{"id":579,"date":"2007-07-05T00:35:18","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T00:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=579"},"modified":"2007-07-05T00:35:18","modified_gmt":"2007-07-05T00:35:18","slug":"happy-4th-of-july-autobots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=579","title":{"rendered":"Happy 4th of July, Autobots!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love your United States of America! With your Albert Einstein and your Rosa Parks and your Michael Jordan and your HBO! Hell yeah!
\nI was reluctant to join Pearce for the Transformers movie, so he called my bluff and said he’d pay for the tickets. So that was how I marked July 4. It wasn’t so inappropriate – the truck dude is all Red, White and Blue, and there are rockets red glaring and bombs bursting in the air and such.
\nAnyway, if you’ve listened to the rather amazed chatter, you’ve already heard that the Transformers movie isn’t so bad. This is true. It is quite entertaining. It may be the second-best movie based on an 80s toy franchise.* I can confirm that it has some snappy dialogue, an acceptable teen-romance angle, neat comedy, and giant robots blowing up lots of stuff. I can also confirm that it makes not the remotest bit of sense and takes place in an alternate universe where they siphoned all the common sense out of everyone and then burned it to make endless, beautiful sunsets.
\n(There is also an entire plotline, about a quarter of the movie, that should have been cut. It mostly involves a sexy Aussie genius not eating donuts while Dick Cheney orders scientists about, and its about as much fun as that sounds.)
\nBut aside from all that, I just want to say this about the director Michael Bay: he gets everything wrong. Everything. In some future time, his work will be studied as a masterclass in failure. Dude just can’t tell a story using words and images, which is kind of a problem. It is frequently impossible to understand what is happening – where the characters are, what they are doing, where they are moving and why. One “dramatic” chase scene went:
\n*mid-shot of teenager running*
\n*mid-shot of robot moving*
\n*mid-shot of teenager running*
\n*long shot of sunset*
\n*mid-shot of robot moving*
\nHuh? What? Who’s chasing who now? The fight scenes are even worse. Everything is shot in mid-range with this frustrating roving camera and cuts every second (literally, every single second). It’s just metal bits wrangling other metal bits at insanely high speed, and then an explosion or someone running through the frame screaming. On and on and on.
\nAnd as for those iconic robots themselves, the franchise heroes – only one of them gets any kind of decent reveal, and that’s within the first five minutes of the movie. The first appearances of all the rest are just dull. A lot of the time they just turn up in frame and a-ha! He’s a truck! Cutaway now!
\nAs cinematic storytelling, it is an unmitigated disaster. There is no value or meaning in the sequence of images, there is no way to transform the cuts you see into a coherent scene without thinking hard and using clues in dialogue or inferring backwards from outcomes. The dude can’t direct AT ALL.<\/em>
\nSo, my recommendation: don’t see it, unless you really like transforming robots, or Pearce buys your ticket. It isn’t bad – Ebert gave it three stars, even – but, man, I’ve only been home 30 minutes and already the whole experience is evaporating like mist in the morning. Just not worth it.
\n* Frank Langella as Skeletor. Just sayin’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love your United States of America! With your Albert Einstein and your Rosa Parks and your Michael Jordan and your HBO! Hell yeah! I was reluctant to join Pearce for the Transformers movie, so he called my bluff and said he’d pay for the tickets. So that was how I marked July 4. It … Continue reading Happy 4th of July, Autobots!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-9l","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}