all. I gotta be honest. My heart’s not really in this. I know, I love writing a good Michael Bay takedown as much as you like reading them — probably more, if I’m being honest. I’ve been doing them for years. Back in the day, Chris Herrington, the Flyer‘s former film editor, would assign me to do the Michael Bay movies, because he knew I hated them. I’ve had a Michael Bay-sized chip on my shoulder since 1998’s Armageddon. How do you mess up a movie about heroic astronauts trying to save the earth from an asteroid? There were so many ways. Then there was Pearl Harbor. How do you mess that up? This is the film where Ben Affleck gets on a train to go from New York to London, neither of which is anywhere NEAR Pearl Harbor.

I include that tidbit in every Michael Bay review, because I still haven’t gotten over it.

And now, another Transformers movie. The fifth one. Giant Robots Go to England. At least they don’t take a train.

I don’t think Michael Bay’s heart is in it any more, either. Back when he had Will Smith and Martin Lawrence demolishing Haitian neighborhoods in Bad Boys 2, at least he seemed like he was having fun with it. In the nonsensical opening scene — in which it is revealed that the secret to King Arthur’s success turns out to be, you guessed it, Transformers — Merlin (Stanley Tucci) takes a big swig of whiskey before staggering into a crashed alien spaceship to forge an alliance with a giant robot. It has the feeling of a confessional moment for Bay: Oh boy. Here we go again. …

Heavy metal — as in considerably cumbersome CGI depictions of giant robots turning into other things.

Bay’s been watching Game of Thrones and obviously missing the point. You like flawed characters caught in impossible situations making hard choices? How about a bored looking Markey Mark just kind of floating through the frame while animated piles of scrap metal scrape together in the background? To say Mark Wahlberg is phoning it in overstates his engagement. Wahlberg is leaving a voicemail for the audience. He was hoping you wouldn’t pick up.

As a longtime Bay watcher, he’s always been indifferent to the audience’s suffering, but in last year’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, I detected something new: a seething resentment of the audience. The Transformers Reaction Force, a special forces group led by Santos (Santiago Cabrera), who can’t seem to decide what side he’s on, seems imported from that movie. It’s like Bay’s sneering misogyny, evident in his treatment of Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), the Oxford English Lit professor who can’t seem to speak in complete sentences, has been extended to the entire world. Our alleged hero Cade speaks in Trumpian word salad, insulting any and everyone he comes into contact with. For Bay, there’s only one use for words: busting chops. Expressing dominance.

There’s a general shoddiness to the whole endeavor. A Goonies-like group of kids is introduced early, only to just wander off without explanation. Bay has always had a knack for explaining things that didn’t need explaining and not explaining big things like, “Where did those five kids go? Did they die in the robot apocalypse along with the tens of millions others alluded to but never seen?” The same stock footage of fighter planes peeling off to attack is used over and over again in the final battle, which itself is inexplicably ripped off from last year’s epic flop Independence Day: Resurgence.

“It’s just big, dumb fun!” might be a valid defense against my half-hearted critical barbs, except for one thing: No one is having any fun, least of all Michael Bay. It’s not even fun to hate-watch Transformers: The Last Knight. At this point, even writing this review feels like enabling bad behavior. As a three-headed robot dragon swoops in, breathing fire, King Arthur screams, “This is what the end looks like!” And I can only say I hope so.

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Film Features Film/TV

Fifty Shades Darker

Aloha, dear readers! Happy late V-Day and thanks for reading this review of Fifty Shades Darker, a cinematic experience that is either one of the defining films of our generation or a particularly long bottled water commercial. Or maybe it’s the visual album for 2017’s most innocuous club anthems? Or an FCC-commissioned instructional exercise in the limits of R ratings? An awards-show compilation cataloging the most expensive pure-plot scenes ever to make it into porn?

Whatever Fifty Shades Darker actually is (and let us not look too deeply, my friends, into that fickle mirror of the self), it is definitely the second of its kind. There was a first, called Fifty Shades of Grey, and there will be a third, called Fifty Shades Freed. Before the Fifty Shades trilogy was on-screen, it was in-book, and before it was in-book, it was online. The story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, two dreadfully entwined lovers from the black heart of Seattle, originated as Twilight fanfiction. It was penned by an author named E.L. James, who is now very, very rich. Steele’s and Grey’s is a story about BDSM and helicopters and what it’s like to be a working girl with a billionaire boyfriend.

This is a nice thing that happens to Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Darker.

At the beginning of this franchise middle child, we meet Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) on the first day of her new job at an independent publishing company. She is no longer dating businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) because at the end of the last movie, Christian revealed to Ana his penchant for x-treme sadism, and she was like no way, my man, not happening to this English major. But now Grey wants Ana back. He sends her white roses to congratulate her on her job and shows up uninvited at her friend’s photography show. She tries to resist his attentions, but because her character is never allowed to speak above the decibel level of a mournful library-whisperer, she fails. So they go out to dinner, and then (kind of a spoiler?) they are fucking again. Only this time it isn’t gonna be about submission. It is going to be a real relationship, on her terms.

Uhhhhggg. Reader, come here. Closer. Closer. Good. Mama is tired. Tired. I want to summarize the rest of this plot for you, but I just can’t. These are the few moments in the film that one might mistake for plot points:

• Christian Grey’s stalkery former submissive shows up threateningly;

• Ana’s boss at her new job looms weird and threateningly;

• Helicopter malfunction;

• Someone fires a gun (at this point in the movie, a dude behind me in the theater said, “I didn’t pay to see this type of shit.”);

• Christian Grey’s stalkery older woman who ruined his youth shows up threateningly.

But, as with the first Fifty Shades, these narrative points really only serve to punctuate the actual purpose of the whole undertaking, and that purpose is “nice stuff parade.” There is so much nice stuff in this movie! There’s a super nice masquerade ball to which Anastasia Steele wears a really sexy gray dress and mask. The masquerade ball is thrown in honor of a charity called Coping Together (definitely 2017’s leading V-Day sentiment), and “Coping Together” is printed on a drum kit. That’s nice! And what else? There’s a sailboat, a home gym that includes a pommel horse, lots of flowers, bottled water, and black SUVs. There are lots of scary-but-hot people! Rita Ora is here, presumably playing a character in the movie, and she has blonde hair. There’s also new Taylor Swift and ZAYN collaboration that I want to hate but is actually stuck in my head. Nice!

The best part of the whole thing comes in one of the numerous, tedious partial-sex scenes, when Christian Grey is beginning to make sweet love to the dulcet, overproduced tones of some song, and it’s doing that subtle techno thing. And then the music stops. And then right when the beat drops, he thrusts.

Please, y’all. Don’t go see Fifty Shades Darker. Instead stay home with your partner/a stranger from the internet and try to perfect thrusting to the drop of a club anthem.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Independence Day: Resurgence

I’m on my knees in the handicap stall of the Paradiso men’s room. I’ve just seen Independence Day: Resurgence, so I’ve decided to drown myself in the toilet. I’m sure there are other, more dignified ways to end it all in a movie theater, but this feels appropriate.

A blue glow suffuses the stall. I turn to see the Force ghost of Will Smith’s character from the 1996 Independence Day standing there in his flight suit, helmet tucked under one translucent arm. “Hold on there, partner!” he says. “Crawl away from the toilet.”

“Will Smith!” I exclaim. “What are you doing here?”

“Technically I’m Capt. Steven Hiller, fighter pilot, alien puncher, world savior. Right now, I’m here to save you from drowning yourself in this toilet. You know you’re in the handicap stall, right? If you drown yourself here, some poor guy in a wheelchair is going to have to move your Brexit-ass out of the way to pee. And he’s got enough problems. So I need you to get up off this floor and go write that review of Independence Day: Resurgence.”

“Man, Roland Emmerich sure coulda used you in that movie,” I say. “All he had was this guy, Jessie Usher, playing your son, who also happened to be a crack fighter pilot in the right place at the right time to fight alien invaders and save the world. But he was just a big slap of nothing. He didn’t even look like you. But you were too smart to get involved in that debacle, weren’t you?”

Force ghost Will Smith lights an ectoplasmic stogie. “Scheduling conflict with Suicide Squad,” he says, chuckling. “So tell me, why are you getting ready to take the pee-pee plunge? Bad movie hurt your feelings?”

“Bad? I eat bad movies for breakfast. This … this was not a movie. This is a symptom of a diseased system. This is a third-generation simulacrum of other, better movies repackaged for the export market. You can actually see the places where they’re cutting in extra scenes for the Chinese, like when Rain Lao, the Chinese pilot played by an actress actually named Angelababy, is briefly seen giving the tail end of a speech in front of a giant Chinese flag. You bet that scene is a lot longer in Beijing. But it’s not going to help. Can you believe they actually expect to sell a Fourth of July-themed movie in China? And waitaminute, why are you a Force ghost? That’s a Star Wars thing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Force ghost Will Smith. “It’s just a trope you’re familiar with so I don’t have to spend time on exposition.”

“Exactly! I kept envisioning Roland Emmerich saying ‘It doesn’t matter,’ over and over again. How do we get Jeff Goldblum from Africa to the moon? Have the Hunger Games guy steal a space tug. It doesn’t matter. Brent Spiner’s been in a coma for 17 years, and now his previously unmentioned gay partner runs Area 51? Why not? It doesn’t matter. No Will Smith? Show a painting of him in the White House. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Just steal some beats from Star Wars, Alien, Starship Troopers, whatever, hit the four quadrants with your $100 million ad spend, and watch the sheep bleat in. There were five writers listed on this thing, and when the Save the Cat outline says to save a cat, they literally saved a cat. Except it was a dog, escaped from a school bus full of kids that Judd Hirsch brought to the big showdown with the aliens in Nevada salt flats for no reason! Nothing matters!”

I lunge for the toilet, but am brought up short by a glowing blue hand on my shoulder. “That’s why you’ve got to live! You have to write this review! Warn the world!”

“Oh yeah. Writing a bad review always works. Plus, I got a mortgage. Thanks, Force ghost Will Smith! You saved my life.”

“All in a day’s work,” he says, turning to leave.

“Hey Will. Which headline to do like better: SHIT PARADE or POO-POO PLATTER?”

“It doesn’t matter.”