Bay Hasn't 'Fallen' This Time

by Brett Parker

So here’s my deal: I was a huge fan of Transformers growing up. My brother and I used to collect all the action figures and we’d always plop in front of the TV every afternoon to watch their cartoon adventures. On an intellectual level, it’s perhaps a preposterous concept to have robots that transform into various vehicles battle each other on the principal that good and evil must endlessly battle each other, but there was an intoxicating excitement to be held in our childlike hearts whenever a new episode of the series graced the television screen. To this day, I’m still thrilled by the animated movie from 1986. It’s still kind of traumatizing to watch Optimus Prime take those crucial laser beams to the chest.

In 2007, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg teamed up to make a live-action Transformers movie and the result was an adrenaline-fueled blockbuster adventure that displayed some of the most impressive special effects work I’ve ever seen. The Transformers were brought to such grand and vivid life, I was in awe of how a live-action production could do full justice to their robotic bodies. If the film had any flaws, it was to be found in its lightweight human story. It wasn’t easy watching Shia LaBeouf, an actor of considerable wit and coolness, being branded as a pathetic dweeb and ultra-sexpot Megan Fox was way too sensual to simply be a high-school love interest. She seemed more appropriate as a femme fatale in a film noir. She and LaBeouf seemed like such a mismatch. Nonetheless, Transformers delivered the action goods; it honored fond memories of the cartoon series and wonderfully displayed the underrated and competent talents of director Michael Bay.

As I prepared to catch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the current sequel in the franchise, I discovered an overwhelming amount of negative feedback from the film’s reviews. It currently holds a 21% “rotten” reading on Rottentomatoes.com and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone thinks the film “has a shot at the title Worst Film of the Decade.” I’ve seen the sequel for myself, and I must say that Travers needs to chill the hell out. Revenge of the Fallen is an eye-popping, slam-bang summer entertainment that delivers exactly what it promises: a whole lot of action, humor, sexiness, and dazzling special effects. It’s pretty much on the same level as the first film, although I give the sequel more of an edge for showing more mastery with its human plotting. If this is indeed the “Worst Film of the Decade,” then we my friends have had a monumentally incredible decade of cinema.

The film picks up some time after plucky teenager Sam Whitwicky (LaBeouf) and his love interest Mikaela Barnes (Fox) survived an alien robot battle between the Good Autobots and the Evil Decepticons. Trying to resume a normal life, Sam prepares to head off to college while maintaining a long-distance relationship with Mikaela and his faithful Transformer Bumblebee, who doubles as his hot Camero. Meanwhile, Major Lennex (Josh Duhamel) leads a U.S. task force that enables the Autobots to battle and dispose of any remaining Decepticons still roaming the planet. The Autobots’ are very successful in their efforts, leading the government to believe if the robots should remain on the planet or not.

Yet the Decepticons don’t stay down for very long. The defeated Megatron is resurrected by his ally Starscream and is brought before an ancient Decepticon leader named the Fallen who wishes to assault Earth with full force. Word of this attack makes its way back to the Autobots who realize that Sam may hold the key to defeating the Decepticons and saving the world. This is where the plot gets super-complicated, so I’ll only reveal that this leads the main characters to Egypt where they discover secrets about the Transformers’ past and a violent showdown erupts across the deserts and pyramids of the ancient landscape.

Since the first film got most of the franchise’s exposition out of the way, Revenge of the Fallen becomes one of those sequels that dives head-first into its action and doesn’t let up. The film rolls out more impressive-looking Transformers than the first film and attempts to top the first installment in the action sequence department. I think it succeeds in that aspect. If you admire good special effects, then it’ll be ultra hard to resist the technical artistry of the Transformers this time out, especially as they slam and battle each other way harder than the first film. Picture the climax of the first film taking up half of this film’s screen time.

I was also extremely pleased to find myself enjoying the human story way more than the last time around. Shia LaBeouf is thankfully a lot less Screech this time and refreshingly more Lenny Bruce. Almost everything he says within the film’s first hour is comic gold (I liked how he refers to the hoodie he wore in the first film as his “Super Bowl jersey”). And even though the camera lingers heavily on Megan Fox’s smoldering beauty, she ends up bringing a lot more warmth and sincerity to her role than last time. I also found myself enjoying Sam’s college life which is depicted not as real life, but as a heightened Hollywood sitcom. Sam’s roommate and professor are made to be bizarre caricatures, his mother has a deranged episode with “special brownies,” and a frat party is made to resemble the club scene from Bad Boys. This would seem cheap and offensive in most films, but there’s a fun comic charm to it in this one.

When it comes to cinema, there are some aspects in which you either see the glass half full or half empty. That is certainly the case with Michael Bay’s films. Most see them as cheap action thrills gone offensively berserk, yet there are some who see adrenaline-fueled movie environments basked in breezy excitement. The Criterion Edition of Armageddon features a rather insightful essay by Jeanine Basinger that will honestly make you reevaluate Bay’s techniques in a new light. She describes him as “a master of movement, light, color, and shape” who wonderfully exemplifies “fast cutting, impressive special effects, and a minimum of exposition.” She may be right, for Bay is certainly not the soulless commercial monster moviegoers make him out to be. There is certainly a distinctive elegance and heightened drama to be found in all his films. He’s almost like Spielberg in the way he finds fluid camera movements to uniquely convey time and space while displaying stories that, when you think about it, play on grand cinematic emotions. Sure, his film universes may be cynical, sexist, and overflowing with testosterone, but like great filmmakers, he makes us feel like these universes truly matter. There’s an all or nothing feel to his work. While he undeniably indulges in fast-paced editing, it only heightens the anxiety and intensity of his action scenarios. It’s certainly not as offensive as its been in more recent and inferior action flicks.

No matter what you think of Bay, there is no denying that he is the perfect fit for the Transformers franchise. He has a gift for making cheap action scenarios feel more grand and dramatic than they probably deserve to be, and this gift is certainly welcome in a plot where giant robots pound on each other endlessly. I’ve always suspected that the Transformers films are in fact Bay’s most autobiographical films. I can picture the young Michael Bay being a lot like Sam Whitwicky, an outcast who is critical of suburban normalcy and yearns for the fantastical. As Sam turns his back on college life to run off into a grand adventure with hot babes and hot cars, we can sense Bay having such daydreams in his youth.

Despite my praise, Revenge of the Fallen does in fact earn some of the more negative criticisms I’ve read about the film. The film’s third act does grow rather lengthy as the battles between the robots seem to go on forever. Despite his fast cutting, Bay has always had a problem with length and prolonged action scenes. If he trimmed his action sequences down to half their length, his films would probably feel more effective. Bay also has a reputation for cruising past important plot points, leaving the audience confused about the story. That is strongly felt this time, for the Transformers mythology carries so many characters and ancient subplots that it gets confusing keeping track of which robots are which and just what in god’s name is going down in Egypt.

Yet these are only minor complaints. Revenge of the Fallen is definitely not high art, but I don’t understand why critics are spitting venom at the film. It wants nothing more than to be a roller-coaster ride of action fun, so why is it being condemned for doing so? Besides its length and coherence, the film is being criticized for its lack of humanity and emotions. To that I say, when you’re dealing with giant robots, how much humanity and emotions do you actually expect? All you can really ask for is eye candy, big laughs, and endless thrills. These are things that Michael Bay certainly knows how to deliver.

To read Jeanine Basinger's Criterion essay on Armageddon in its entirety, check out http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/48

A Fun Ride on 'Pelham 1 2 3'

by Brett Parker

A group of armed madmen seize control of a New York subway and demand a high-priced ransom or else they’ll murder every passenger on the train. That’s the set-up up for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a remake of the 1974 thriller, and let’s face it, we’ve dealt with a million cinematic scenarios just like this one before. While every genre of film has the ability to surprise, the Hostage movie really does feel like an exhausted premise. It seems like Spike Lee retired the prize with Inside Man.

Yet you shouldn’t count this Hollywood remake out just yet. With the seasoned Tony Scott behind the camera, you can expect plenty of adrenaline and testosterone no matter what kind of plot he’s taking on. And he really doesn’t disappoint this time; he pumps plenty of juice and relevance into this routine material while basking it in his trademark frantic energy. It also helps matters that Denzel Washington and John Travolta, who can be the most compelling of movie stars, take standard roles and bring unexpected angles and weight to them with surprising conviction.

The film opens on a seemingly ordinary day for the New York Transit System. We see the Subway control center where Transit workers can monitor the activity of all trains on a giant computer. Walter Garber (Washington) is working dispatch at the center and notices that the Pelham 1 2 3 train is not following its scheduled path. The computer identifies that it’s veering off into different directions and separating from attached subway cars. Garber radios the train to find out from Motorman Jerry (Gary Basaraba) what’s going on, but instead he hears the threatening voice of a man who calls himself Ryder (Travolta). “This is the guy who’s gonna give the city a run for its money!” he declares with a madman’s glee.

It is discovered that Ryder is the leader of a gang of thugs who’ve forced their way onto the train with guns and taken hostages. They have the subway car stopped in an isolated section of the underground (where internet and phone signals can’t reach) and demand millions of dollars from the city of New York. If the ransom is not delivered within one hour, Ryder will kill a passenger for “every minute it’s late.” The Mayor (James Gandolfini) catches word of this and races to get the ransom paid with the assistance of the NYPD. Meanwhile, Ryder and Garber keep each other in check over the transit radio waves as they try to figure each other out while discovering the startling things they have in common.

Over the past few years, it seems that Tony Scott has really indulged in a frantic style of editing that shows no mercy for subtlety. This style skewered the competence of Man on Fire yet complemented the deranged nature of Domino. With Déjà vu, Scott’s last outing with Washington, he seemed to find an appropriate balance between his kinetic pacing and attentive scenes of peculiar character development. Pelham 1 2 3 further perfects this delicate balance, for Scott has shown he knows when to speed things up and when to slow down for more dramatic moments. His high plot velocity is welcomed this time because it allows the viewer to feel the compressed anxiety of the ransom timeline and the unrelenting tension of a hostage situation. He even puts his playful use of title cards to good use as he maps out the times and locations of this pot-boiling situation. He even adds some gratuitous action excitement by inducing hard-hitting car crashes into the plot as well as a midtown standoff that displays two criminals who really don’t want to go back to prison. In such standard cinematic territory, jolts like these are welcomed with open arms.

In his earlier works, Scott had a knack for expressing peculiar character attention in tough guy action scenarios. Top Gun, for example, was just as interested in the pilot’s egos as it was the aerial photography. Plus most people cherish his cult classic True Romance for its patient scenes of colorful dialogue. What makes his Pelham 1 2 3 remake so special is the way it develops the personalities of Garber and Ryder, savoring their personal flaws and moral ambiguities. The screenplay by Brian Helgeland (the Oscar winner for L.A. Confidential) doesn’t paint them as Good-Evil counterparts but shows how they are both linked by similar shortcomings and were deeply affected by shady details from their pasts. By observing these two, the movie becomes a sly meditation on the moral boundaries we’re willing to cross for personal gain. Both Garber and Ryder have violated serious rules but felt they were justified in seeking what they felt they deserved. These complications spare the dialogue from being less mundane and more unique on ideas of right and wrong.

It’s kind of surprising to see Washington and Travolta work so well in these familiar roles, since we’d expect them to work better the other way around. Washington can display boiling rage like no other while Travolta has a great talent for playing kind everymen. We almost wonder if this movie would work slightly better if these two actors switched roles. But maybe that would’ve been a tad predictable, for most of the film’s fun comes in watching them put their own stamp on unexpected archetypes. Washington put on weight and dialed down his natural smoothness to wonderfully convince us he is a troubled everyman. As an actor who usually walks with confidence through action plots, its fun to watch him play a normal bystander in over his head. Travolta turns his tics and intensity up to the absolute max to channel the maddening rage of his wounded villain. He paints Ryder not so much as mindless evil but a flawed man who was pushed beyond his absolute breaking point and is out for thoughtfully justified revenge. It’s really interesting when you reflect on the presumed journey from who his character was to what he’s become. It’s one of his more convincing villainous turns.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 wisely falls somewhere between a fun action vehicle and a timely thriller of relevance. While it never transcends the level of a fun adrenaline ride, it does evoke some interesting thoughts on our times with details concerning Wall Street and a Bloomberg-like Mayor (Gandolfini has great fun with the role…as so do we). Of course, this is not high concept originality, but in a summer movie season, it’s nice to see a skilled thriller with surprisingly fun performances and more brains in its head than initially anticipated.

A Con Caper in Full 'Bloom'

by Brett Parker

Rian Johnson is a filmmaker who’s been making fun and fascinating films with the device of merging unlikely genres together. His first feature, Brick, was a mix between film noir mystery and the teen angst picture. Now he’s made The Brothers Bloom which is a gorgeous and energetic meeting between a con artist caper and a romantic comedy. While these cinematic cocktails seemingly appear to be clever stunts, Johnson wisely brings emotional flourishes to his material, giving us reasons to actually care about these characters. The Brothers Bloom is a wonderful example of this, making for a con game that is funny, romantic, and surprisingly poignant.

The film centers on a pair of “gentlemen thieves” named Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody). The duo started life as orphaned brothers who bounced around from foster family to foster family. To pass the time, they decided to conduct confidence schemes to swindle the simpletons around them and rake in the benefits. Over time, a routine formed where Stephen would script out elaborate psychological and theatrical con games using Bloom as his main point man. With the assistance of the lethal and muted Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), the boys build an underground reputation as the best con men in the world. But Bloom grows weary of such a fabricated lifestyle and dreams of one day living a real life with a real woman to love.

Bloom may have found what he’s looking for in Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a wealthy eccentric Stephen has marked for their latest scam. Penelope is a heiress who has lost her family and lives out her privileged existence in loneliness. Although she is quirky and callow, Bloom identifies with her isolated playfulness and he begins to fall deeply in love with her. This grows complicated as Stephen begins the play against her, which includes smuggling an antique book, a trip to Mexico, explosives, and a mysterious Belgian curator (Robbie Coltrane). Bloom wants so desperately to run off with Penelope towards a normal life, but in a con game where nothing is what it seems and twists reveal themselves on top of twists, normalcy feels like the last thing that can be obtained.

As far as con movies go, this plot has the usual grandeur of twist, turns, and slight-of-hand tactics that keep revealing depths upon depths of hidden agendas. Plots like these can be exhausting, but The Brothers Bloom pumps its structure with such style and emotion that we have a great time with these swindles. The film is certainly gorgeous to look at, whisking us away to exotic locales and basking the cast in elegant fashions this side of To Catch A Thief. Plus the twists are so effective because most of the time they are dictated by the emotional needs of the characters. The motivations behind most of the cons have little to do with financial gain but show the characters trying to make someone they care about truly happy. There’s a hilarious scene where the brothers botch a fake death act in order to spare Penelope from future emotional pain (the payoff is priceless) and Stephen’s final con is deeply touching and tragic in what it implies about his relationship with Bloom.

This gamesmanship is elevated by the fact that there’s a surprisingly touching romance baking beneath the deceptive plotting. Bloom and Penelope grow a deep affection for each other, for they both understand each other’s loneliness and unconventional skills as they help liberate each other towards true happiness. Brody and Weisz really anchor the film with their emotions, for their yearnings and emotional bruises can be felt throughout the film. I’m reminded that the best con movies show humanity sneaking in through the slickness. The Sting, for all its flash and charms, had its best moment when a lonely Robert Redford revealed his late night yearning for a waitress he liked. Ocean’s Eleven, if you peel away its style and coolness, is essentially the story of a romantic on a quest to win back his ex-wife. If your head can’t keep up with a cinematic con game, it’s important that your heart still has something to identify with.

Cinematic con capers are so much fun to watch because most of these plots can be seen as clever metaphors for the very nature of filmmaking and acting itself. Con games, when you think about it, require the same tools and formalities as movies themselves: costumes, set pieces, scripts, pyrotechnics, props, and most importantly, good performances. The Brothers Bloom certainly exemplifies this: Stephen resembles an enthusiastic writer-director-actor who wants to create a compelling story that hooks people on an emotional level while raking in millions for his efforts. He recruits a special effects technician (Bang Bang) and his favorite leading star (Bloom) to assist him and even throws an elaborate after-party for all the people that helped in his scheme. Bloom has an interesting fit into this angle: he’s the in-demand actor who’s bored with his profession and seeks a real life away from the spotlight. He wants to settle down and have a normal relationship, but so demanding is his career that normal romances are hard to conduct.

The Brothers Bloom is further proof that Rian Johnson is one his way to becoming one of the most fun and exhilarating filmmakers of our time. He’s like Wes Anderson in the way he creates off-beat and quirky landscapes filled with peculiar characters, fashions, and music. Like Brick, this film plays off of classical Hollywood themes in a highly-creative cinematic universe that exists in its own time. With two films so far, he’s proving to be quite a hand at smart dialogue, backhanded humor, literary references, and slick moods. I can’t wait to see the cinematic territory this man takes us to in the future.

It’s rare nowadays to find a film that possesses both a grand style and a grand heart, making The Brothers Bloom a rare triumph to cherish. It’s not everyday a film seduces you with gloss then tugs you at the heartstrings. While some of the plot complications can get dizzying and wacky, it’s the film’s damaged heart that keeps it on course to being one of the best films of the year.

BY THE WAY: There seems to be some confusion as to why the main characters are referred to as the Brothers Bloom when one of them has the first name of Bloom itself. The movie never really sheds light on this. My theory is that since the brothers are orphans and presumably never had a last name of their own, the child Bloom probably thought it’d be amusing to call himself Bloom Bloom. Stephen, ever the loyal brother, followed suit. That’s the best I can come up with. Anyone have anything better?

A Fun Time Getting 'Lost'

by Brett Parker

Land of the Lost is a big-screen update of a 1970s Saturday morning TV show now noted for its cheesy special effects. What is so peculiar about this update is how in a time of state-of-the-art CGI breakthroughs, the film’s special effects attempts to recapture the innocent cheesiness of the original show. By doing this, the film becomes an unexpected spoof of effects-ridden event films in which actors blue screen their way through adventure fantasies. This film is out to celebrate the ridiculousness of those kinds of blockbusters, and who better to celebrate ridiculousness than Will Ferrell?

Ferrell stars as Rick Marshall, a bumbling scientist who tries to make a name for himself by proving that he can find time portals to other dimensions. Marshall sabotages his whole plan, however, after conducting a disastrous interview on The Today Show with Matt Lauer. Lauer’s no-nonsense questioning highlights the lunacy in Marshall’s methods and he is made to look like a complete fool. The interview ends with Lauer blasting Marshall with a fire extinguisher. This interview becomes the most notoriously hilarious web clip on the internet, tarnishing Marshall’s reputation and making it impossible for him to get funding for his experiments.

One day, Marshall receives unexpected support from a beautiful scientist named Holly (Anna Friel) who convinces him to test out a portal device in a nearby tourist cave. With the assistance of an obnoxious tour guide named Will (Danny McBride), the scientists take a ride down the cave stream and the device transports all three of them to a strange and decidedly goofy alternate dimension. What a strange place this is. It resembles a prehistoric landscape, with missing links and dinosaurs, yet missing objects and buildings from the modern world find their way to this place. Dinosaurs attack an ice cream truck. A motel with a swimming pool is found in the middle of a desert. A race of lizard-men named Sleestaks look to wreak havoc and some of them even take time to fornicate with each other. The trio must battle all of these challenges as they stumble about trying to find their way home.

Whenever we watch an effects-heavy popcorn film, we apply suspension of disbelief to distract from the basic absurdities than can be sensed in watching special effect sequences. Moviegoers are smart and can sense when they are looking at screen animation and blue screen work in front of them, but if the actors are convincing and the effects are efficient, they will go with the flow and seek cinematic enjoyment. Land of the Lost purposely exploits these peculiar absurdities and uses them to great comic effect. Instead of sleek and convincing effects, the filmmakers have allowed a degree of fakeness to sneak into the imagery and bring an intended goofiness to the film’s look. The Sleestaks bodies have the obvious look of rubber suits while the CGI look of the dinosaurs is highly cartoonish. This comedy allows us to see how hilariously awful it would be if movies like Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings fell into amateurish and incompetent hands.

That’s not to say Land of the Lost is an amateurish and incompetent film. Director Brad Silberling (Casper, A Serious of Unfortunate Events) has grown a talent for creating fantasy landscapes of compelling whimsy and he doesn’t come up short on that quality this time around. Sure, this movie may revel in juvenile silliness, but it’s good-looking and fun juvenile silliness. I found myself really loving the loud randomness of the film’s production design, which throws everything at us from old Cadillacs to dinosaur nests. Like the Land of Oz or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, this is truly a cinematic landscape of childlike imagination you won’t soon forget.

Now I use the word childlike to describe the film’s look while the content, mind you, is a completely different story. I once wrote that Will Ferrell is pushing “deeper into a comic abyss, one that could cause his movies to snap from reality and descend fully into madness.” In that sense, Land of the Lost pretty much needs a straight jacket. While Ferrell constantly gets away with raunchy buffoonery in simple comedies, I think it’s hilarious that he tries to pull such insane shenanigans in a big-budget effects film based on a children’s television show. While the film’s advertising makes this look like a kid-friendly vehicle, be warned that this is the complete opposite. Get ready for Ferrell drowning himself in dinosaur urine, lizard people having sex, an ape-man who gropes both men and women, and, I kid you not, a scene where Ferrell and McBride get stoned with a missing link while chewing on a giant lobster.

Sure, Land of the Lost is stupid, cheesy, and could’ve been a powerhouse epic if made seriously, but I’m truly in awe of its comic audacity and truly in love with its creative look. If you watch episodes of the old TV show, you could spot the obviousness of the fake backgrounds and the stitching in the creature suits. I think it’s pretty hysterical that the film sets out to honor and retain that kind of spirit. Both moviegoers and critics have reacted negatively to this flick mainly due to Ferrell’s relentless brand of humor. To them I say, have you never seen a Will Ferrell comedy before? Did you seriously not see insanity like this coming? Do you think a deranged comedian like Ferrell could look at a dinosaur and not bring up its bathroom functions?