This is what I'm talking about.
I couldn't possibly get behind a lot of what Kai Nagata has to say, or else I'd be ready to take my hat and go, too. But I understand. He's even younger than me, but to him the state of TV news is untenable, and in quitting with this very public dispatch, he's articulated what many of us might feel in our most cynical moments. Cynicism in this industry is peculiar because, as Nagata demonstrates, it runs hand in hand with a kind of idealism for what it could be.
A lot of good can come when someone with promise tips out the door so early, and so loudly, reminding us that the status quo is not mandatory. I hope a lot of people with pay grades higher than mine take his criticisms and at least ponder them a while.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Review: Transformers - Dark of the Moon
Strike three, Harry Knowles.
His perspective on film being entirely dependent on the screening's circumstances, Knowles winds up with some weird conclusions about the movies sometimes. Last year, I read in disbelief as he tried to pass off the credibility of a negative review of Inception with the caveat that he hadn't slept the night before and was barely mentally present during the screening. Still, that was last year, so 2011 was a clean slate. Briefly.
This year, he gave a glowing pass to X-Men First Class, which was not a bad movie, but also not a great movie, and not even the best of the X-Men films (for me, that title still belongs to X2). Prior to that, a review that came down favourably on what I thought would be the worst movie I'd see this year - Sucker Punch. But it's still 2011, and I'm now hard pressed to say which Harry Knowles-approved film was worse - Sucker Punch or Transformers 3.
It's subtitled 'Dark of the Moon', which ties into the plot, but I think some better names might have been 'the third, longer, one' or 'Frances McDormand needs a new summerhouse'. Michael Bay has a way of getting good actors into terrible films - I can't believe that Ewan MacGregor is at once the actor who starred in The Island in 2005 and also the one who starred in Beginners this year. I know Bay also casts bad actors - or models, when actors point out how bad his movies are and have to be cut loose.
Transformers 3 takes a problem I experienced with X-Men First Class and amplifies it considerably. Lurking within the over 2.5 hour chore of this movie is some good entertainment. Not great, but certainly the entertainment I had hoped to find once again, it having been missing from this series since the first film in '07. The original managed to be way more fun than either sequel, possibly because the first level of exposition in this universe is way less convoluted than the plotting developed since. But here, even worse than in the previous sequel, whatever good fun was to be had is utterly buried. There is about an hour of this movie that could have been left on the cutting room floor. An HOUR. That means that you could have taken, say, $70 million of this movie's near $200 million budget and just made another, big budget film.
All that is to say that by the time this movie made it to the setpiece destruction/occupation of Chicago, I was already checked out. As one friend pointed out to me, this is going to give a number of people exactly what they want from a trip to the big robot show - there are robots, and they're big, and it's all very showy. In a very un-Michael-Bay style, a great number of the shots in this film's action sequences are longer, to allow the eye time for the much-insisted upon 3D effect (someone must be insisting on it, but it's not me, and it's not anyone I know). The result is that you have many more opportunities to stare at the lavish, almost impossible to conceive effects.
Along that point, my last point, I guess I should thank Michael Bay - he has completely quenched my appetite for mindless effects pictures. I haven't walked out of a movie feeling this exhausted in - ever. In the whole run time of Transformers 3, there was not one second where I cared about any character, ever. That has become completely required for me to enjoy this kind of thing on any level. Not that long ago, I caught Super 8, and that movie was full of spectacle - but it also had a ton of character in it, and was magical in that way that requires you to have a sense of wonder, to share it with someone on screen. Maybe that's what's so tiring about Transformers now - in the past two movies, no one's ever stopped to go 'wow! - huge talking robots!' - it's all been there, done that.
His perspective on film being entirely dependent on the screening's circumstances, Knowles winds up with some weird conclusions about the movies sometimes. Last year, I read in disbelief as he tried to pass off the credibility of a negative review of Inception with the caveat that he hadn't slept the night before and was barely mentally present during the screening. Still, that was last year, so 2011 was a clean slate. Briefly.
This year, he gave a glowing pass to X-Men First Class, which was not a bad movie, but also not a great movie, and not even the best of the X-Men films (for me, that title still belongs to X2). Prior to that, a review that came down favourably on what I thought would be the worst movie I'd see this year - Sucker Punch. But it's still 2011, and I'm now hard pressed to say which Harry Knowles-approved film was worse - Sucker Punch or Transformers 3.
It's subtitled 'Dark of the Moon', which ties into the plot, but I think some better names might have been 'the third, longer, one' or 'Frances McDormand needs a new summerhouse'. Michael Bay has a way of getting good actors into terrible films - I can't believe that Ewan MacGregor is at once the actor who starred in The Island in 2005 and also the one who starred in Beginners this year. I know Bay also casts bad actors - or models, when actors point out how bad his movies are and have to be cut loose.
Transformers 3 takes a problem I experienced with X-Men First Class and amplifies it considerably. Lurking within the over 2.5 hour chore of this movie is some good entertainment. Not great, but certainly the entertainment I had hoped to find once again, it having been missing from this series since the first film in '07. The original managed to be way more fun than either sequel, possibly because the first level of exposition in this universe is way less convoluted than the plotting developed since. But here, even worse than in the previous sequel, whatever good fun was to be had is utterly buried. There is about an hour of this movie that could have been left on the cutting room floor. An HOUR. That means that you could have taken, say, $70 million of this movie's near $200 million budget and just made another, big budget film.
All that is to say that by the time this movie made it to the setpiece destruction/occupation of Chicago, I was already checked out. As one friend pointed out to me, this is going to give a number of people exactly what they want from a trip to the big robot show - there are robots, and they're big, and it's all very showy. In a very un-Michael-Bay style, a great number of the shots in this film's action sequences are longer, to allow the eye time for the much-insisted upon 3D effect (someone must be insisting on it, but it's not me, and it's not anyone I know). The result is that you have many more opportunities to stare at the lavish, almost impossible to conceive effects.
Along that point, my last point, I guess I should thank Michael Bay - he has completely quenched my appetite for mindless effects pictures. I haven't walked out of a movie feeling this exhausted in - ever. In the whole run time of Transformers 3, there was not one second where I cared about any character, ever. That has become completely required for me to enjoy this kind of thing on any level. Not that long ago, I caught Super 8, and that movie was full of spectacle - but it also had a ton of character in it, and was magical in that way that requires you to have a sense of wonder, to share it with someone on screen. Maybe that's what's so tiring about Transformers now - in the past two movies, no one's ever stopped to go 'wow! - huge talking robots!' - it's all been there, done that.
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