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| Marj |
 Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 2:44 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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Eww. that's hard.
Sorry, but I can't stop laughing. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 3:21 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Transformers 2 is really inspiring critical raves:
Ebert: Quote: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
John Anderson:Quote: As with so many sequels, anything that worked in the first film is ratcheted up to overkill. To say the film is too loud or relentlessly violent misses the point: We watch movies like this for noise and violence. But what's wrong here is that there's so much swirling, relentless action, indistinct robot characterizations and over-caffeinated techies loose on the special-effects machines that the movie, in mere seconds, achieves incoherence.
Michael Phillips: Quote: The first, comparatively lucid "Transformers" was a headache, but I sort of enjoyed it. It was a Slurpee brain-freeze of a blockbuster. "Revenge of the Fallen" is more like listening to rocks in a clothes dryer for 2½ hours. ... Each time the battle between the Autobahns and the Technocrats (I think I have that right -- sorry, make that Autobots and Decepticons) comes down to one 'bot against another, you cannot really tell what's happening, and who's vivisecting whom. Your eye instinctively flees to the far corners of the screen for some relief from the computer-generated mayhem.
There are some favorable reviews, too. The movies look to me like a three-sided batlle between erector sets. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 3:30 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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Quote: There are some favorable reviews, too. The movies look to me like a three-sided batlle between erector sets.
I love that description, Syd. Perfect! |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 3:59 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Armond White (a Weeden favorite) once again goes against the grain and gives TRANSFORMER 2 a rave:
"WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen.
Who else could compose a sequence where characters (albeit robots) go from the bottom of the sea to another planet in one seamless, 30-second, dreamlike flow? That transition typifies the storytelling in this sequel to 2007’s Transformers.
Teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), on his way to college, is drawn back into the first film’s battle between mechanical aliens. Sam innocently acquires the secret code of the aliens’ cosmic history—something to do with his American kid innocence and appreciation of middle-class life’s abundance.
Based on the original 1980s Transformer toys by Hasbro and subsequent TV cartoons and comic books, the Transformer movies expound on this cultural plenitude. Their fascination with technology—the way common objects rearrange, expand or shrink as if having a benevolent or malicious life of their own—drives the stories.
Bay is an ideal director to realize this peculiar genre, which remakes the surfeit of adolescent commercial media as a means of multimedia gratification.These cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes—both human-friendly Autobots and dastardly Decepticons—metamorphose fast, but their transfiguration is like the mechanical toy descriptions in E.T.A. Hoffman: fantastic and uncanny.
Bay’s post-nuclear version of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker stirs emotion from our pop culture, industrial experience then connects to ancient spiritual myths (like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It’s too much the production of industrialization to be considered magic, yet Bay’s sheer fascination with seeing is impressively communicated.
In the history of motion pictures, Bay has created the best canted angles—ever. The world looms behind a human protagonist with the enormity of life itself. (My favorite: a windblown Megan Fox facing the audience as a jet fighter slowly, majestically glides behind/above her). Bay already has a signature: the up-tilted 360-degree spin (gleefully parodied in Hot Fuzz). Here, he flashes it whenever Sam kisses his girlfriend.
Bay photographs Fox and luscious/vicious rival Isabel Lucas like pin-ups—a pop culture joke encompassing what every young girl, post-Madonna, is told is OK. (They’re girls “with options” as Sam says.) There’s still advertising porn in Bay’s soul, but it’s so expressive of the media norm that it’s funny—proof we’re watching nothing more than fantasy.This commercialized life force “Cannot be destroyed, only transformed,” as a Decepticon warns.
Transforming is the capitalist dream of rebranding. It’s not transcendence—thus, the need for the basic sci-fi story of good vs. evil, where Revenge of the Fallen alludes to the story of Lucifer.
Transformers doesn’t simultaneously critique pop culture like Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race or Joseph Kahn’s near-miraculous Torque (none of Bay’s mechanical anthropomorphism matches the wit of how Torque’s human characters live through their vehicles), but there is satire in Sam’s roommate Leo’s (Ramon Rodriquez) Everynerd chatter: “The Internet’s pure truth! Video doesn’t lie!”That breathless naiveté indicts Transformers’ target audience, yet there’s something in scenes of an overturned carrier ship, of alien assaults on the Great Pyramids or Sam’s Clockwork Orange torture that is close to wonderful. Bay’s skills have found their appropriate subject now that he’s abandoned fake history (Pearl Harbor) for fantasy." |
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| lshap |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 7:32 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 4248
Location: Montreal
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On a slightly more adult note, The Taking Of Pelham 123 was pretty good. Travolta finds his groove as the dramatically caffeinated mastermind behind the hijacking of a New York subway train. Denzel Washington's cool and earnest as the unlucky manager on the microphone who ends up as the intermediary.
It's Travolta's show all the way and he's a blast to watch. Will he kill passengers or won't he? What's his plan behind the plan? What'll happen to Denzel? The questions, of course, end up being bigger than the answers. Not surprisingly, it's a thriller that follows most of the same dance steps, but it's a catchy tune, so who cares? Film, as with music, is all about the groove, so sit back and enjoy. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 9:52 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Quote: Film, as with music, is all about the groove, so sit back and enjoy.
Sometimes it's a lot more than that. |
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| warpedgirl17 |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 11:31 pm |
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Joined: 06 Jan 2009
Posts: 51
Location: Salt Lake City,Utah
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Marj wrote: Has anyone heard anything about Public Enemies?
Public Enemies looks really good! I keep seeing the trailer on tv a lot. Johnny Depp looks like he does a great job in it. |
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I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong... but to feel strong.- Christopher McCandless(Into The Wild) |
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| warpedgirl17 |
| Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 11:34 pm |
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Joined: 06 Jan 2009
Posts: 51
Location: Salt Lake City,Utah
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carrobin wrote: "The Hangover" looks like a guy-humor kind of thing. (Not that there's anything wrong with that--in fact, I like an occasional Three Stooges sketch myself.) My priorities at the moment are "Up" and "Moon." Though so many of my priorities fade to DVD.
I saw Up recently. It was so fantastic! If you go see you will need some tissues with you. Very touching through out the whole film. Almost every person in the theater when I saw it was just really crying at certain parts in that. I love the opening cartoon Partly Cloudy. It was very cute and funny. |
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I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong... but to feel strong.- Christopher McCandless(Into The Wild) |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:21 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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The tissues are good advice for me. I want to see Up.
And it's good to see you around here, Warpedgirl (I started typing Movielover by accident  ). Don't be a stranger. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 5:26 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Marc wrote: Armond White (a Weeden favorite)...
I just want to make clear for those who aren't in on the joke that Marc is being sarcastic here. I think Armond White is an absolute disgrace to the profession of film criticism, and the fact that he gets even one ounce of respect from anyone is a terrible comment on the state of the media. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 1:06 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| moved to correct forum. I should really check where I am before I post something. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:17 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 7149
Location: NYC; US&A
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I saw a current film, woohoo!
The Hangover -- really funny stuff, I mean, like, really dudes.
Now I wanna see Moon; the french film with Juliette Binoche; and, err, uhm, Nurse Jackie -- finances made me cut my cable bill in half. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 5:39 pm |
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Went to the cheap theatre today. Nothing that excited me, swo I went with a movie that my son liked, State of Play. Well worth seeing. well done and well acted, even Ben Affleck. Rachel McAdams wasn't very good as a reporter, didn't be;lieve it for a moment but she was pleasant enough. Two hours and it moves along very well.
I wonder what Armond White said about it? |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 8:29 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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marantzo wrote: Went to the cheap theatre today. Nothing that excited me, swo I went with a movie that my son liked, State of Play. Well worth seeing. well done and well acted, even Ben Affleck. Rachel McAdams wasn't very good as a reporter, didn't be;lieve it for a moment but she was pleasant enough. Two hours and it moves along very well.
I wonder what Armond White said about it?
I didn't think State of Play was any good, except for Russell Crowe. Even the divine Helen Mirren was mediocre. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 8:51 pm |
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Mirren was easily good enough for me. the role itsef could have had a more substantial or should I say less choppy arc. Crowe was terrific. The movie was on his shoulders. Affleck made a very good congressman,
The movie had my interested from the opening sequence. Nice camera work too. Loved the secondary characters. I would have liked to see more of them. The time went by at a good pace. |
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