The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Tony Scott's remake lacks any and all suspense (as do nearly all his movies despite his penchant for thrillers), but he also finds a surprising resonance in the material. Blessed with a superbly written script, Scott tones down his usual madness and lets his actors do most of the work. Oh, he still can't help himself at times, but Scott puts his talents toward a sense of visual pacing and structure that uses the battle of wits between Garber (Denzel Washington) and Ryder (John Travolta) to slyly bring out back story and sociopolitical themes.

Travolta hams it up to no end, playing ex-con stock trader Ryder like the demon of Wall Street unleashed below the city, his outrage at serving time for his white collar crimes well-timed to the outrageous entitlement displayed by the real stock brokers who took all kinds of shortcuts to make a fast buck. Garber too is guilty, but we see the disparity between them, greed motivating one and financial desperation the other. Washington and Travolta have the awkward task of playing off each other mainly through long-distance radio communication (an analog take on the potential for meaningful friendships through Internet communication?), but they make for one of the richest hero-villain pairs in years and get across some unexpectedly keen social commentary to boot, even if Travolta oversells it. Supporting players John Turturro (as an arrogant negotiator), James Gandolfini (a scandal-ridden mayor) and Luis Guzman (a former MTA employee nervously helping Ryder) also deliver solid performances.

Scott frames his film with flattened compositions, a beautiful array of neon-lit streaks of blue, red and green, and Scott's "Big Board" fetish realized by the flashing subway map back at Rail Control (a board framed, like all of Scott's giant screens, as a means of both clarifying and abstracting action). Yet despite his usual touches of altered speeds and on-screen text, Scott's aforementioned ease off the throttle shows that his love of visual style does not blind him to seeing and focusing on the great chemistry between Washington and Travolta. In fact, as a movie about a sedentary narrative spruced up by slick, action-oriented direction, I found The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 to be not only more tasteful but more emotionally affecting than Danny Boyle's slick con job 127 Hours.


Sidenote: I don't know if Travolta decided to play Ryder as a flagrant homosexual or that's how the part was written, but if and when he ever comes out of the closet, expect this movie to be gutted for clips on late-night shows. Dressed like he just came from a gay bar, Travolta finds ways to be even more suggestive. Describing a teenage hostage to Garber, Ryder notes his outfit and tangentially throws in "he makes it work" before getting back to the threats. Talking with one of his cohorts about Garber, Ryder bypasses the fact he doesn't know what the man looks like and says, "He's got a good voice, though; he'll be my bitch in prison." Bless his heart; he seems to know he'll never be a star again and at least balances out his usual tat with unorthodox performances in this and Hairspray.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011)

If there is any sliver of decency in this universe, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third entry in the most crass, vile and offensive big-budget franchise in Hollywood history will be its last. If it is any better than the series' previous installment, that is only because it sublimates its racial, gender, political and aesthetic travesties into an even longer, more interminable celebration of reactionary ideals. For a series predicated on the idea that some things are more than meets the eye, the Transformers movies represent one of the least varied, consistently shallow sagas to ever hit the big screen: Transformers 3, like its predecessors, is a masturbatory affair, perhaps even more so than the execrable Revenge of the Fallen. Whatever shred of humanity existed in these films is obliterated, leaving only an unadulterated tribute to He-Man masculinity in response to hysterical conservative perceptions of the Obama era.

Sam (Shia LaBeouf, whose increasingly greasy look in each film he does suggests he hasn't showered since Even Stevens got canceled) saved the world and brokered an alliance between man and Autobot, but no one will give him a job out of Ivy League college. The poor guy has to settle for an absurdly large D.C. apartment and being supported by his disposable new girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), whose car-collecting boss, Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), openly flirts with her in front of Sam, further emasculating our hero. Compounded by the American government having locked Sam out from communicating with the Autobots, he needs a complete world invasion of Decepticons to let him prove his manhood, raising the question of just how many people need to die for Shia LaBeouf to feel comfortable about his dick size.

The film opens with the most crass, avaricious distortion of historical footage since Forrest Gump to turn the moon landing, a genuinely awe-inspiring event that continues to provoke wonder and human pride today, into a front for investigating a spaceship crash. Turns out, Prime's predecessor, Sentinel, crash-landed on the Moon 40 years ago, carrying with him an important weapon that would have decided the Civil War on Cybertron. Now, the Autobots must retrieve the deactivated Sentinel Prime and the device before Decepticons discover the ship.

That's all the plot background you need, really. However, those who continue to absolve Bay as someone who caters to experience over story sure are ignoring the endless pile-ons of narrative threads and convolutions that affect all the Transformers films but this 155-minute slog most of all. Dark of the Moon is really no different from its predecessor, only bigger. But that increase is all proportional, so while the climactic war for Earth might be on a larger scale than what came before it, it takes up about the same percentage of screen time.

Ergo, we get more individualist hokum as all government officials are yet again portrayed as feckless, spineless bureaucrats holding back Sam and the Autobots from getting the job done. We also have to sit through Sam's usual relationship drama, albeit this time with a character simply dropped into the franchise and given no development; Bay's idea of character establishment for Carly is a tracking shot closed in on H-W's ass as she walks up a staircase to greet Sam. And we also get endless exposition, told-not-shown mythology for a bunch of goddamn toys that eats up at good hour and a half of the 2.5-hour movie.

Bay might have subtracted some of the more onerous aspects of Revenge of the Fallen, but he's only found all-new ways to make the same dumb movie. Bay frames so many shots from low angles that after a certain point it seems less an affectation to stress the heroic properties of the Autobots and Americans than the result of getting rid of the tripod for budget reasons. The 3D looks good but is still nothing more than an add-on, and one can only make out snippets of stereoscopic depth because of the usual editing and compositional clumsiness. In fairness, Bay does lengthen the shots, though it seems the average shot length of his action moments has gone from .8 seconds to one whole second. (An integer? Oh, Mr. Bay, you spoil us with your 24 frames!) And when a shot is held for one of a seemingly unending series of slo-mo shots, the constantly moving parts of incoherently smashed together Transformers turn what are meant to be moments of gasp-inducing wonder into headache-causing confusion. ILM had their job cut out for them with Tranformers, animating hundreds of moving parts on each robot, but I've come to regard their work as something similar to overzealous scientists in outbreak movies: they were all so eager to see if they could make something so frame-collapsingly complicated that they never bother to ask if they should.

Even by Bay's standards, the disregard for acting here is horrific. Huntington-Whiteley makes Megan Fox look like Meryl Streep: she says her lines as if reading cue cards without her contacts in. I'm worried about sounding paternalistic here, but frankly, this isn't her fault. She has no experience and no charisma, but that's what Bay wanted, and it's not like she has much of worth to say anyway. Bay met her while shooting Victoria's Secret commercials, and this may be the first case where more was demanded from her for a lingerie shoot than acting in a big-budget film: the women in Axe Body Spray commercials have more meaningful lines than Huntington-Whiteley does here. Saying she should have known she was just there to be hot and to get suitably dirtied up is akin to saying she was "asking for it," and at this point I feel sorry for anyone who has to work with both Bay and LaBeouf.

Besides, why pick on her when she appears in a film with a whole host of people who ought to know better? Frances McDormand and John Malkovich join fellow Coens alum John Turturro, who unfortunately returns once more to speed-talk his way through pompous, histrionic lines. Malkovich coasts on autopilot, taking off from his forcefully smug condescension to reach a cruising altitude at manically infatuated with robots. McDormand's performance is better, but she fares worse for being the bureaucratic punching-bag who keeps a leash around the Transformers' wrecking-ball testicles until she realizes that she should have let them run rampant after all. Ken Jeong appears to add another Asian stereotype to his C.V., also hinting at aggressive homosexuality for a couple more yuks. The best actor here is Buzz Aldrin, brought out of retirement to excuse Bay's tacky appropriation of one of the true feats of American exceptionalism. Aldrin, a true American hero who has experienced the true awe of space travel and exploring the unknown, has to paint a look of overwhelmed reverence on his face to talk to a pocket of air to later be filled in by an unimaginatively humanoid alien. Now that is a performance.

And so, Dark of the Moon is another arduous foray up Bay's vas deferens, a wantonly destructive paean to distorted, boot-in-your-ass American shit-kickerism. Autobots never fight more than 50 yards away from a American flag billowing behind them, and they even seem content to kill Arabs for Uncle Sam. Hell, Megatron, who keeps coming back from total annihilation because the source material has a dearth of other standout villains, even wanders around the desert wearing a cowl over his half-destroyed, almost leprotic face like an Arab terrorist organizing a sleeper strike. And finally, we have Sentinel Prime, the revived Autobot leader who clearly becomes an Obama stand-in, surrendering to our enemies. Of course, the only group to whom Obama has actually capitulated are Republicans, but Bay paints Sentinel as a weak appeaser letting terrorists come in and destroy the world just so he can say he brokered a deal for the greater good.

Bay loves a good apocalypse under Democratic presidents, forcibly tearing apart any liberal globalism so America alone can triumph in the end and prove reactionary politics the only true virtue. Of course, in real life, America flourished in peacetime under Clinton and Obama had bin Laden shot in the face, while Bay has done nothing more than make obscenely expensive, morally bankrupt commercials for General Motors. So let me modify an earlier statement with its obvious true meaning: the human race does not face extinction so Sam Witwicky can feel better about his masculinity but so Michael Bay can feel like a big man. Like Bill O'Reilly, who appears in the film, Bay is loud, obnoxious, and posturing; he uses the achievements of others to promote his own cult of personality and disguise how little individual might he truly demonstrates. In a sense, Dark of the Moon stands as Bay's masterpiece, the auterist statement to make irrelevant the idea of auterism as the predominant measuring stick for film as an art form. It is the Tree of Life of shit, a career-summarizing monument that definitively proves Michael Bay is not merely an awful director but a repugnant human being.



Addendum 6/30: The more I think about this film, the more I find it incredibly disturbing that the carnage of the final act, in which Chicago (incidentally Barack Obama's home turf) is ripped apart by Decepticons in the absence of Autobots, who essentially hide to teach humans a lesson about not respecting them. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people die, just so we'll appreciate our robo-allies. That is profoundly messed up.

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011)

I will not ask why Cars 2 exists because I've seen the merchandising figures from the first film. Nevertheless, it's a question I couldn't force out of my mind while watching this two-hour bore. After a string of ambitious, beautiful films that established Pixar as one of the most respected studios on Earth, they finally sink to the sad state of their bosses at Disney. This isn't a film, it's a preview of coming attractions at a theme park. I didn't stay through all the credits, but I nearly did just to see if it ended with an advertisement to come check out Cars Land next year at Disney California Adventure.

Underlining the sheer cynicism of this film's conception is the near-total lack of characterization. John Lasseter, whose erstwhile evocation of the young, winsomely childlike George Lucas here brings out the mercenary side of the Star Wars creator, transparently structures the film to avoid personal connection in favor of selling toys. Forgettable as the first Cars was, it at least spent time with its characters; Cars 2 throttles past the drama between Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his loving but tiresome best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), preferring instead to get in as many new vehicles as possible to make sure Disney's merchandise wing ends this year in the black.

For whatever reason, Cars 2 plays out both as a world-spanning Grand Prix and a spy movie, forcing incessant cuts between McQueen's unimportant exhibition match and an insultingly simplistic spy mystery that even a child could guess within the span of about 10 minutes. The two threads converge over a new alternative fuel pushed by a reformed oil tycoon (Eddie Izzard), the race sponsored by Axelrod to test and promote his new product and the spy stuff uncovering a plot by Big Oil to protect its interests. You thought the environmental message in Wall•E was on the nose? At least that was part of a beautiful and beautifully told story; here, Lasseter just ladles on some social commentary in the midst of his choppily edited action sequences.

There's something profoundly disturbing about the perception of this film as Pixar's most kid-friendly movie, considering the casual gun violence sprinkled throughout. Other Pixar movies contain danger and more ambitious ideas, but that doesn't exclude them from children. This film, on the other hand, is insipid and shiny and hollow, Pixar's first great capitulation to ADD. Because it makes no effort to get the audience to care about any character, Cars 2 can have fun with its explosions and gunfire without worrying about a child getting upset. Compare the banal "suspense" scenes of contrived danger here to the wrenching near-death of Wall•E: if Lightning McQueen suddenly contracted HIV (CIV?) I still wouldn't care about him.

Admittedly, Cars 2 has the decency to sport some of Pixar's strongest animation. Like its predecessor, the film offers the animators a chance to particularly hone their lighting work, and Cars 2 at times outstrips the look of anything the studio has done. The belched flames of oil refineries look even more real than the swirling inferno of Toy Story 3's incinerator, and the animated Tokyo might be even more dazzling than the real thing. But nothing ever wows in this movie. Whatever magic Tokyo might have held is instantly dispelled by the stereotypical humor used for cheap laughs (hahaha Japanese toilets are confusing!), while the nature of the Cars universe continues to be so vexing I can never connect with it.

Why do the cars eat when they seem to fill up like real automobiles? Who built any of this world without hands? Are the vehicles born or manufactured? (I think the answer to this one is both, depending on the setup.) And why are there shitting metal detectors in an airport? I know it's a cartoon, but that only means this childish response is all the more appropriate: I don't like this world. I don't like its meaningless, undeveloped characters. I don't like its villains all cheap models like Gremlins and Pacers, an unfunny joke period and certainly one that won't work on children. I don't like its environment, meticulously animated solely for visual and spoken puns and never given flavor and personality the way Ratatouille's Paris, Wall•E's trash-ridden Earth or the various playpens of the Toy Story movies are. And I don't like its puerile, inconsistent humor, none of which connects because the characters are so undefined they provide no anchor for the comedy.

Cars 2 wants to tread in the same waters as the first film, stressing the importance of friendship, but Pixar already developed this theme with far greater resonance in the Toy Story pictures. And with Mater jet-setting around with British spies Finn McMissile (Michael Caine, the only person even trying to give his character some flavor) and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), Lasseter never even bothers to flesh out Mater's insecurity and hurt feelings save for clumsily inserted scenes of reflection. And don't even get me started on the rivalry between McQueen and Italian F1 racer Francesco (John Turturro), a mutual dislike so dull that the filmmakers can only hope that we care about who wins based on past familiarity with the American car.

Cars 2 will make its money, perhaps even faring a bit better overseas now that it adds more European and Asian models, but if every Pixar film sets out to prove some artistic or moral point, Cars 2's message seems to be open, cynical confirmation that the studio truly can make not merely a weak film but a dismal, greedy one. Be sure to bring a copy of your disappointment with you to California next year, everyone; you'll get a Fastpass for half price.