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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The IMAX Experience
By Scott Mendelson
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen represents a shocking amount of effort and skill going into a product of little entertainment value and even less significance. The plot is both insanely complicated and absolutely beside the point. The filmcontains a full middle act where nothing occurs. Director Michael Bay keeps the focus on the human characters while giving them almost nothing interesting to say. While there is a token amount of increased robot on robot fighting this time around, it is so randomly edited and the characters are so poorly defined, that we never know who is fighting.
The three most annoying characters in the first film, John Tuturro, Kevin Dunn and Jule White, provide the sole entertainment this time around. Sam's climactic scenes with his parents provide the only genuine emotional content. Megan Fox returns as Shia's girlfriend, bringing new meaning to the term 'token love interest'. The army is relatively bland, existing only to get massacred at every given opportunity. For someone who rants about how much he loves the military and how good he makes them look onscreen, Michael Bay sure loves showing our fighting men and women getting slaughtered .
And the only remotely interesting robot, Optimus Prime, has far less screen time, giving the spotlight instead to Mudflap and Skids (both voiced by Tom Kenny), two bickering robots who look like monkeys, talk in the most stereotypical Ebonics jive possible, and apparently can't read. To say that these two are the most astonishingly racist caricatures that I've ever seen in a mainstream motion picture would be an understatement. The rest of the robots make little impression. Starscream is once again a vehicle for abuse. The Devestator is a speechless giant of a robot, voiced by Frank Welker (the cartoon voice of Megatron).
What of the robot action? Well, there are two genuinely stunning bits, both shot on IMAX film (fair warning, there are about ten minutes of IMAX scenes in this film). The highlight of the film occurs at the hour mark, as Optimus Prime faces off against a pointlessly resurrected Megatron and two other Decepticons in a forest. In IMAX, the fighting robots are apparently shown to scale, and the richness of the visuals, plus the overall coherency of the fight, makes this a tour de force sequence. The only other action scene of note is the arrival of the Devestator, as he shows up in Egypt during the finale and proceeds to suck everything in sight into his giant robot mouth. The rest of the action is either impossible to follow and comprehend, or the action is overly comprised of military men shooting at offscreen targets.
Sam is saddled with a completely unnecessary college roommate, who inexplicably tags along. The comparative absence of Optimus Prime leaves the film hollow, since he was the only robot who had any kind of dramatic impact and/or character (think of it as a Batman film where Batman was sidelined). To be fair, the humans are much less campy and overtly comical this time around, but now the robots are completely 'off the wall zany', which again robs the film of any drama. And what little IMAX footage the film contains is so stunningly rich and visually gorgeous that it makes the surrounding moments look cheap and ugly in comparison.
I don't know why I thought this film would be any better than the original Transformers. I'd imagine that the many critics who inexplicably gave the original Transformers a pass will now question their tolerance of that equally terrible film. We may not have gotten the Transformers sequel we wanted, but we got the one we deserved.
'YEAR ONE'
BLACK DAMNATION
By Sean Chavel
Obviously Year One is a buddy movie in loincloth. The two buddies are played by Jack Black and Michael Cera. If you know these two actors well than you can make that mismatched buddies. What makes these two similar is that their characters Zed and Oh, respectively, are both outcast from their tribe within a few minutes into the movie. The former a failed hunter and the latter a feeble gatherer and both a nuisance to all, especially to a beefcake hunter named Marlak within the tribe. Zed and Oh cower in his presence as if they're ceaselessly afraid of getting bitch-slapped by him although Marlak is probably capable of doing much worse harm.
The first half of the movie roams around in unspectacular forests and deserts, while the second half is located in the city of Sodom amidst chintzy sets where our boys Zed and Oh hope to bathe in sin. Along the way there are slave auction jokes, edge of the world jokes, circumcision jokes and a gag on a horse cart ride involving our characters to barf because… they are going way too fast. As much as it sounds like that the movie is making fun of people way back when, you know the book of "Genesis" far back, but it is making fun of people of today: a couple thousand years later - the movie is saying - and we still have the same pettiness and selfish desires.
Of course that is underlined by the fact that Jack Black and Michael Cera behave in totally contemporary terms. What these boys want is simple. Juno Temple and June Diane Raphael are delicious babes who play Maya and Eema, both of them share the practical desire for men who can hunt and provide for them, but lazy Zed and inept Oh don't fit that bill. Jack Black is the same numbskull from "Tenacious D" and Michael Cera is still the gawky boy from "Juno." The boys make the kind of verbal faux pas you hear typically in 21st century nightclubs.
The script also makes fun of vernacular when Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd, in a brief appearance), two of several Biblical characters to make way into this story, use the insult word "suck" and then discuss the core origins of the word. More irreverent humor is demonstrated when Hank Azaria presents his whack-job interpretation of Abraham the prophet who's so giddy about circumcision that it must be celebrated with afterwards wine and sponge-cake. His son Isaac is played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse who like Cera was another "Superbad" alum, and here, another weakling dork trying to not get stomped on by the hulk-men rivals around him.
Due to its setting in Sodom you can of course depend on offhand sodomy jokes -none of them are memorable - but you can exclude any visual gags on sodomy. For bawdy sexual humor, Oh has to oil and rub the hairy chest of a high priest (Oliver Platt, plump as ever), and when a sexy wench simulates fellatio on a banana Zed responds by nibbling suggestively on a beef stick.
What's less appetizing is its in-your-face gross jokes. The less said about bodily fluids the better yet it must be said that director Harold Ramis ("Caddyshack," "Groundhog Day") likes to go in for the crass close-up. What he never goes for at any point of the movie is any shot that is remotely visually sensual - his shoddy work on this film makes Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part I" look rapturous in comparison. The blah made-for-cable-like cinematography is credited to Alar Kivilo.
If "Year One" elicits you to have three or four shameless big laughs then it also has twice as many cringe-worthy moments, but as a normal hormonal male in the audience I was able to get behind and cheer for Jack Black to "save the virgins!" Michael Cera is the same shy mope he's been recycling through all his movies but when he finally breaks a virgin's chastity it gives him a sense of aggression and hostility that's eluded the actor's persona previously. Moments like this are funny, but what Ramis never gives his movie is a funny and consistent momentum, and many of his scene transitions are painfully choppy. "Year One" isn't entirely witless but it is ostensibly graceless and you come out of it thinking you saw half of a good idea played out.
My Life In Ruins
By Rei Nishimoto
The flood of summer releases has been dominated by sci-fi remakes, horror films and comedies, which have been heavily hyped to pull in audiences. My Life In Ruins is one of the few films that captures audiences with a story from the heart and a human touch.
The film features Nia Vardalos (also of 2002's My Big Fat Greek Wedding) playing Georgia, a Greek-American history professor who came to Athens to find her kefi (Greek for mojo). She eventually finds herself working as a professional tour guide for Pangloss Tours, as a way of finding equally eager people who shared her knowledge of Ancient Greece.
Vardalos brings warmth and sincerity to her character, playing an often uptight person who is also passionate about Greek history, which attempting to share that with others.
The film captured many breathtaking views of the ancient Greek sites. Unlike a documentary, each scene is worked in with the tour group's chaotic personality and brings a humorous touch. Director Donald Petrie managed to find a strong midpoint towards bringing both elements to the film.
Georgia finds herself with travelers who are only interested in lounging at the famous Greek beaches and shopping more than seeing the famous heritage sites she knows very well. Due to her refusal to adapt to the group, she earns unfavorable ratings. This leads to her boss (played by Brenice Stegers) to cut a deal with another tour guide, Nico (played by British comedian Alistair McGowan) to force her to quit with his obnoxious methods and backstabbing ways.
Georgia is stuck with a tour bus without working air conditioning, accommodations with the crummiest hotels Greece had to offer, and was paired with a bus driver with a heavy beard and was thought to be a mute named Procopi "Poupi" Kakas (played by Greek actor Alexis Georgoulis).
Nico is following the same route, but often unleashes sets of mean pranks such as buying the group ice cream on a hot day and dinner at the Hard Rock Café. This pushes Georgia to her breaking point, often thinking about abandoning the tour and her life in Greece.
Georgia attempts to write a letter of resignation from the hotel, which that also goes sour. Vardalos' real life husband, actor Ian Gomez, plays the hotel clerk that mails her letter, or attempts to do so.
Georgia's tour group consists of a diverse yet somewhat unruly group of loudmouthed Americans (Rachel Dratch and Harland Williams), beer drinking Australians with their odd accents (Simon Gleeson and Natalie O'Donnell), the stuffy Brits (Ian Ogilvy and Caroline Goodall) and their sullen teenage daughter (Sophie Stuckey), a couple of divorced and looking-for-action Senoritas (Maria Botto and Maria Adanez), a kleptomaniac senior citizen and her mute husband (Sheila Bernette and Ralph Nossek), a young adult looking for action (Jareb Dauplaise) and a workaholic, cell phone addicted IHOP sales rep (played by Brian Palermo).
The group member who stood out amongst the crowd was Irv (played by Richard Dreyfuss), an elderly man who loved to crack a joke or pull a gag for every occasion, especially when Georgia's lectures begin to pull the group down. But after learning Irv just lost his wife, the two characters learn more about each other and let their guards down. Dreyfuss' interaction with Vardalos throughout the film, brought out a human touch to the film. Irv represented a character that audiences could easily relate to, and was made relatable to anyone on many levels.
Each of the group members bring their own unique personalities to the film. While Georgia is battling Irv over her uptight behavior, her kind hearted nature comes across in the film, whether it is getting the rash behavior of the Americans over souvenirs, making the young British girl happy while her parents argued, or simply stealing the air conditioner from the other group's bus.
The film's heart is found with the interaction between Georgia and Poupi, as the two characters gradually discover their mutual attraction for one another. This part of the film is also interwoven as the tour group encourages her towards Poupi, as the romance gradually builds up.
This film is not the over hyped, box office breaking movie of the summer. Instead this film is for audiences that miss stories with human emotions and cinematography that captures real things left in this world. My Life In Ruins is something that will be touching audiences for a long while.
Blood: The Last Vampire
By Jonathan Weichsel
The original Blood: The Last Vampire was a pretty good anime film that was released in 2000 and went on to gain a worldwide cult following through a series of mangas, light novels, an anime television series, and a video game. I call the original film 'pretty good' because while it did succeed in creating an atmosphere of excitement and suspense, it was emotionally flat.
The live action remake, filmed in Japan with a Japanese crew, but directed by French director Chris Nahon, improves on the original, fixing its flaws while upholding its integrity as a fun action/suspense flick.
Blood is about a four hundred year old half-human half-vampire named Saya who on the outside looks like a shy, beautiful, angst-ridden sixteen year old girl. Saya works for a mysterious American run organization, hunting and killing vampires with nothing but her agility and a double edged Samurai sword.
The film takes place at the height of the Vietnam War, when Americans set up military basses in Japan from which they could organize attacks. The organization sends Saya undercover as a student at a school for American children living on the army base, because vampires have infiltrated the school, and are posing as students. The other students at the school discriminate against Saya because she is Japanese. They tease and torment her, and even some faculty questions her right to attend the school. Saya at first doesn't care what happens to the other students, but when the beautiful daughter of the base's General befriends Saya, she suddenly feels responsible for the girl's protection, as well as the eradication of the vampires.
If this all sounds like a commentary of Japanese-American relations, that's because it is. The Japanese have a long history of using genre films to explore their political situations, from Godzilla to Mothra. Blood does a good job portraying the complexities of a situation where Japan has been recently defeated by the US, is being used by the US, but is also dependant on the US.
Saya's emotional subplot involves her origins. Saya was born to a human father and a vampire mother. As a child she struggled whether to embrace her human half or her vampire half. She is so adamant on killing vampires because Kato, the man who raised her, was killed by a hoard of ninjas at the behest of the leader of the vampires, Onigen.
The film is at its best when it simply allows itself to be Japanese. Americans want their films to be completely logical and answer every small question, such as, why can this character change shape? Or why can this character fly though the air? The Japanese don't care about these questions, and simply want their films to be full of flying characters, shape shifters, and monsters, without any scientific explanations. Parts of Blood are like this, but there are other parts that get bogged down in explanations, as if the film is trying to have it both ways, playing to an American and a Japanese audience.
The two best action sequences are the fight between Kato and the ninjas, and the wild, expressionistic confrontation at the end between Saya and Onigen.
The Kato-ninja square off is full of great martial arts moves, and features characters running up trees just like in some of the older martial arts flicks. The final fight between Saya and Onigen is dreamlike, and recalls Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
Unfortunately, the film is also full of terribly shot and edited chase sequences, and some CGI that makes the movies they show Saturday nights on Sci-fi look like they were rendered by Industrial Lights and Magic. I know it is impressive to see any CGI at all in a Japanese movie, but still, it does nothing but distance you from the story.
Blood: The Last Vampire is opening in July. The film is in English and in Japanese with English subtitles.
'THE HANGOVER'
VEGAS SIN
By Sean Chavel
Here's a movie that will become qualified viewing before-and-after trips to Vegas for an eternity, as well as one that will become an around the clock fraternity broadcast at college campuses everywhere. The Hangover liberates its characters in a classic convertible to have a hells-on-fire bachelor party in the ultimate GQ high-roller Mecca - the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The joke is this four-man crew doesn't look cool enough to have a wild-on night of untamed debauchery. Beyond their estimation and ours, somehow they awake to remnants of the pandemonium they spurred and they don't remember a goddamn thing.
Blame it on the roofies. Upon rude awakening, there is a baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom and a chicken. The chicken is never explained. Those are some of the more digestible discoveries these guys will have compared to the helter-skelter shock of what else awaits them. A missing tooth? A run-in with Mike Tyson? A naked Asian Mafioso in their trunk? Kids taser-gunning them? The greater problem is that groom-to-be Doug (Justin Bartha) is missing and his wedding is in two days.
Of the crew, Phil (Bradley Cooper) is the one cool enough to seem like he'd know how to have a wild time. He is the designated leader when it comes to retracing the steps of the previous night. Stu (Ed Helms) is the obligatory uptight dork with a fascist girlfriend back home who hysterically has to lie to her that they're "wine-tasting in Napa Valley," who is reminded by returning strangers that he was the party-guy last night. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is the hideously ungroomed, anti-social, and borderline personality disorder member of the quartet - he is not allowed within 100 feet of a school according to a restraining order.
Who knows why anybody in the audience would believe that these four opposites are actually friends (Phil seems like he should be partying at the sex-swingers preferred yacht club in Miami Beach), but what it comes down to is that the incidents are funnier than the actual characters. Incidents that include revisits to wedding chapels, the emergency room, to Mike Tyson's mansion, to a desolate desert site that looks like an ominous restaging of DeNiro and Pesci in "Casino." The homage to the casino scene in "Rain Man" is a howl, and cinephiles can now count Martin Scorsese and Barry Levinson as visual references that writer-director Todd Phillips ("Old School," "Starsky & Hutch") is borrowing from.
The characters have their "arcs" but their starting points are strictly behaving to Hollywood playbook standards. Stu is an overly rationalizing drag who frets over every new discovery of what happened (embrace the decadence, man!), and Alan is the kind of creepy guy you'd ditch before you'd let him hang out with you (you half expect cockroaches to crawl out of that jungle mangle beard of his). These two in particular are more types than actual people. The female characters are mostly passive - which in a male-buddy comedy is pardoned - with Heather Graham ("Boogie Nights" and now "The Hangover" belong on Mr.Skin.com) as the ultimate hanger-on passive female.
But the sense of discovery, the uncovering of that's-what-really-happened is the true appeal of "The Hangover," which has three guys playing headache-induced detectives in search of the groom that they might have been responsible for rendering inoperative. For all you dingdongs that bolt from the theater the moment the end credits come on, please hold on. The best part of the movie is a still photomontage that explains everything that happened during the bachelor party. The photomontage technique hasn't worked this well since "GoodFellas."