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The mid-credits scene is extremely important, because the specific line Turturro drops is (if I recall) "Arrest me! I'd go to jail for love!!" He gleefully, maniacally shouts this straight into the camera, and it seems almost improvised. McDormand is also visibly laughing in the background, but it's a genuine laugh, as though she's broken character. The quality of the footage seems lower than expected too, as though this were a behind-the-scenes clip or something. But anyways, the point is this idea of willingly 'going to jail for love' in a film that's all about varying concepts of freedom. The climactic line for Sam's character is "I'm just the messenger" which is an odd one. It's superficially badass, like he's a prophet of god and that power courses through him or something. But of course, the god in question is the face-stealing Optimus Prime. And here's the kicker: Sam insisted earlier, during one of his entitlement hissy-fits, that he only takes orders from Optimus. So what has changed? He really hasn't learned anything! Sam has only stopped trying to impress his fellow humans. Although she's not present, this line is 'actually' directed against Mearing and her insistence on following a chain of command. Being the Autobots' messenger afforded Sam no rank in America, but this is Optimus' planet now. Why change yourself, when you can simply destroy the world? When Optimus swoops in at the end of the toppling skyscraper sequence, he bellows something like "I'M HERE FOR YOU", and it's actually a very ambiguous line. It's unclear if he's talking about saving the heroes or just slaughtering Shockwave, but the effect is that it means both - that preserving 'humanity' can only occur by expunging the 'inhuman' monster. We've already established how Megatron is the genuine leader of the Deceptions because he cares for the weakest, is the weakest. When Sentinel shoves his hand into Meg's head wound, his failure as leader is obvious. So there's a beauty to the Megatron POV shot (!!) where he gazes up at Cybertron. Importantly, there is no such POV shot for Optimus - or for any of the protagonists, really. Megatron dreams of a world where even the little deformed green homunculus he feeds is treated well. Not only treated well, but elevated to the highest rank! Sentinel goes on about how sacrifices had to be made, how people had to be betrayed for the greater good, but this is what Megatron specifically refuses to do. See, the crucial nuance in Carly's interaction with Megatron is that Meg doesn't actually mind being a 'bitch'. Megatron, in all his abjection, is king bitch. The part he objects to is being Sentinel's bitch - compromising his idealism out of 'pragmatic necessity'. Where Sentinel talks about how "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", and Optimus believes in the needs of 'all' (to the implicit exclusion of the 'non-all' remainder), Meg loves his fellow abject 'bitches' above all else. Only Megatron is motivated by this sort of authentic, uncompromising love for his neighbor. (Y'know, like Jesus!) And that brings things back to the mid-credits scene, where the literal plot content is a exaggeratedly romanticized sexual assault by a broken man, but the form is of two Coen Brothers stars expressing a wholly unironic camaraderie. Turturro's sincere belief in a mad, unconditional love worth sacrificing oneself for shines out from under the Simmons character's weird odiousness. And really, that's the story of the film. Most of the characters are motivated by a love (of their families, of America, of 'humanity', etc.) that is genuine but overly particular and exclusionary. Not Meg, though. There's a theme in the film, that Terry already pointed out, of Autobots flying in to provide an obscenely happy interruption of some inevitable doom. The flipside of this is Que's detestably over-sentimentalized death, which stands as a stark contrast to Megatron's end. There's no sentimentality, as with Bumblebee's over-wide ET eyes. But it's also not callously ignored, like the deaths of Brains and Wheelie (this film's version of the twins - tolerated by the 'multicultural' heroes, but ultimately disposable). Megatron simply dies for the little guy, without pleading, and it's the only dignified end in the series. Though Optimus fronts about universal freedom, Megatron remains pure to the last. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 00:37
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Corsec posted:Isn't this excessively laudatory since Megatron spent most of the film conspiring with Sentinel to enslave humanity, even referring to Carly explicitly as slave? Not to mention his complicity with the terror attacks against the civilians in Chicago. Isn't that a sacrifice for the greater good? Except Sentinel defines greater by numbers and rank, while Megatron chooses the greater good of a moral category of personhood. Megatron is a flawed character with an arc: originally believing that resurrecting Sentinel is necessary to save the children, he has an epiphany. He called Carly 'slave', but then refrains from killing her. The decision to spare her is the key point there. The slavery plan is Sentinel's bullshit - Sentinel is all about being a god and master over humanity. What we see is Megatron's realization that if Carly is a slave, then so is he - so is everyone. He doesn't attack Sentinel to prove his masculinity, but to redeem himself. The world of transformers is fraught with objective violence. The film begins with Optimus in charge of the Autobots, going on covert, unauthorized missions. They talk about how peaceful it is, but we see surveillance devices and armed guards everywhere. But, beyond that, the whole of society is hosed if Malkovich's character is a respected billionaire. Megatron fights against this horrible state of affairs, and characterizing that as 'dragging everyone down with him' is unfair.
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Oct 1, 2013 08:15
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A quick recap on Megatron: Megatron sent himself on a lonely thousand-year mission to retrieve the allspark and save his planet, after the mad Optimus Prime destroyed Cybertron by launching its best/only energy source into space. Prime had effectively starved the entire planet to death in the name of an American-style freedom supported by a few hereditary god-king types. But anyway, at the cusp of saving his planet, Megatron suffered a terrible accident and was frozen alive for hundreds of years. When finally discovered, he was not helped but slowly vivisected by the humans. His exploited flesh became fodder for the industrial revolution. From then on, his only goal had been to help his people, with Optimus manipulating the humans into demonizing and exterminating them. Megatron isn't a Jesus figure, but he isn't a Darth Vader/Bane figure either. We all know that Vader has an unwavering ethical commitment to the 'dark side', but then renounces it all and removes his mask out of particular love for his son. Meg 'puts his mask back on' after realizing that he himself had been 'all too human' and lost track of what he was supposed to be doing. IMAGERY: the final executions take place on a bridge, and of course the whole plot centers around a 'space bridge'. It's about the future of the planet, the transition from one state to another. When Megatron volunteers to help Optimus and is killed, this is extremely symbolic - because what is Optimus about more than 'protecting humanity'? Carly has obviously convinced Meg that the humans are not his true enemy. Megatron has decided to let them to join the Decepticons - not as prisoners and slaves but as equals. The only catch is that Optimus cannot be the leader, for obvious reasons. Killing Megatron on the bridge is Optimus' statement that nothing will change. It was never about protecting humanity. It was about dominating.
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Oct 1, 2013 17:43
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Corsec posted:I think that Megatron's intentions towards humans in particular are really important for understanding his values/motivations in this film. Meg doesn't symbolically eliminate Lincoln but takes over for him. Check the form of his expression: he destroys the lily-white, Grecian statue of the caucasian, American president and fills that spot with his own body. Meg's body has, as we know, been coded as African, feminine, homeless and whatever. And recall that these are symbolic clothes: Meg could look like any large vehicle but chooses to be an authentic version of the decidedly inauthentic Optimus. He wraps himself in chains! Anyways, the point is that the Cybertronians are (pagan) gods. The scene where the NEST dudes target their eyes and legs is mythic imagery of David and Goliath, Odysseus and Polythemus, and so-on. Great Mythic stuff. Lincoln's statue rests in a temple - and Meg isn't destroying Lincoln so much as surpassing him, taking over from him. Megatron aspires to lead his people to a brighter future. He doesn't specifically target Optimus at all. Look at how he stares up at the planet he hadn't seen in who knows how long. Megatron has aspirations, and is not merely acting out of envy. Cybertron in this film is presented with the same imagery as Krypton in Man of Steel or Elysium in that film. Bringing these symbolic kingdoms to Earth can be apocalyptic or revolutionary, depending on how it's done. What if we mirror Elysium directly, and make everyone an honorary Decepticon? And then, isn't that what Meg is doing by approaching Optimus - to organize an alliance with humanity? As a flipside to the surveillance imagery, eye violence imagery is nearly as prevalent as violence against faces in the film. You might recall that the opening title sequence is a zoom into Sentinel's eye, and then further into an abstract/metaphorical spiraling abyss of whirling gears and blades - it's the abyss of subjectivity. Transformers' souls happen to 'look like' Shockwave's worm. The last we see of Megatron is the fire dying out in his remaining eye. It's the eye on the undamaged side of his face, the same side that he turns toward Carly and the camera after her motivational pep-talk.
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Oct 3, 2013 16:26
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Party Boat posted:At the weekend I was put on the spot about my opinions on the Transformers trilogy, and I settled for "bad, but in an interesting way". Transformers 3 is a genuinely good alien invasion film along the lines of War of The Worlds and Battle: Los Angeles that is continually interrupted by the obscene presence of the Autobots. It's the film's running joke: that any poignancy is cut short by Optimus stepping into the frame in his trumped-up idiot uniform, or Bumblebee appearing to snatch a falling character from the air (a recurring image). People have called Bay a nihilist, but his appreciation of 'the troops' seems genuine. He's just as genuinely distressed that they fall into line behind this Optimus figure. Consider that Sam's search for Carly in Chicago is the same scenario as Cloverfield, and consider how that film ends by comparison. One thing people miss in Cloverfield is its fairly seamless transition from being a 9/11 film to an Iraq War film, and you get the same thing in Transformers 3. There's the imagery of the skyscrapers being toppled, sure, but the spectacular violence is mostly distraction, chaos designed to disrupt the existing order so that a 'fortress' can be built in its place. Remember when all those advanced terrorist gunships engaged in a prolonged shock-and-awe bombing campaign? 9/11 was a lot of things, but it wasn't a colonization.
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Oct 3, 2013 20:27
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Zeppelin Insanity posted:The beginning with the soldiers also feels wrong to me. Terry pointed it out but it's very striking to me. It's not triumphant. It doesn't feel like the underdogs finally getting the upper hand over their oppressors. To me it feels like majestic creatures being hounded and mercilessly butchered after being rendered helpless and pathetic. Well, like I said before, it's a David and Goliath reference. In the accurate translation, David knocks the gigantic Philistine warrior down with a blow to the leg, and then decapitates him in the name of God. He subsequently leads the Israelites to victory as their king. What makes the victory here ambivalent is the fact that the god in question is not the god of Abraham, but the false god Optimus. An earlier scene shows that it was Bumblebee who handed down the knowledge of how to kill the Cybertronians. And you have the lead NEST guy doing the 'wink-wink' plausible deniability thing when Optimus leads the unauthorized attack on Iran. We know which side his bread's buttered on. Que is a deliberately-poo poo character, but I absolutely love the scene where he distributes those grenades and grappling hooks to the NEST team. He very specifically scatters them on the floor like toys, so that everyone must kneel to pick them up. (!!!) This is one of the most important scenes in the film, because it succinctly illustrates the Autobot concept of freedom: you're free to own toys. You are free to buy a sportscar. You're free to profit off the exploitation of others, or to be exploited. The command to kneel is unspoken. Even ultra-rich business guy Malkovich loves being subdued and dominated by Bumblebee. It's a hoot to play with these toys - even moreso when they play with you. Contrast this to Megatron, who stands against this false freedom and for genuine freedom in the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the end of the film, you get the cliche of the protagonist driving up in his reclaimed sportscar. It's like the end of Back To The Future and countless other films. Sam steps out and walks forward, to look up reverently at Optimus - but the shot lingers on the car as it shudders, twists and unfolds into a giant alien thing. Forget that the is Transformers for a second. It's weird for a film to end like this. Oh, and then Bumblebee scatters junk wedding rings on the ground like toys. Sam and Carly both kneel to pick them up, as Bumblebee laughs and laughs.
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Oct 5, 2013 03:53
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A note on the bridge imagery: At the end of the film, Optimus chases down the fleeing Sentinel and slaughters him on a bridge. It's soon revealed, if you pay attention to the geography, that Sentinel was deliberately heading towards the control beacon - AKA the 'space bridge' that literally leads up to the Cybertronian elysium/paradise. Two other characters are also crossing the bridge to paradise: Megatron and Carly (who followed him from the same direction). Heading in the opposite direction? Sam, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime - and this latter group doesn't just head in the opposite direction but stops the former. Optimus does so with the obvious brutal violence, while Sam and Bumblebee fix Carly in place with the prospect of marriage(!). (Again, this is the scene where Bumblebee makes them kneel.) This shows the opinion of 'C' for the folly it is. Not only is the bridge an obvious symbol, it means the same things in the basic plot of the film: it is literally the road that leads to Cybertron, and Cybertron is literally a futuristic utopia (brought down by a 'war in heaven', as seen in the prologue). There's a lot of biblical/luciferian imagery in the series - but isn't the Lucifer character Optimus, who rebels against heaven's strictures in the name of individualistic hedonism? So you can extrapolate outwards from there: Bumblebee destroys the bridge to heaven, destroying heaven itself. Megatron persists in moving forward, creating a new heaven on Earth. Optimus stands fixed on a bridge to nowhere, promising eternal war, etc. This isn't a one-off thing, since Kurtzman and Orci employed similar, fairly obvious, biblical imagery in Star Trek 2009, and Bay used obvious Adam and Eve imagery in his The Island. Not only that, but Joss Whedon copies and 'subverts' this imagery along biblical lines in Marvel's inferior, procultural quasi-ripoff The Avengers. The 'space bridge' there is created by pagan 'puny god' Loki and his armies of mummy-men in vaguely Egyptian headdresses, while the supermen stand for a superficial monotheism. They pretty much just swapped the names, down to the scene where Nick Fury hacks into the cellphone cameras - but Whedon presents his 'Decepticons' as a mere horde of thoughtless killers threatening the almighty status quo. The parallels are informative because, when Black Widow destroys the space bridge in her film, you can now pinpoint Whedon's trademark kung-fu waif-victim as his unironic personal Bumblebee. She's the car!
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Oct 7, 2013 04:34
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Terry van Feleday posted:I guess what it comes down to is that I really don’t blame anyone for broadly rejecting the films. I would be rather more troubled if more people didn’t, really. I simply cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to watch them... And to me, that’s sad. Partially because I see all this incredible work done by the artists and effects team dissipate in a story that cannot properly present it, but mostly because I can say without a hint of irony that I have gained more enjoyment out of Transformers 3 than any single other movie I watched, and it sucked not being able to share that enjoyment with anyone. To me, this isn’t about “proving Bay’s secret genius” or whatever. It’s about how we, as an audience, approach a film. For my money, the series gets progressively better as it goes along - and it's actually a pretty stark improvement, because Transformers 1 is wholly skippable. Revenge of the Fallen is solid fun, and Dark Of The Moon is essential viewing. There are a few interesting things in Part 1: -The fact that Optimus can project hyperrealistic virtual reality propaganda out of his eyes. -That the cube doesn't just give life but reveals a latent violence in everyday objects. -The paralleled tortures of Bumblebee and Megatron. -How multiple scenes are conspicuously shot through windows. -The fact that its sister-film is the explicitly-about-class-warfare (and frankly superior) Friday the 13th remake. ...but honestly, I don't think it goes far enough to be fully conducive to a satirical reading. It really is just a Spielbergian kids' movie with the 'problematic' socio-political implications writ large. The parts that seem truly sincere are few and far between. When Mikaela Baines (girl Michael Bay) creates a makeshift tank out of a wounded bumblebee and a hotwired tow truck (company name: Mike's Towing!), it seems like a statement of purpose. This mad max poo poo is what bay really believes in, though it's impossible not to read it as another example of the hackers selling out. Plus, there's simply not enough Megatron. The movie is basically about Frenzy, who unleashes some abstract explodey creatures - and Frenzy is lame. Revenge of the Fallen skips straight to the good stuff, horrific from the opening frames. But by Part 3, Bay will have stripped back and streamlined the whole thing. Gone are the 'Transforming' subtitles for Decepticon Speech, and the unconvincing Decepticon HUD POV shots that distance us from them. It's the first to really express what Cybertronian society is like.
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Oct 9, 2013 17:14
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Sprecherscrow posted:I think the Autobots creating personalities whole cloth out of digital media upon their first arrival to Earth belongs on this list. It's pretty key to their characterization in the later movies (Iron Hide's clumsy and out of place one-liners only make sense when you realize that it's because of his own context-less absorption of media) and certainly thematically interesting in the way the Transformers relate to our culture. Also, 'fun' is a weird term for Revenge because while it is an artistic accomplishment it's also grotesque and horrifying and kind of hard to watch at times. Like a lot of things in Part 1, that stuff comes back more succinctly and more interestingly in Part 2. Bumblebee in Part 1 spoke with clips from Star Trek and African-American preaching, implying that he really is a good guy at heart (and that the Autobots are like Starfleet - accurate in the Into Darkness sense, not so much in the original sense). In Part 2, Bumbleebee settles into using Tom Hanks' voice - specifically his Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump characters. That's a loaded combination, no? This tells us more about Bumblebee's character than anything else. Reedman is the superior Frenzy, with less screentime and no dialogue. The scene where the allspark reanimates Sam's entire kitchen is better than the whole ending of Transformers 1... Revenge of the Fallen is fun because it's grotesque and horrifying. I'm not watching Transformers for its relative tastefulness - but relative tastefulness is exactly what you get in the first film. I love that the robots casually fart and poo poo in Revenge. Transformers 1 made a big deal of Bumblebee pissing, but that brings up the old observation about the Harry Potter films: in the bad ones, the magical insanity is treated as astonishing spectacle. In the good ones, the insanity is treated as mundane.
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Oct 9, 2013 18:10
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What makes the films watchable at all is that, for example, Bernie Mac's character makes sense. Like, Bobby Bolivia could just be a Black Huckster, but you see that his family business is struggling badly, and he's trying to earn the respect of his abusive mother, who he also resents. That this isn't funny at all is the point. It's not funny. It's all flop-sweat and desperation. Mumbling under his breath that he wants to kill his bitch mother isn't a punchline. It's shocking and uncomfortable. What's important is that everything he tells Sam about the mystical bond between car and man is bullshit that literally comes true - but only for Sam. Not only does it literally come true, but Bumblebee actually attacks Bolivia and degrades him to make it happen. This totally justifies Mikaela's observation that Sam has "never sacrificed anything in [his] perfect little life." Remember that Bumblebee isn't just a car, but an embodiment of all the values you buy into when purchasing a car. That Bee casually attacks a black man over a sum of a thousand dollars is important. It's what makes Transformers 'about race' rather than an example of racism. Bolivia has absolutely nothing in common with Jazz. Another important detail is that Blackout, the first-ever transformer we see, is a ghost. It's literally the after-image of some dead American troops in Afghanistan. Although audiences might assume that Blackout blew up the chopper after stealing its identity, you might notice that Transformers of all varieties don't bother to do this in any of the films. It's more likely that the chopper was coincidentally brought down by human insurgents - so Blackout is more a vengeful spirit of the war dead, as in Joe Dante's Homecoming! After all, isn't the point of the film that our enemy is not the Russians, or the Chinese or whoever? It's coming from inside. There's also the weird implication, then, that the robot Scorpion that Blackhawk poops out is a mirror to the individual soldiers, with their goggles and weaponry... There's actually a ton of Dante influence in the films. The aliens who learn Earth culture from its media are from Explorers, and there's a Gremlins/Small Soldiers anarchy to the primitive allspark 'bots and the various toy-sized Decepticons running around. that's how these films need to be read. They're about that same ambivalence towards junk culture and consumerism.
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Oct 9, 2013 21:15
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Cornwind Evil posted:Okay, I'm curious. Explain, please? Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th is literally a sequel to Transformers 1. Trent, the rich Jock who insults Sam at the lakeside party re-appears in F13 as a major character. A large chunk of the film takes place in his father's extremely expensive lakeside cottage, and he is basically presented as the anti-Jason. Trent is the rich, domineering rear end in a top hat to Jason's abjected insurgent figure (they literally control territories on opposite ends of the lake), and so it's basically a Sam vs. Megatron situation.
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Oct 10, 2013 19:42
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About the conspiracy imagery: As noted before, the film obviously does not argue that these events actually happened - that there are robots on the moon, etc. However, Dark of the Moon mines imagery from conspiracy theories to symbolize why these events happened. Like the excellent and underrated 2011 film Apollo 18, Dark of the Moon tells a symbolic tale that links the end of the Apollo missions with the death of American idealism in the 1970s. Apollo 18 specifically uses imagery of a heroic all-American astronaut literally decaying, analog film corrupted by digital editing, attacks by abstract, 'transforming' nanotech aliens... Sound familiar? You see the similar imagery in the more optimistic Thing prequel (also 2011), and in the decidedly pessimistic Prometheus (2012). Dark of the Moon is a part of that conversation. But there are specific nuances to Bay's film. Return to the imagery of the space bridge as a 'bridge to paradise', and the presentation of Cybertron as a lost Elysian utopia. In Dark Of The Moon, both the Russian and American Cold War space programs are presented as attempts, however unwitting, to 'access Cybertron'. So they make a specific point: America abandoned the ideal because it was cynically declared wasteful, while the USSR experienced Chernobyl...  (Note that they are crossing a bridge to reach it.) You might remember these shots of the Chernobyl reactor core from the film. In the literal text, it represents an failed attempt at creating that Cybertopia. And it looks awfully familiar:   See the rounded shape of the core in the background? Yep, the Chernobyl reactor is a tiny Cybertron! This has pretty big implications in the rest of the film, because who else is trying to create a Cybertron on Earth but Megatron? He's explicitly starting again where the USSR failed. It certainly goes back to the scientifically inaccurate but loaded image of Shockwave emerging 'undead' from the dead zone where nothing can survive, like some kind of spectre. Also, if you go back to the first film, Optimus Prime beams a fictional VR film around Sam and Mikaela, showing them what Megatron ostensibly did to the planet:  Here, however, is what Cybertron actually looks like:  It's obviously not an earthlike planet torn apart by huge, evil Decepticon spikes. It's an advanced hive-like community disrupted by tiny outbursts of Autobot violence. Why is Optimus' 'memory' so obviously distorted? Does he actually believe this, or was it a fabrication? I'd say it doesn't matter, because it's bullshit either way. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 00:13
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Reminder that Bay refused to let Scarlet Johannsen go topless in The Island. The Internet was confused and mock-outraged, but consider that the entire film is about exploitation, and her vat-grown character literally has a mental age of about twelve. (There's a scene where Steve Buscemi's 'everyman' character becomes intensely uncomfortable about his attraction to, essentially, a child.) People confuse Bay's tasteful restraint here with some deficiency on his part.
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Oct 11, 2013 19:42
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The thing that makes me fairly ambivalent about the first Transformers film is that it does succeed at illustrating the gulf between how the characters are written and how they're presented. Bobby Bolivia is presented as "funny" and Mikaela is presented as "sexy", but they're not. Bobby is unsettling and Mikaela is plain sad. The trouble is that there's no solution. When Mikaela straps the crippled Bumblebee to the hotwired tow truck, shouting "I drive!", the flipside is that she's strapping herself to Bumblebee. We all know what Bee represents and what he'll come to represent. She's also only given an extremely brief moment of despair before she gets mad and the butt-rock kicks in. The effect is that this 'empowerment' is actually less authentic than the palpable sadness she exuded before. As Armond White put it: "True art is watching hot-chick Megan Fox [...] coming to grips with her own exploitation." And that's the opposite of what happens in TF1. Mikaela's actual victory occurs when she dumps Sam offscreen and vanishes between Parts 2 and 3. Through all of Part 2, Mikaela is presented as a reward for Sam - and her refusal to obey is as much a source of Sam's impotent rage as his bleak job search and his crap car. It's important that the dumping happens offscreen, and we're never given a reason, because it's something that Sam can't incorporate into his 'Transformers' worldview. It's downright traumatic to him, and he doesn't handle it well at all.
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Oct 12, 2013 01:19
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Dicky mouse posted:So can we just get a bunch of giant robots doing giant robot stuff and no hot chicks or shia or anyother bay-isms No, of course not. Why on earth would you want that?
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Dec 1, 2013 22:07
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2 is actually fantastic. The early scene where Bumblebee blows up the kitchen beats the entire ending of Part 1, and there's great imagery like a mural being blown open to reveal a ribcage underneath (way better-executed than the equivalent shot in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2). Dark Of The Moon found a perfect balance between being a fairly straight alien invasion picture and a harsh satire of the Autobots and everything they stand for - but if I have to choose (which you do, with the earlier films) I'm going to go with the latter.
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Dec 8, 2013 20:56
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The twins are Jar Jar Binks characters. They're also related to Bai Ling in Crank 2, the 'prawns' in District 9, the islanders in King Kong 2005, and Gollum. Bai Ling plays a screeching 'me love you long time' asian whore stereotype - but one who is, specifically, screeching her love of 1992's interracial romance The Bodyguard. This is obviously deliberately provocative, an attack on its middlebrow sensibilities. People like Ling's character do actually exist, but would be 'intolerable' to fans of The Bodyguard. (She specifically compares herself to Whitney Houston's Oscar-winning actress/singer character - the joke being that Bai Ling ain't going to win an Oscar.) The message of Crank 2 is to reverse the logic of 'real people don't act like this' to 'those who act like this are real people'. King Kong 2005 opens with an Al Jolson song, and features Andy Serkis as the world's biggest metaphor for blackness - it's about blackface as a historical phenomenon, and something still happening with performance-capture tech. Jar Jar Binks mixes things up further by being a black dude in blackface - an appropriation. I'd remind that Jar-jar is the de facto protagonist of his film, and is badly mistreated by the white dudes around him even if he is clumsy and stupid. So what if he is? The extreme of this are the prawns in District 9 and the islanders in Kong, who are totally dehumanized by the conditions they're forced into. They're inhuman and bestial because they've been reduced to that level. They shamble like the undead. Instead of complaining that the twins are fairly illiterate (though not totally so; their ice-cream truck mode is scrawled with custom English graffiti) the important thing is to ask why they are illiterate, why they are nonetheless a high-ranking part of NEST, why they are coded as 'good' minorities while the decepticons are monstrous and mercilessly slaughtered.... That's why they're in there.
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Dec 9, 2013 06:39
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It's important to remember that Optimus can shoot beams out of his eyes that transform reality itself. See the scene in Transformers 1, where the Earth cracks and peels away to reveal a holographic Cybertron 'inside.' This goes back to Terry's points about clothing and nakedness in the film: Optimus presents Cybertron as a vision of Earth stripped bare. The world melts away to reveal the machinery beneath, as in They Live. But Optimus 'dresses it up', blames it all on Megatron. This is how the Twins must be understood. Underneath the cars, they are the same monsters as everyone else, the same machines, but they are clothed in neon colours and gold teeth. They are illiterate and whatever, and that's 'OK' - illiteracy is a real issue - but the Twins don't wear their monstrosity with pride. They disguise it with non-confrontational, non-threatening, tolerable jokiness.
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Dec 9, 2013 17:56
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penismightier posted:You can use text analysis to support just about any alternate reading you want, but at a certain point you have to deal with the bare facts of the text, and something as noxious and gratuitously racist as those robots in Transformers 2 are borderline unwatchable. It's not gratuitous if the film's about racism. There's a big reveal that the Decepticons are not a race but a class, and it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It serves no purpose except to show that the heroes were motivated by racism. They'd assumed that Decepticons were just born evil. See also the film's treatment of (how Sam perceives) women.
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Jan 23, 2014 07:30
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penismightier posted:When does that happen? They go to Jetfire for help and they're like WHOA gently caress HE HAS A DECEPTICON SYMBOL ON HIS BODY. Jetfire then casually explains to them that being a Decepticon is a choice, and they're totally surprised. The depiction of the twins is also directly related the scene with the short military guard. The heroes joke that he must have a Napoleon complex, but they discover that he totally loves America - specifically New York - allowing them to fool him. This is the exact same relationship the twins have to Optimus Prime. The twins genuinely believe in Optimus' rhetoric of freedom and equality, and the heroes tolerate their attempts at helping, but the twins are still very clearly subordinate. They are Jar Jar Binks figures, and George Lucas employed the Gungans the same way. The heroes pretend to respect them in order to exploit them. Meanwhile, they're all gung-ho about trying to be cool and helpful, not realizing that they're being exploited. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 07:50
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penismightier posted:Huh, I didn't remember that at all. My point remains, though, which is that though that characterization may be made defensible by certain readings of the text, it's completely indefensible when you place the movie in its context. It's a disgusting, sleazy thing to do, one that even in its most charitable reading preys on and legitimizes a particularly ugly and unresolved stereotype which belongs dead. Kids - the target audience - should not see that, they don't have the critical faculties to decide whether or not the film "condones" it, they'll just absorb it as something normal and okay. That's just an appeal to author intent though. I don't think it matters, I don't think children are the real 'intended' audience - and I also honestly don't think they're that dumb. Or, at least not dumb enough that we need to fool them. The film demonstrates the performative effects of a racist ideology. The twins are inferior, on a socio-symbolic level (i.e. the entire distorted hyperreality of the film), because they are treated as inferior by the heroes: "It's not merely an interpretation of what blacks are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects." (Z, Violence) So, the film is actually quite accurate about the underlying racism in Optimus' liberal ideology. And though it sounds hopeless, the film is actually making a clear point against the racism, and offers a solution: "The bondsman has to disavow that he acts merely as the Lord's body and act as an autonomous agent, as if the bondsman's bodily laboring for the lord is not imposed on him but is his autonomous activity. [...] The paradox not to be missed here is that the bondsman (servant) is all the more the servant, the more he (mis)perceives his position as that of an autonomous agent". (Z, The Thing from Inner Space) By making their servitude and lack of autonomy overt, instead of disavowing it, the film honestly helps to understand their situation. Promoting, instead, a Captain Planet-style multiculturalism would actually be more harmful for the kids at home because, well, they'd be told Optimus' lies. See how Iron Man includes a token 'good Muslim' to disguise its racism. That's a far more harmful film - promoted as light, happy, and inoffensive to the same audience. Kids should very quickly, like most people, grow to detest these characters (or at least shake their head at them, as I do). But it's not because of their race, but because of the racist ideology the film exemplifies/satirizes. The film, as it exists, is conducive to that reading. Just tell them the truth.
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Jan 23, 2014 08:35
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Lord Krangdar posted:my interpretation actually is about the text, whereas you started out saying to focus on the text and then focused on everything but (the film's marketing and tie-in products...) Hold up: marketing and stuff are actually vital contexts. It's very important that the film itself - and the entire worldview - is repeatedly underlined as being the product of a corporation. This is part of how the film tells the truth to kids. That honesty is the important thing.
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Jan 23, 2014 09:02
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Why's "Criticism of Transformers 2" a higher priority than "Criticism of Liberal Democracy"? You don't want to fall into the tumblr trap, where your concerns are divorced from authentic antiracism. Michael Bay is just a man, and Revenge Of The Fallen is just a movie. The fans, the children... these are not the source of racism. Multiculturalism is white supremacy, and I'd prefer if the children were not taught otherwise.
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Jan 23, 2014 19:44
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Ferrinus posted:I haven't actually watched Transformers 2, but while "The autobots are deliberately mimicking our society, and since our society is racist the autobots themselves replicate and engage in that racism" explains the inclusion of the Twins it doesn't in and of itself excuse the specific portrayal of the twins. The trick is if the plot is truthful. Are there people who act like the twins in reality? Of course! They actually exist - but who cares? Racism is a pathology. Racists are only a symptom. The twins, as a product of racism, are also a symptom. Likewise, we are seeing something very dangerous in this thread now: people are more concerned with being called a racist (or calling others racist) than with actually fighting racism. That's the Tumblr trap.
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Jan 24, 2014 02:14
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Ferrinus posted:People fitting that stereotype obviously exist, but there are plenty of different ways to portray them onscreen or on the page or whatever. It can't be true that every conceivable constellation of camera angles/lines of dialogue/plot contrivances involving such a character are equally inoffensive/unobjectionable/laudable/whatever just because they're technically capable of having happened. Yeah but, in this case, the film equates them to that short border guard who gives up his dignity because he buys into American ideology. There's also the key point that the Twins are in the film to replace Jazz, the breakdancing guy who dies pointlessly in Transformers 1. The twins are an extension of that same character. Can you imagine a Decepticon character acting like that too? Nope, because they are a different sort of grotesque. They're abject, monstrous, but also self-aware and unapologetic. The twins say "we're ninjas lol", while the Decepticons say "we are dogs". SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 03:27
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There's some important tension between form and content to factor in, I think. The form of Bernie Mac's scenes in part 1 is 'just goofy comedy', but the presentation is unsettling. Like, just the basic image of Bolivia's cousin(?) going blind from the clown makeup melting into his eyes. It's awful. This comes into play later, in the gratuitous scene where Bumblebee upgrades himself. Mikaela asks, paraphrased, 'if Bee can look like anything, why'd he choose to look like a piece of crap?' The obvious counterpoint is that people like Bobby Bolivia have no choice. Then, think of who's saying this; Mikaela's a car thief, from a broken home, who puts a ton of effort into her outwards appearance - in an unspoken effort to secure an upper-class boyfriend. The idea that Bee would look 'trashy' on purpose is bizarre to her. She's pressured to fit in and 'marry up.' This is the context in which the twins 'try to look badass', and in which Megatron adopts his Mad Max truck form. It's all appearance, but one is clearly more authentic. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 20:12
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PriorMarcus posted:They didn't choose the forms to blend in with Dinosaurs but rather to appear as God monsters to ancient man; Chinese dragon, Quezacotl, etc. Booyah.
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Feb 3, 2014 20:37
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Tommy 2.0 posted:God drat. I've always felt as if Bay has been maliciously mocking the audience with the Transformers movie, this makes me really believe it now. It's pretty easy to assume that they're putting a Transformers twist on the old story of mythical creatures being inspired by dinosaur bones. The dinobots (crash-)landed millions of years ago, based their shapes off dinosaurs, and then were eventually worshiped by humans. This also handily combines Jurassic Park imagery with 'golden calf' imagery - a bit of Prometheus-style 'Chariots of the Gods' stuff.
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Feb 4, 2014 02:32
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Mordiceius posted:Should I get hyped for this movie or not? I enjoyed the first Transformers movie, thought the second was complete poo poo, and never watched the 3rd. 3 is easily the best one. But, then again, 1 is the worst. Your results may vary.
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Feb 4, 2014 02:39
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Boys 18+
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Feb 16, 2014 09:45
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I swear that such things as recasting the heroes as white and replacing the accurate Asian text and pronunciations with ching-chong and squiggly lines is the entire point of Last Airbender. Fans of the cartoon were miffed but, as a springboard to mock Hollywood-style orientalism, it works like gangbusters.
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May 31, 2014 18:52
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Hey all, let's talk about Grizzly Man by Werner Herzergalergadurf.
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May 31, 2014 18:56
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Revenge Of The Fallen owns.
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Jun 22, 2014 10:01
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Shaocaholica posted:How do you feel about working on something thats rated so low and gets raged on by fans? In situations like these, I mentally replace select words with 'I' or 'me', for accuracy. "How do you feel about working on something thats rated so low by me?"
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Jul 1, 2014 00:51
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Shaocaholica posted:Well I meant it as an honest question to a fellow industry artist, not to berate the guy because I don't like the TF movies. Executionally the movie is probably fine (I haven't seen it yet). So was Battlefield Earth but a couple of guys I work with still joke about it. You can be proud of your specific work as an artist and still object to the bigger picture. Maybe you animated an Optimus battle sequence and its pretty rad and you got all the nuances right and it just rocked. That doesn't mean you actually like the film as a whole and all the stuff that wasn't really your work. The film as a whole is made up of contributions from people exactly like you. Each one is doing specific work, introducing those nuances. That's the bigger picture. That's the 'substance'.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:09
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Aight shut the gently caress up I'm back and I saw the film. The thing to note immediately is that the green guy is Starscream. He's an Autobot Starscream, scheming against the leader and generally being a dick. Oh yeah, and Optimus? He's locked up in a lab and experimented upon, going on a mad rampage when he wakes up. Sound familiar? It's Megatron from the first film. Wahlberg is literally planning to exploit his parts for profit. Things have changed. The specific thing that's changed is that the roles from the first film are reversed. Optimus loathes humans now, incredibly hurt when told that he's not needed anymore. That's what gets to him: being needed. He's not mad about the nuke or whatever; Galvatron threatens Optimus with obsolescence. These drones are legitimately better at being Autobots than Optimus ever was. They can attack the gently caress out of Iran autonomously - it's exactly what Optimus claimed he was fighting for in previous films: the end of human warfare. But this was a lie. The Decepticons knew all along: "this is not your planet to rule." (This fear of obsolescence is what links him directly to Wahlberg - why Wahlberg's daughter issues are important.) Galvatron is also reset. Being put back in the torture chamber brought him right back to the 'dark place' from the first film. You might recall that Bumblebee was also tortured by government agents in the first film, going on a mad rampage when he woke up. Torture does that to everybody in these films - it doesn't matter your side. But in this case, Galvatron is literally based on Optimus. He's not a resurrected Megatron, he's a version of Optimus without a soul. But hold on! The spark is said to be where Cybertronians store their memories, so why can Galvatron persist without it? How does Prime survive being impaled through the chest? The spark is actually just a power source. Optimus is talking about his religious beliefs. This is where the conflict comes from. Optimus has regressed to a weird feudalism, with weird quasi-pagan beliefs in legendary dragons and poo poo. In this sense, he stands opposed to the liberal capitalism he used to support and to Galvatron's nihilistic atheism. The hints of revolutionary Christianity from TF3 have vanished entirely. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 07:22
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Daryl Surat posted:in the latest film attempting to kill over 7 million people by intentionally detonating a terraforming device in a heavily populated area, as doing so maximizes their yield output. Galvatron has again been 'driven mad' with torture in this film - just like Brains, the Autobot imp who was also tortured. However, it's more accurate to say that he's not crazy; he just no longer gives a poo poo about anything. He's retaliating against the enslavement of his people. He says like ten lines of dialogue in the film, and half of them are about protecting his brothers. That's honestly a perfectly sane reaction. When he tried to unite the poor and impose universal democracy in the previous film, he was murdered.
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Jul 1, 2014 07:41
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I was hoping Megatron would return as the unambiguous good guy of the film - but the reversal where he is now Psychopath Prime taken to an extreme, with only the name changed, is pretty interesting. Here's something notable: Lockdown's dogs aren't robots. You can see the flesh through the gaps in their armor - they are organic creatures. His subordinates are also clearly organic alien people in cloth suits, not robots.
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Jul 1, 2014 08:08
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JediTalentAgent posted:Also, was Bumblebee always as sort of 'pissed off' as he was in this movie? It's like they put Sam's brain in his body. In the first film, Bee gets pissy when Mikaela criticizes his appearance and changes into a new outfit. In this film, when Stinger is revealed, Bee gets pissy all over again. However, the not-so subtle gag: Bee immediately chooses a new outfit that looks exactly like Stinger's. Cade bonds with Optimus, but Tessa bonds with Bumblebee. There's even a bit in the final battle where Optimus complains that Bee disobeyed his orders, exactly as Tessa did. So: Tessa is preoccupied about her appearance, influenced by beauty ads? That's pretty much exactly what's going on with her relationship to Lucky Charms. He's older, and he can drive, and he's got a corporate sponsorship! Plus, he has government authorization to date her. He's the evil, successful version of Cade - the one who'll make him obsolete. Lucky Charms is Galvatron. Anyway: the moral of the film is that there is now, officially, absolutely no difference between autobots and decepticons, except for Optimus's newfound religious fundamentalism. It is now a matter of Cybertronians fighting the dark god. Lockdown flies a literal hand-of-god spaceship* whose interior is like an evil mirror of both Cade's barn and Joyce's lab. (There is absolutely no difference between Cade and Joyce either, except that one is more rich.) What we see at the end of the film is a temporary class truce. Rich and poor unite to stave off the evil invader from Outside. This is what happens in Matrix 3 and other stupid films, except here it's played for a joke. Hooray, we win a mansion! Everything is fixed! *Of course, Optimus rockets off in the middle finger.
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Jul 1, 2014 08:56
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Daryl Surat posted:But the only way you can arrive at the conclusion "the only danger innocents were facing in [Age of Extinction] was caused by Optimus himself" is through absolving Lockdown, KSI, and the CIA of responsibility. For one, the Seed is clearly NOT "safely out of the city" as its blast radius is quite substantial; it would cover much of the Mongolian desert. You use the term "arrest" to describe Lockdown's actions, but the bounties he hunts are not typically brought in alive and he doesn't give any of his targets an opportunity to turn themselves in. He's an assassin that snipes his targets at range unannounced before executing them up close, such that all anyone knows is "we're being hunted by him." The only reason they know even that much is because Optimus Prime is the only one to survive an initial encounter with him. By the time it's known that "Lockdown won't actually kill Optimus Prime" the Seed is already on Earth and in the possession of forces willing to use it. Why is that? It's because Lockdown gave it to them. He's responsible for that, not Optimus Prime. The CIA and KSI are able to harvest Transformers because Lockdown supplies the corpses, and THEY are doing so out of desire for power. The direct responsibility for Galvatron's creation lies not with Optimus Prime for killing Megatron, but with KSI for acquiring his body and holding Brains in captivity (I do appreciate that they gave him little tiny casts to sell what were presumed fatal injuries to him and Wheelie). The CIA directly activates Galvatron and his weapons at the cost of American civilian lives. The Autobots didn't do that. Optimus Prime didn't do that. He's not even the immediate cause of that. "He attacked the building that we were shipping the corpses of his friends to in order to conduct quasi-legal research" is a shaky justification. The crucial point of this film is that KSI and the CIA behave exactly like the Autobots did in previous films. The drones are literally copied from the Autobots. Those Autobots (and NEST) were already so awful that the only way to make them worse is to make them look cartoonishly evil - with black-painted cars, ridiculous trenchcoat outfits, etc. The only difference between the Autobots and Decepticons is who is currently in power. They are absolutely identical except that Galvatron is an atheist. The crucial line is "underdogs suck". That, and the constant use of the word "bitch" by the ostensible goodguys cuts right to the heart of it. The opening scene shows a bunch of little dinosaurs squabbling over something unimportant. The largest one smacks the smaller one down, and feels good for a while. Then the world ends, the bombs fall, and the bigger dinosaur only barely survives by outrunning the others. This imagery recurs. Lucas, Cade's subordinate, is too stupid and slow. Everyone else outruns the blast, and Lucas goes extinct. He's the underdog - the bitch who drives a Mini and can't play football. He believes he's equal but he's not. His forehead is marked 'like a Star Trek alien' - he's inferior. The extinction of the dinosaurs is always presented as a mythic morality play - especially in documentaries. In Dinotasia, one of the greatest dinosaur films, Werner Herzog admonishes the dinosaurs for not being able to look up and realize how futile their day-to-day existence is. There's a cut from the frozen corpse of a T-Rex to the Chrysler Building's gargoyles, saying you're next. However, Dinotasia praises the smallest dinosaurs that survived the apocalypse and evolved into birds. And that's the secret lesson of TF4's opening sequence: the larger dinosaur is still miniscule compared to the T-Rexes and Brontosaurs that get obliterated. It's exactly his 'bitch-like' qualities that allow him to survive. Instead of learning from his example, Optimus resurrects the frozen giants. One more important detail: Galvatron self-identifies as Galvatron. That's not his name; he's Megatron. So why does he adopt this focus-tested, trademarked name? He is acting as a grim parody, deliberately subverting it. Also, Galvatron is presented as a synthesis of Megatron and Sentinel Prime. Brains was hooked up to both of them! SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 19:51
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