Ramon Rodriguez seems like kind of a cool guy. He was on Rescue Me, he was on The Wire, and apparently he can balance a spinning basketball on a pen he’s holding with his teeth.

His role in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a classic Michael Bay-style annoying sidekick role; half the time he’s an arrogant jerk, and the other half the time he’s a jabbering pussy. But no matter. According to the L.A. Times, Bay was quite impressed with the actor:

Director Michael Bay has a third “Transformers” film in mind, and if it plays out as he expects, the next installment would have a more substantial role for Rodriguez. The filmmaker, speaking at his office a few weeks before “Revenge of the Fallen” was released, seemed to have some pride of discovery when talking about Rodriguez.

“I’ve worked with big stars, people like Will Smith, Sean Connery and Bruce Willis, but casting is a weird thing, it takes you places you don’t expect,” Bay said. “We went looking for a sidekick in this movie, Shia’s sidekick, and we find this new kid who really pops on screen. I think he’s going to have a real bright career. It’s great to work with big stars, but it’s always fun to discover people.”

So it looks like we’ll be getting a lot more of Leo in Transformers 3: Rise of the Revenged Fallen Again Plus More Robots We Couldn’t Fit in the First Two.

A few recurring themes have popped up as I’ve poured over the reviews for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  #1: it’s not as good as the first.  #2: it’s really loud and has a lot of explosions (no, really?).  And #3: it’s mind-blowingly racist and misogynistic.

I know, I know, we all want to have a good time here.  We just want to see a movie about killer robots!  Who cares what the stuffy critics in their stupid critic land of stupid critic opinions say!

I’d be all for that point of view…except, I’ve seen it, and they’re right.  It’s absurd.  Read any random review and you’ll find lines like these:

NYTimes:

…the introduction of two new Autobot characters, the illiterate, bickering twins Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), both of which take the shape of Chevrolet concept cars. The characters have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas. For what it’s worth, the script, by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, also includes a crack about Simmons, who’s coded as Jewish, and his “pubic-fro head.”

Ebert:

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines…

L.A. Times:

“Revenge” is strictly a man’s world…Although there are female Autobots and Decepticons in the Transformer universe, they are rare and none make it into the movie.

(That’s actually mistaken — there’s one female Autobot in the movie who has one line and is promptly killed.)

AICN:

…the frightening sidekicks of the film and the mistake this film will most likely be forever known for: Mudflap and Skids…Oh. My. God. They speak in clichéd urban slang, tossing around phrases like “I’m gonna pop a cap in your ass” while fist bumping and mumbling unintelligently in a voice that sounds like a bad Chappelle Show sketch. Then you get a close up. And they each have bug eyes and a gold tooth. Then there’s this jackass comment about them not being able to read. My jaw was on the floor.

Variety:

…a college whose students all look like twentysomething actors, and whose frat parties seem to take place at expensive strip clubs. In fact, on his first night out, Sam is treated to a sort of lap dance by a Decepticon posing as a nymphomaniacal freshman.

The Hollywood Reporter:

…Fox has little to do except look great in a tank top and tight jeans while running in slow motion…

The Associated Press:

The only robots with any discernible personality traits, aside from bravery or antagonism, are the Autobot twins, Mudflap and Skids. These are shockingly crass and unfortunate black stereotypes, jive-talking fools who can’t read and bumble their way from one mishap to the next. They are Jar Jar Binks in car form…

Those are the first seven media outlets I thought of, by the way.  There was no picking and choosing.  It was just a matter of skimming through the review and finding the token part about how offensive the movie is.

For my two cents, I was focused less on Mudflap and Skids (I guess I’ve become desensitized to alien racial stereotypes after the Star Wars prequels — not just because of Jar Jar but also because of the Neimoidians) than I was on some of the subtler offenses.

Example? Every woman in the movie is either presented as a complete imbecile (Sam’s mom — seriously, it’s painful) or a sex object.  There’s a scene near the beginning of the movie where Sam’s moving into college, and on the move-in day, students and parents and boxes everywhere, the only girls you see are ones walking in and out of the bathroom wearing nothing but towels.  That’s not hot; it’s pathetic.  There are also constant references to Megan Fox’s hotness (including a mini-Decepticon complaining “you’re hot, but you ain’t too bright”), so much so that it gets tiresome.

As for the racism, you can talk about Mudflap and Skids, but how about Tyrese Gibson’s character?  He gets fourth billing, which might make you think he’s got a decent part.  Sorry to disappoint.  He has about ten lines in the entire movie, all of them typical black sidekick comic relief stuff.  The good-looking white soldier (Josh Duhamel) is the one who actually gets to do everything.

When the original Transformers was released in 2007, it became the surprise hit of the summer: it opened on a Monday evening, and by the following Sunday it had made $155.4 million dollars.  Final tally? $319.2 million.  (And that’s the domestic gross alone.)

The reviews were also solid — for a summer movie, anyway.  Of all the reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes, 57% of them were positive.  RT’s consensus?  “While believable characters are hard to come by in Transformers, the effects are staggering and the action is exhilarating.”

In other words, it was a classic example of a good Michael Bay movie.

Not to be preaching doom on a site called Transformers Movie Buzz, but the responses so far for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen seem to indicate that it’s a bad Michael Bay movie.

For a direct comparison, the Rotten Tomatoes score is now at 21% — 31 positive reviews versus 115 negative reviews.  But it’s the content of the reviews themselves that tell a bigger story.  Ain’t it Cool News, the granddaddy of movie fanboy sites, has four different editorial reviews up, and they’re all negative.  Here’s a taste:

The film is padded by an hour of completely unnecessary, worthless, offensive and repugnant sequences that do nothing but tread water. Be it the family dogs f***ing, twice. An extended sequence of Mom hopped up on pot brownies on a reefer madness binge. Then we’ll talked about racist foul-mouthed robots that are built in monkey proportions, have a big shiny gold tooth and do nothing to advance the story an inch.

And:

[A]ll this leads to the worst sin of the film. It’s called TRANSFORMERS. And yet, 90% of the film is spent entirely with the above collection of tools and occasionally Bumblebee who has mysteriously lost his voice again. Sure, the film OPENS with Optimus Prime and all the badasses from the previous film. But they’re barely in this film at all. It’s more about Shia and Megan running around, collecting incompetent sidekicks while half-assing their way through an Indiana Jones plot. Ironhide? Ratchet? They’re all back at the base. They could only spare a pair of sambot jackasses for THE MOST IMPORTANT MISSION, LIKE, EVER!

If you prefer your reviewers established and respected, here’s Roger Ebert’s one star review:

“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.

Well hey, it’s inspiring new creative insults, so that can’t be all bad. To end on a positive note, here’s Owen Gleiberman’s “B” review for Entertainment Weekly:

At last year’s Comic-Con convention, several representatives of Revenge of the Fallen appeared with the slogan ”Bigger. F—ing. Robots.” on their T-shirts, and Bay, taking that cue, knows just what his job is relative to the first Transformers (2007): It’s to make the movie huger, louder, smashier, and — on the mechanical level — more crazily, audaciously imaginative. He succeeds…Revenge of the Fallen may be a massive overdose of popcorn greased with motor oil. But it knows how to feed your inner 10-year-old’s appetite for destruction.

Fun Fact #1: He’s not quitting Tranformers 3.  Despite a flurry of rumors to the contrary, they’re only rumors.

Beyond that, though, one of the keepers of MichaelBay.com posted the following list of cool trivia details about the new movie:

Robots

• 14 robots last time, 46 robots this time (ILM only)
• If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
• Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
• Devastator’s hand is traveling 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.
• The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
• All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles
• Devastator’s parts stacked tip to tip would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.
• If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.

Disk space

• TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
• 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

Rendering times

• If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
• A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
• IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

Imax

• Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
• Imax frames take about 6 times longer than anamorphic to render.
• IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

ILM screen time

ILM Screen Time is about 51 minutes.

Devastator

• Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.
• Devastator has more than 10 times the number of individual parts found in an average car.
• Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.

Devastator totals

• Number of geom pieces: 52632
• The total number of polygons: 11,716,127
• The total length of all pieces: 73090 feet
• The total length of all pieces: 13.84 miles

A little something for everybody here: the Devastator, the pyramids, the Fallen, and even a little skyscraper battle.  Plus Megan Fox.  Because she’s the breakout star (apologies to the kid with the hand cast, whom I like, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’t have boobs) and Transformers photo galleries feel strangely empty without her.

We’ve still got two weeks to go before Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opens in theaters, but the Hollywood is tracking the film closely and all signs point to a huge debut.

It opens on a Wednesday — June 24th — so it won’t break the three-day opening record that The Dark Knight set with $158 million last summer.  But it will almost certainly make more than that over its first Wednesday to Sunday span.  Rival studios are pegging the debut at $175-180 million, while Paramount itself is aiming for around $160 million.

The sky’s the limit, really.  Today, Deadline Hollywood Daily reported that ROTF is accounting for 21% of all online ticket sales.  And, again, that’s two weeks before the movie comes out.

Paramount was smart to choose June 24th as its opening day.  Its second weekend will be Fourth of July weekend, and while moviegoers tend to stay home on July 4th itself, they heavily go to the movies in the surrounding days.  That means Revenge of the Fallen’s second-weekend drop might be soft compared with other summer blockbusters like Wolverine (which dropped 69%) and Terminator Salvation (which dropped 61%).

As part of the publicity blitz for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Megan Fox recently had a sit-down with Entertainment Weekly that resulted in a four-page article.

On acting:

I tried [to act well]. But unless you’re a seasoned veteran, working with Michael Bay is not about an acting experience.

I can’t s— on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don’t want to blow smoke up people’s ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting.

On her looks:

I think all women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. That’s what our purpose is in this business. You’re merchandised, you’re a product. You’re sold and it’s based on sex. But that’s okay. I think women should be empowered by that, not degraded.

On why some women don’t like her:

Sure, for the same reason they didn’t like me in high school. I come across as confident and they assume that means that I think I’m hot s—. And that makes them feel bad about themselves and so they hate me.

On the topless photos of her that leaked from the set of Jennifer’s Body:

Well, I wasn’t topless. I had booby stickers on. They make these silicone stickers that go on over your nipple. If I’d been actually topless, I would have sued someone. But that’s a really unfortunate thing that happened. I know who [alerted the paparazzi] and I never did anything about it. It’s her karma to deal with, not mine.

Shia LaBeouf and his Eagle Eye/Disturbia director DJ Caruso had long been planning on tackling a big-budget adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn’s graphic novel series Y: The Last Man, but recently LaBeouf dropped out of the potential flick — citing Transformers as the main reason why:

You take Sam and you put a monkey on his shoulder, [and] I don’t know if it’s that big a differential. It seems like he’s the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation again… I’m not willing to make that movie currently, and may be too old to play the role by the time it does come around.

[via Wizard Magazine]

LaBeouf would’ve played Yorick Brown in the flick, the last man on an Earth full of females after a virus wipes out everyone with a Y chromosome.  His main companion?  A monkey named Ampersand.

That currently leaves only the inevitable Transformers 3 and the John Grisham adaptation The Associate on LaBeouf’s schedule.  Course, both are pretty big projects.

The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen soundtrack will hit stores on June 23rd, according to MTV, and the track list looks just about as generic-rocky as it could get.  Green Day, fine.  But do we really need yet another soundtrack featuring Taking Back Sunday and Nickelback?  No, no we don’t.

I’m also completely illiterate when it comes to new music, so the fact that I actually recognize ten of the thirteen bands might be a sign that the list is a little stale.

Nope, sorry, but I don’t recognize Cavo, Theory of a Deadman, or Avenged Sevenfold.  Oh, they play that song that’s been on the radio and in clubs nonstop?  Sorry, I still don’t know it.  I didn’t know who Fall Out Boy was until well after everybody was sick of them, and I immeditately didn’t like them after learning their name had nothing to do with the Fallout games.  But enough about me.  Here’s the tracklist:

1. Linkin Park “New Divide”
2. Green Day “21 Guns”
3. Cavo “Let It Go”
4. Taking Back Sunday “Capital M-E”
5. The Fray “Never Say Never”
6. Nickelback “Burn It To The Ground”
7. The Used “Burning Down The House”
8. Theory Of A Deadman “Not Meant To Be”
9. The All-American Rejects “Real World”
10. Hoobastank “Don’t Think I Love You”
11. Staind “This Is It”
12. Avenged Sevenfold “Almost Easy”
13. Cheap Trick “Transformers™ The Fallen Remix”

When the TV spots arrive, you know the movie’s not far away.  These three for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (all packaged in the one embedded video below) are pretty solid as far as thirty-second ads go; like all TV spots, they reuse a lot of footage from the full trailer, but if you look closely each one has its own distinct theme.  Check ‘em out: