Cinema Sideshow

People Are Drooling Idiots: 'Transformers 2' Makes $60 Million in One Day

A few days ago, I wrote a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for a new outlet. The piece was short, and didn't say anything that hasn't been covered by every other right-thinking critic in America (in other words, it's very loud, very long, and sucks). I thought it was going to be my premiere piece for the site, but now know that it's going into storage so I'll have a backlog of reviews already written when the site's overhaul is unveiled in July.

This is just as well, really. Since I wrote it, I've read far, far better reviews than mine. Mike Russell of the Oregonian called Tranformers 2 "a barely strung-together collection of visual ideas and set pieces, with some of the most hilariously stupid and generic dialogue ever financed by hundreds of millions of dollars." Roger Ebert said that it was "a horrible experience of unbearable length."

And over at the site io9.com, Charlie Jane Anders wrote a lengthy, awe-inspiring deconstruction insisting that the film's really a post-modern masterpiece, "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."

My review was not as good as any of these. Mainly because my own limited resources were unable to come up with the words to convey how aggressively wretched Transformers 2 actually is. It's so awful, it made me want to punch Michael Bay in the cock ... with Shia LaBeouf's face. And I kind of like Shia LaBeouf.

Now, today, comes the unsurprising news that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made a record-breaking $60 million on its first day in theaters. This, after almost every review tried to warn people that it's incomprehensible dreck, and that the sight of Megan Fox licking her lips in slo-mo is no trade-off for two-and-a-half hours of being bombarded by Michael Bay's obscenely expensive, ear-splittingly loud, stupidstupidstupid Monster of the Id on celluloid. They went to see it anyway. In droves.

Because most people, it turns out, are morons. Whenever that thought crosses my mind, and it does fairly often, I usually put it down to my admittedly curmudgeonly nature. But no, it's now official -- a very large swath of America is made up of drooling retards with enough leisure time and enough disposable income that they can throw it away on fucking terrible, ass-stupid, ridiculously long wastes of time even after they're warned not to do it. These are the people we're saving by passing seatbelt and helmet laws, by the way. And they breed. Also, this is why the rest of the world hates us.

Mike Judge's Idiocracy is becoming more and more prescient with each passing year. If the one-day landslide business for Transformers 2 is any indication, in a few generations Americans will live exclusively on fast food, all television will be reality shows in which people compete for prizes by kicking each other in the crotch, and movies will be three-hour extravaganzas consisting entirely of loud explosions, barely legal titties, and fart jokes.

The first two paragraphs of my inadequate Transformers 2 review, by the way, go like this:

In the old Looney Toons cartoons that I watched every Saturday morning, Foghorn Leghorn would torture his farm-dog nemesis by jamming a metal bucket on his head and then banging on it with a wooden spoon. I never knew what that felt like until Michael Bay did to me for two-and-a-half hours with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

At once a feature-length ad for the military, a soft-core Maxim spread featuring Megan Fox, and an extremely loud music video, Bay's second shot at turning the popular 80's toy/cartoon into an action flick is the sort of film that people suggest you "turn your brain off" to watch. It would be nice if that actually worked, but with Bay insisting that you pay attention to EVERY! LOUD! THING! that he throws at the screen, you can't even allow your mind to wander to, say, your grocery list, or what you had for dinner, the way you can with a normal bad movie.

But as I remember the actual experience of watching the movie, I realize that the above is painfully weak. Honestly, having my head inside a metal bucket upon which someone is hammering with a spoon would be an improvement on watching Transformers 2. Comparatively, it might even be a pleasure. Because I left the theater actually feeling stupider for having watched it, as if exposure to two-and-a-half hours of maximum Bay-hem caused genuine brain damage. Had I checked, I might have found bits of soft, greyish-pink brain matter oozing from my ears as I staggered through the lobby, bumping into walls.

Which might, in fact, be Michael Bay's master plan. Perhaps he's found a way to literally make his target audience mentally retarded through repeat viewings of his films, thus assuring that they'll continue to enjoy his work even more as his career progresses. And maybe he figures that if he can make film critics into babbling, single-digit-I.Q. mongoloids as well, we'll all be unable to type, and then we can't review his movies anymore.

Well, I have news for you, Mr. Bay. This future retard isn't going to go along quietly. You can have my brain cells when you vacuum them from my cold, dead, Transformers-desiccated skull. After I punch you in the cock.

'The Proposal': Slightly Better Than You'd Expect, Until It Isn't.

The early portions of The Proposal, the by-the-numbers romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, are actually somewhat promising. Of course, by "promising," I mean that, despite being utterly predictable in absolutely every respect, the acting is decent, the writing competent, and the DP kept everything in focus most of the time. This may seem like faint praise, but given the state of the modern American rom-com, that places it head-and-shoulders above most of the genre.

The premise, of course, is as stale as a week-old bagel: Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a stern book editor who's going to be deported to her native Canada. She ropes her assistant, Andrew (Reynolds) into agreeing to marry her. Under pressure from a cartoonishly broad INS agent (the usually-much-better-than-this Denis O'Hare), the two jet off to spend the weekend with Andrew's family in Sitka, Alaska. The expected hijinks arising from his parents (Mary Steenbergen, Craig T. Nelson) and grandmother (Betty White) believing that they're a real couple ensue, as the plot chugs forward exactly as you'd expect.

Despite kicking off with what is, perhaps, the tiredest gag in the rom-com playbook (Reynolds fetches coffee for the boss, juggling two obviously empty cups until the time comes to bump into someone, then he covers his shirt with a cascade of latte), The Proposal does a fair job of delivering its weak goods in the first two acts. Much of this can be attributed to Reynolds, a grossly underrated comic talent who can deliver bad dialogue with such cocky finesse that one (almost) forgets that it's dreck. (As a side note, this is one of many reasons that the recent Wolverine failed utterly -- the filmmakers cast Reynolds in a role that ought to have taken full advantage of his snarky, whip-smart charm, then sewed up his lips after just a couple of lightning-short scenes.)

Bullock is fine, as she always is, and surprisingly doesn't milk humor out of falling down or tripping over something for a change. She does take a tumble off of a boat about halfway through the movie, but it's done less as a reason to laugh at her goofiness than as a transparent device to get Reynolds to put his arm around her. Her plastic-surgified face has relaxed a bit since her last film, which makes her look almost like a normal human again -- although not so much that we can ignore the 12-year age difference between her and Reynolds, an issue that the film never addresses.

But Bullock also has a way with dialogue, and when she dryly delivers a line like, "What am I allergic to? Peanuts. And the entire spectrum of human emotion" it elicits a genuine chuckle.

Somewhere around the two-thirds point in the film, however, it feels like everyone involved just sort of gave up. An intriguing character line with Andrew's father resenting him for leaving Alaska and the family business is pretty much dropped until film's end, when he just shrugs and decides that he doesn't mind anymore. Andrew's pretty, pleasant ex-girlfriend (Malin Ackerman) hangs around and then offers nothing to the story whatsover, and Steenbergen's mom is just that, The Mother, with little in the way of a developed character other than a perpetual smile and a few hugs.

Everything plunges sharply downhill with a pointless scene in which Bullock encounters White in the woods, dressed in a Native American outfit and dancing around a fire. This is supposed to be hilariously wacky, but with no set-up to explain why, exactly, the 90-year-old grandma would be wearing a headdress and chanting to the Indian gods, it merely comes off as exactly what it is -- a desperate attempt to wring comedy from an old lady, and an opportunity for Bullock to do a silly dance. Everything that follows from this point is similarly slipshod, until the movie limps to a sad, lame, stupid conclusion.

Two small moments that shine involve roles so small that they're almost cameos -- The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi as an editor summarily fired by Bullock, and Oscar Nuñez of The Office as an unlikely stripper at an impromptu bachelorette party. As with the presence of Reynolds, both actors elevate the slim material briefly, but they can't save a movie as poorly executed as this one.

[My seatmate for the screening, Mike Russell, shares his views in the Oregonian, kicking off with an observation that I chose to leave out of this review because I was already pretty wordy. But just so I can say, "Oh yeah, and this, too" -- read his review here.]