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SuperMechagodzilla posted: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. 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.
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Oct 9, 2013 17:32
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Hand Knit posted:Everything Bay has done is interested in, in one way or another, masculinity. The idea of masculinity he puts forward is a usually a virtue-based idea where the true man is interested in his own excellence and doesn't approach women as objects to be merely used, or held on to as status symbols. One of the clearest scenes depicting this is in Pearl Harbor. At the end of their date before he is shipped off to war, Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale stop in front of a hotel room. Beckinsale asks if he wants to go up to her room, to which Affleck responds that he "doesn't want to be like those other guys." As he says this, one couple walks in the revolving door while another exits. This is most likely why his films tend to contain a lot of titillation but little actual sex. Sex requires looking at both participants clearly being subjects but Bay prefers to depict his women as subjects buried underneath many layers of objectification rendering them socially impotent, a theme served by the use of titillation. Though I imagine anyone who criticized him for not wanting ScarJo topless was probably just disappointed they didn't get to see ScarJo topless.
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Oct 11, 2013 20:49
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Hand Knit posted:I do not think that he has any preference for that sort of depiction, given his presentation of Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbor, Liv Tyler in Armageddon, and (so far as I can remember) Tea Leoni in Bad Boys. It's simply that when he wants to tell a story involving an insecure man or culture that insists on objectifying women, he appears to have no problem with presenting the unvirtuous point of view. Haven't seen the other two, but I'm smacking my forehead at forgetting Armageddon. There you have Bay depicting actual tenderness between a man and a woman. The Transformers series and Pain & Gain just make the idea of romance seem so inherently crass I'd forgotten that it didn't account for every movie he's ever made.
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Oct 11, 2013 22:28
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Well if you attempt to watch Transformers 2, one of the things you may notice is that it's borderline unwatchable. In the theater I found Transformers 2 headache inducing, particularly the final segment in the desert. I felt like the kid in The Men Who Stare At Goats that Spacey doses and assaults with strobes. (Yes I'm aware The Men Who Stare At Goats came out afterwards, I'm just making a point.) It was sensory bombardment. I think one of the more unfortunate things about these movies is that in the first film there's that little montage of the Autobots coming to Earth and assuming various forms based on quick scans of the internet. Pretty much the entire cultural context of the characters across all the films stem from this idea, but it whizzes by so fast it doesn't seem particularly important at the time. Two years later it probably isn't going to come to mind and Transformers 2 doesn't do much to reinforce it. The Twins being so egregiously racist puts the onus on the film to make any symbolic role the characters play really worth it. The themes being present elsewhere in the film in Jetfire or the Constructicon doesn't really justify the Twins so much as it renders them unnecessary.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:17
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Basebf555 posted:I think part of the problem is that every time marketing is brought up nobody wants to talk about it, but in this specific case its very difficult to separate Transformers from its marketing and target audience because they came built into the franchise before Michael Bay ever decided to do the first movie. So he could have made the most thematically complex film possible and it still wasn't likely to get through to a large portion of the audience, a lot of them almost certain to be children. Comes down to what you think kids can handle, and how sheltered you think they should be and for how long. The problem is all the arguments against the Twins have been contextual rather than textual. Here let me make an attempt at a textual argument. The Twins playing a subordinate role to the other autobots to draw a parallel between the media depictions of lower class black culture and the exploited working classes makes only the most obvious point about race and class privilege in that it only manages to point out that it exists. It lacks any sort of real insight beyond that. As such while it could be said to be anti-racist it is a wholly ineffectual anti-racism. Masturbatory even. Ash1138 posted:The scans weren't always quick. Bumblebee can't speak because he saw the goatse side of the internet. Ratchet can't fix it because he doesn't know what caused it. How could you truly describe that to someone? If Bumblebee could vocalize his thoughts, it would be a blood curdling scream He knew enough of both the English language and American popular culture to construct sentences out of audio samples. That alone doesn't make you incorrect, but he couldn't have only seen the "goatse side" because he had a grasp of various films, tv shows, and songs. Regardless, it's only a minute or two of the run time and doesn't seem as important in context as it actually is. Doesn't make it bad, just makes it a difficult reading to see at first glance.
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Jan 23, 2014 22:03
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Ensign_Ricky posted:I honestly wouldn't mind that kind of nod....except that it would mean that we'll never seen actual Unicron. It's for the best. Orson Welles is dead.
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Mar 26, 2014 22:20
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Is the pdf in a form where it's completely up to date including the analysis of the design for the robots as well as the look at the cartoon movie from the '80s?
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Mar 31, 2014 16:49
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:I think the latest version is in the OP. I checked it, it has everything but the stuff on the animated movie.
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Mar 31, 2014 17:25
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Leospeare posted:Here's the link to download the EPUB file (23mb - probably the biggest ebook file I've seen!) Thank you so much. Now that we have a good definitive version compiled I'm going to show it to my non-goon friends.
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Mar 31, 2014 19:06
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Milky Moor posted:It's too grandiose. Like it or not, the Transformers films have been fairly grounded amongst the everyday life of the common man. Unicron would set a fairly different tone. Given the all new cast of humans, a shift in tone may be in store.
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Apr 18, 2014 15:46
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Milky Moor posted:Given that this is Bay's final film (sadly!) it is certainly possible. I personally think the whole Unicron/Primus thing is one of the goofiest parts of the Transformers mythos and I'm not particularly fussed about it being included either way. I don't see this iteration of the Transformers becoming more epic or universal in scope. Wait final film ever or final Transformers? If the latter, well he said that about the last one. Which is part of what makes me think this one will be a lot different from the other one's because he was probably bored of the franchise going into this.
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Apr 18, 2014 16:08
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Shyamalan has a consistent visual aesthetic to his films. They all feel like a gloomy rainy day to me, which I do not enjoy. This aesthetic also seems to permeate the line delivery in all his films. I would say they are humorless and joyless which undercuts the spiritual epiphany in something like Signs. I didn't see Devil, but from the trailers it seemed to keep this aesthetic. If that is the case, I imagine that is why it is often assumed he directed it. So, who else is predicting Age of Extinction to be the best of the series? With what he learned from part 3 and what he learned from Pain & Gain I'm expecting something very interesting.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:10
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So, is Terry coming back again?
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Jul 2, 2014 15:56
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henpod posted:Is there a thread for talking about this dumb movie and the robots fighting, or is this the only one where we discuss Bay's intentions when that guy was under the enemy's scrotum in the second movie. This thread was about Terry finishing her write up of the first three movies, so the latter I guess.
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Jul 14, 2014 16:33
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