The Battle Over Transformers 2 Continues…

Ever since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened last week, there’s been something of an Internet flame war raging over how good the movie actually is. It’s gone a little something like this:

Critics: Transformers 2 is one of the worst movies of the year.

Fanboys: Critics suck! They want everything to be Oscar-worthy and independent and foreign and don’t like action movies!

Critics: That argument makes no sense at all, and you’re whining.  We weren’t expecting Revolutionary Road.  We just thought it sucked.

Fanboys: Of course it’s bad!  It doesn’t have to be good!  It just has to include hot chicks and giant fighting robots!  And it totally delivered on both counts!

Whose side are you on?  Well, you’re on a site called Transformers Movie Buzz, so I have a guess.  But still, I would recommend you read Roger Ebert’s intentionally-baiting blog post called “I’m a Proud Braniac“, if only to make you angry.  The highlights:

Another common line of attack was disturbing. It came from people who said I was out of touch with the tastes of the audience. That the movie’s detractors (lumped together as “the critics”) like only obscure movies that nobody else does–art films, documentaries, foreign films, indies, movies made 50 years ago–even, God forbid, “classics.” One poster argued that “Transformers” was better than that boring old movie “Casablanca.”

I was informed I didn’t “get” Michael Bay. I was too old, “of the wrong generation,” [...] am I out of touch? It’s not a critic’s job to reflect box office taste. The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own. But you know that. We’ve been over that ground many times. What disturbs me is when I’m specifically told that I know too much about movies, have “studied” them, go into them “too deep,” am always looking for things the average person doesn’t care about, am always mentioning things like editing or cinematography, and am forever comparing films to other films. [...]

It’s true that many Americans have an active suspicion and dislike of the “educated.” They ask, “what makes you an expert?” when they’re really asking, “what gives you the right to disagree with me?”

Those who think “Transformers” is a great or even a good film are, may I tactfully suggest, not sufficiently evolved. Film by film, I hope they climb a personal ladder into the realm of better films, until their standards improve. [...]

The opening grosses are a tribute to a marketing campaign, not to a movie no one had seen. If two studios spend a ton of money on a film, scare away the competition, and open in 4,234 theaters before the Fourth of July, of course they do blockbuster business.

What do you think of Ebert’s comments?  Or has the memory of Revenge of the Fallen already completely faded from your mind, save for that one lone shot of Megan Fox straddling the motorcycle?

Is Transformers 2 Racist and Misogynistic? (Yeah…it is.)

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.

‘Transformers: ROTF’ is Out! And Reviews, Unfortunately, are In…

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.