5th Monday Ugh: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Actual movie quote: "I am directly beneath the enemy scrotum!"

It's a fifth Monday, and you know what that means, don't you? It means instead of reviewing some great work (as is heavily implied by the name of the blog), I will instead be addressing something which affects us all: bad movies. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is my least favorite film. (And, yes, I've talked about this once before.) I'm not saying it is the worst movie ever made, I'm saying that I personally despise it with such tremendous passion that these feelings have come all the way around again, and I find it bizarrely irresistible. Drake Lloyd, director of the 1990 horror b-movie Troll 2, once said something to the effect of, "Having people tell me this is the worst movie they've ever seen is the same as them saying it's the best movie they've ever seen." Obviously, I don't think Transformers 2 is so bad that it has magically become the best film ever made, but I must concede, when I'm in the mood to be angry, I enjoy watching Transformers 2.

Typically on this blog, I try to organize my thoughts in a way that makes sense and is accessible to the reader, but I'm going to make an exception today. :) Bay expects his audience to sit through complete confusion, and he's incredibly rich. Perhaps lack of cohesion is precisely what this blog needs to propel it forward to absolute fame. So here is my rant, which should be read aloud and with as much gusto as you can gather:

There are THREE scenes in which something is humping something else. Two are dogs ("No dominating Franky!"), and one is a small robot. One of these humping scenes is a brief breakaway shot entirely unconnected to any other action or dialogue in the film. It hopes only to appease our appetite for random stimuli. 

I have seen this movie a number of times, but only in searching
for these images have I learned this little lady is apparently
named, "Alice." Good to know.

I watched in wonder and disgust, mouth slightly agape, as the two-and-a-half hour long juggernaut of a film lumbered on from one incomprehensible scene to another. The plot is about as easy to follow as Primer, but instead of showing confidence in our intelligence, the film seeks to destroy it. 

Shia's mom acts like a mental patient, but we don't know why. At Princeton (you know, the party school where everyone dresses like they just stepped off the cover of the Cosmopolitan, and no one cares about grades) she eats compacted green cubes out of bag with a marijuana sticker on it, insisting that they are normal brownies, despite her family's pleas that she stop. She then promptly tells three or four passing girls that her son's cherry was recently popped. This gem is followed by her tackling someone playing frisbee for some reason, but we are not sure why, since random violence is not a well know symptom of digesting pot. Twice during the film robots fart for our entertainment. Not one girl in the entire movie seems to weigh over a hundred-and-ten-pounds, and everyone of them has the same kind of clothes and wears their hair down. 

Robots fight, but we have no understanding of who they are or what they are doing. We cut away to a robot orbiting earth several times, but why? We cut away to some other planet where robots talk to each other about "waiting" to initiate a "plan," but we don't know where it is, or who is talking, or why. The "plan" is formless and without point A or point B. Did they end up "waiting?" Who knows! 

Let's see: Breasts? Check. Shia looking maybe not so smart? Check.
Random machinery? Check. Now just throw in someone screaming
a word or phrase repeatedly, something humping something else, and
some kind of indecipherable action, and you've got yourself the perfect
Transformers 2 tableau.

The sun is apparently going to be blown up at some point, and the only way to stop it is to bring another robot back to life, but the connection is lost to us. Some objects can bring some robots back to life, but not others. Some of these objects cannot be used without a human visiting Robot Heaven or someplace, where robots say that they are testing him. Also, they can control matter from beyond the grave sometimes. Robots have Brooklyn accents, English accents, "Gangster" accents, but we don't know why. Some of the robots are very, very stupid, but there is no explanation as to WHY ANYTHING IS HAPPENING. There are two robots named "Skids" and "Mudflap" who are insulting caricatures of African American "gangstas," that would be more at home in a closet white supremacist movie fifty years ago. 

Apparently, though they are super-advanced robots, they cannot read, nor can they think. Many robots fight in the desert, but we don't know why. They fight in a forest, in a city, near a beach, in suburbia. We don't know why. We are expected to not ask questions. Megan Fox wants to leave Shia Labeouf's character, but then she stays with him, then she wants to leave him, yet she wishes he would tell her he loves her, which he--despite being patently obsessed with her--has apparently never done. 

The characters talk rapidly, unintelligibly, repeating any line they can as often as possible. The subtitles assure as that the garbled mess we are hearing is actually made up of words. These are lines such as, "Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!", "You're my son! You're my son! You're my son!", "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!" and my personal favorite, "Stand up against the wall! Stand up against the wall! Stand up against the wall! Stand up against the wall!" Shia befriends a young man who is exactly like him in every way we can assess. The Rifftrax beg the pointed question "Doesn't this movie already have a Shia Labeouf?" 

See Shia. She Shia run. Run Shia, run.

The evil robots, whom I originally tried to keep track of by remembering that they are the ones who aren't colorful, become more colorful as the movie progresses, obliterating all hope of being distinguished. People make jokes, but we don't understand them. A professor acts godlike, Shia freaks out because he either touched something or saw something or read something, he says that Einstein was wrong, then leaves class. Do I even need to tell you that we don't know why he does this? 

We hope that by wishing as hard as we can we will be able to banish Rainn Wilson, Tom Kenny, John Turturro, and Scott McNiel from this mockery of film, but when we open our eyes, they are still in it. It goes from bad, to worse, to inexcusable, to unbelievable. You might wonder, out of all this (and so much that I have failed to mention), what was the worst thing about the movie? It's success. I bid you adieu, with the humble plea that Michael Bay's future funding be divided out equally among Shane Carruth, Joss Whedon, and Jared and Jerusha Hess.

-MA 4.29.13


PS - Can I just add this? The ENTIRE third film is devoted to creating some nonsense called a "space bridge," yet "Iron Hide" makes one in the second movie NO PROBLEM. Where are the quality assurance people??

5th Monday Ugh: Kickin It Old Skool (Movie)

What does it say about a film made in 2007
when there isn't a high resolution image
of its cover easily available online?

What can I say about 2007's "Kickin It Old Skool" that isn't said by its 2% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes?  This movie is basically a "Hot Rod" knock-off with everything good replaced by something soulless.  I'm not just saying the film is bad, it's also horribly dark, offensive, and bad-natured.  What is supposed to be a wacky, high-energy comedy leaves the viewer feeling not only bored but strangely soiled.

In "Kickin It" Justin Schumacher (Jamie Kennedy) is a child break-dancer in the 80's who hits his head while dancing and falls into a twenty-year-long coma (as one does).  As his parents are about to pull the plug he hears the song "Rockit" by Herbie Hancock, and this somehow revives him.

When he entered this coma he was twelve; when he wakes he is thirty-two.  Why then, does he act like a disturbed six-year-old?  At what point did this seem like it would be funny to anyone?  He meets up with his old dance crew, and we enter into the abyss: a mind-numbing parade of failed joke after failed joke, poking fun at everything from pornography addiction to individuals with mental disabilities.  The feeling of the film is best encapsulated in one memorable deleted scene in which a young girl misunderstands adult Justin's hand motions describing how he squeezes lemons for his lemonade stand after inexplicably asking him, "How do you squeeze the lemons?" (which has to be the worst joke set-up in history).  She calls him a perv, flips him off, and says venomously, "F*** you!" before storming off.  Now we're having fun.

If you have a desire to abuse yourself--in fact, maybe if you kind of hate yourself a little--might I recommend this movie without hesitation.  For the rest of you I would just stick with reading the (very entertaining) critic reviews.

This promo wallpaper of Kickin It's "Chilly Chill"
may perhaps be the least used desktop image of all time.

I find myself in agreement with one reviewer, who refers to the film as "laugh-proof".

-MA 12.31.2012

5th Monday Ugh: Spider-Man 3 (Movie)

This promo photo just screams "coolness."

As promised, on fifth Mondays I will be "reviewing" artworks which I consider "terrible".  This is the first installment.  I understand that most of the people reading this blog already consider Spider-Man 3 (2007) to be a terrible film, but maybe some of you don't fully realize just how bad it is.  I'm not going to dwell on the fact that the acting is bad, the dialog is bad, or that the action scenes have an inexplicable Three-Stoogesque quality; you already know those things.  My focus is on the level of coincidence involved with the plot.  I'm going to go ahead make an unsubstantiated claim here which I wouldn't be surprised if it's true: Spider-Man 3 is the most coincidental non-farce ever created.  It probably goes without saying, but if you want to avoid spoilers for the movie don't read on.

It would be too complex to try to list the coincidences in a logical order--such as chronological or stupidilogical--so I'm just going to state some of them and let you sort them out yourselves.  First off, let's set the stage.  All of the coincidences in the film are compounded by the fact that the events take place in one of the most populous cities on Earth.  New York has over eight million residents.  Keep that in mind.

Disclaimer:  I understand that every specific situation (even in real life) is made up of unlikelihoods, such as a train that might arrive between 12:15 to 12:20 is less likely to arrive at 12:17 then from 12:15-12:16.  But I doubt the filmmakers are going to claim that this list of coincidences (which I lovingly call "coince-ables") was created in the spirit of life's unpredictability.

1.  The meteorite that carried Venom to the earth landed about thirty yards from Peter (one of only two super-people in the city at that time), hopped on to his moped and followed him home.  It could have landed next to anyone, it could have gone home with Mary-Jane, but it didn't.  It followed Peter.  Then, it didn't do anything until the plot required further action.

2.  The man that (apparently) killed Peter's uncle landed in an unexplained atomic sand-pit during his escape, becoming the third super-person in the city.  What are the odds that someone so intimately connected to one of the two super-people in the city becomes the third?  The sand-pit operators heard the warning sound alerting them of foreign matter in their pit, but assumed it was a bird that would fly away when the experiment started.  It seemed there were no cameras to allow them to monitor whatever the heck it was they were doing in that pit, and none of their super high-tech sensors could differentiate between a large human male and a bird that would fly away.

3.  Peter's almost-flame, Gwen Stacy, knows Peter from school, but she is also the almost-girlfriend of Eddie Brock, Peter's number-one work rival.  She does not know Peter through her almost-boyfriend, nor does Eddie know Peter through her.

"The greatest battle lies within" is another way of saying, "This film's greatest enemy is it's script."

4.  Gwen's father, Captain Stacy, is the investigator in charge of Uncle Ben's murder investigation.  How unlikely is it that the man in charge of your uncle's murder investigation is the father of a girl you know from school?  How unlikely is it that the man in charge of your uncle's murder investigation knows your number-one rival?  How unlikely is it that both are true?

5.  Just as the problems with Venom and Sandman are ramping-up, Harry remembers that he hates Peter and wants revenge on him.  Why this moment?

6.  When things get really bad for Spidey, Harry's butler tells Harry that Peter didn't kill his father.  He's known this for years, but has never said anything until just that moment.  Why?

*7.  On Peter's first date with Gwen Stacey they unknowingly go to the same bar where Mary Jane has just started working.  Perhaps you are starting to see a pattern here; this is not likely.

8.  The moment before Peter proposes to Mary Jane, Gwen walks up to their table.  Not only is it coincidental that she would even be in the same restaurant as them, but she could have approached the two and any point during their date.  Instead, she just happens to walk up at the exact point of almost-proposal.

9.  Eddie Brock is in the same church that Peter is on top of when he removes Venom from his body.  He is the only person in the building who responds to Peter's loud grunting and stands directly below him as venom drips down, becoming the forth super-person in the city.  Also coincidentally, he had just been praying for Spider-Man's death.

I'm sure there's more to add to this list; post any others you notice in the comments!

Lastly, I know it has been claimed that one of the biggest failings of this film is the fact that it had three villians, but this is simply not true.  One of the biggest failings of this film is the fact that it had four: Green Goblin, Sandman, Venom, and Eddie Brock, who wanted Peter dead before Venom even touched him.  Four.  Get it right.

-MA 10.29.2012

*Contested, see comments