Transformers Gets Dretful Review

My favorite sort of movie review is the kind that totally pans a movie, but somehow makes you want to see it even more. i09's review of the new Transformers movie is just that sort of review:

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that [director Michael] Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane.

Every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height.

In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

I need to see this movie.

The Lives of Soccer Players

The Iranian soccer players who wore green armbands in a World Cup qualifying match in solidarity with the protesters have been "retired" from the team. Yglesias makes a very astute connection to the tactics used by the East German government, as displayed in The Lives of Others, one of my favorite films:

One of the things The Lives of Others does very well is illustrate how a dictatorial regime that prefers to stay in power through “soft” methods can use the threat of destroying people’s careers. Instead of being put on trial and executed, becoming a martyr for the cause, you can just be rendered unemployable in the field of your choice in a decision nobody has to publicly defend but everyone understands. You become, then, not an imprisoned hero, but perhaps just an apparently pathetic person—in the movie it’s a theater director who can’t direct—a cautionary tale rather than an inspirational example.

This is not the martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the peaceful protester shot dead by the regime's thugs, but it is a sacrifice all the same. These players must have known full well there would be consequences, the ending of their careers possibly the mildest scenario imaginable. Whatever the result of this situation, its legacy will be a hundred thousand stories of courage. I hope someone tells them again, someday.

Star Trek 2.0

The new Star Trek was far better than I expected. Far better than it had any right to be, really. I don't think the experience would be improved by reading reviews beforehand, but if you must, Peter Suderman's got a solid review over at Reason, and Jonah Goldberg's got a positive but somewhat curmudgeonly opinion at National Review (with spoilers!). Jonah's a stickler for internal consistency, and I'm not, so most of his negative comments didn't really bother me. One thing that does stay consistent throughout the Star Trek canon is the bizarro rank structure of Federation Starfleet, in which the top handful of ship's officers are regularly required to undertake away missions requiring hand-to-hand combat. Jonah comments:

I always wanted to write an SNL skit called “What if Gene Roddenberry Wrote World War II.” The whole war would involve Churchill and FDR karate chopping or neck-pinching their way across Europe, all the way to Hitler’s bunker, where FDR and Hitler would find it necessary to fight in a gladiatorial pit with long spears.

The Lost Symbol

Anthony Sacramone has somehow gotten his hands on an advance copy of Dan Brown's just-announced DaVinci Code sequel and kindly shares a summary:

The Catholic Church has a rogue monk/priest/canon lawyer/legion of Mary tractarian out to kill a select group of Masons who possess the key that unlocks the code that reveals the secret of the ancient riddle that solves the mystery that will uncover the conspiracy that hid the truth about the cabal that obscured the meaning of the cryptic script that when deciphered will unveil the face of the man who died to protect the arcanum embedded in the Masonic symbols, which, if made public, will shake the very foundations of the Catholic Church, rendering the papacy a spent force and reduce several hundred million Catholic laypeople to mainline-Protestant status.

Of course, they've already got the movie deal.

A Great Movie

Bruce Gee reviews The Lives of Others, one of my very favorite movies, over at Pagans and Lutherans. My own review finds its way into the comments.

See Slumdog Millionaire, No Matter What Rushdie Says

Salman Rushdie is a brilliant author, but he's apparently a bit deficient in irony. He recently criticized the plot of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire as a "patently ridiculous conceit". The conceit? That a boy from the slums of Bombay could have an incredible series of experiences in which he learned precisely those facts he needed to win on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". Unlikely? Of course. But "patently ridiculous"? Mind you, this two criticism is from an author whose most celebrated novel begins with two men who survive their jetliner exploding 35,000 over the English Channel, and who won the Booker Prize for a novel whose protagonist has telepathic powers by virtue of his superhumanly runny nose.

Postscript: If you haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire, please do. It's easily the best movie I've seen in several years.

Hollywood Comes to St. Olaf

My alma mater will be part of the backdrop for the new Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man. Set in the Twin Cities suburbs, the story focuses on a middle-American college professor in the middle part of the 20th century. The directors needed some classrooms that fit the image of mid-60's academia and found a fit in the fortuitously vacant Science Center at St. Olaf, which has just been replaced with the opening of the New Science Center Regents' Hall (that'll take a few years to sink in, after everyone calling it the New Science Center for the last half-decade of planning and construction).

Live-Blogging 10,000BC

While I was up in Baghdad recently I bought a hajivision DVD of Roland Emmerich's prehistoric epic 10,000BC. I didn't so much want to see it as enjoy the experience of tearing apart the anachronism, just a few minutes in, it's as bad as I expected. I do still want to see it, but I don't want to feel like it's a complete waste of my time, so I'll be live-blogging it. Spoiler alert. Like you care, because if you take my preemptive advice, you won't see this movie.

• I can't quite place the imagined location. Everything would speak of Eurasia to me, what with the mountains and mammoth and such, except our heroes just reached a jungle full of giant, flightless birds of prey. This could work, in South America or New Zealand, except that the bad guys ride horses, which are strictly Eurasian in antiquity. Oh, nevermind. This movie is clearly not trying to be taken anywhere nearly that seriously.
  

• Speaking of the bad guys -- tall pale figures with straight hair and aquiline noses who ride horses and terrorize those who don't -- we actually do seem to be looking at a semi-believable imagining of the Indo-European expansion in Eurasia, which many scholars believe was facilitated, if not defined, by the successful (and likely unique) domestication of the horse. In which case, go us. Am I allowed that sentiment?
  

• Forget the issue of location, now they're coming to a desert. This within a few days walking of the jungle and the snow-covered mountains, remember.
  

• Ooh, and our hero just saved a sabre-toothed cat from a trap, after asking it not to eat him, Aesop's fable-style. Oh, and now it's defused a confrontation with a bunch of Zulus, who conveniently have a prophesy about "the one who speaks to the spear-tooth", who will lead them in battle against the horsemen.

• I'm already seeing the whole ideal of this film coming together. We've got the standard celebration of primitive society and over and against the degradations of "civilization". It's the same thing we saw in Apocalypto, except that movie was executed with far more depth and resonance. It only makes sense the man who brought us The Day After Tomorrow would be pretty down on civilization. And there are those out there who -- understanding that "stopping global warming", or even any serious attempt to do so, means locking a billion or so people in dire poverty -- have an urgent need to romanticize "traditional lifestyles", by which they mean "abject squalor" and which they, of course, have no intention of emulating.
  

• Ooooh, all the brown and black people are joining together to rescue their captives from the evil white horsemen. They're marching across a massive desert to get there. Good for them.

• Now we've reached the city of the horsemen, which shows some remarkable architectural achievements for the early stone age. I suppose, when you've domesticated the mammoth to help build your pyramids, things are easier. So are these supposed to be the builders of the Egyptian pyramids? Plausible (minus the lingering location issue) except that Egypt always had a surplus of native labor. Most musings about the pyramids wonder about how they managed to get enough people to build them, but never seem to consider the possibility that they were built precisely because Egypt's leaders needed something to consume the excess labor of a heavily populated land whose climate leaves four months of the year free of agricultural labor.

• So our hero's captive love interest bears scars that mark her as the one prophesied to portend the collapse of the god-king's evil civilization. How perfect.

• This is feeling more and more like a ham-handed, Hollywood-ized Apocalypto, with precious few of that film's strengths. Sad.
  

• Yep, there's the climax, pathetic attempt at meaningful tragedy included. Oh well, there was some nice imagery, it's always pretty cool to see CGI mammoth running amok through a stone-age construction site. I'll pay $1.50 for that any day of the week. Even if it's got that videotaped-in-the-theater look of the lower-grade hajivision.
  

• So, wait a minute, where exactly was the city surrounding the temple complex and pyramid? Or were a few dozen priests and a few hundred slave-drivers all that was necessary to constitute a pyramid-building civilization? I can't be the only person who noticed this. I suppose the temple complex could be a ways out of town, I could see that being convenient for the god-king.
  

• Nevermind, forget about the pathetic attempt at tragedy, because the person we just thought had died just got saved by a mammoth looking really intently in her direction and sorta waving his trunk. It could only have been a better moment if his trunk had lit up like ETs fingertip.
  

• The movie ends with one of the black tribes (from the desert) giving the gift of agriculture (which apparently is nothing more than a handful of seeds) to the hero's tribe (from the snowy mountains) to replace their lost food source because the mammoth aren't migrating any more (for no explicable reason). Does any of my farming and gardening readers not see this working out quite as rosily as the epilogue implies?
  

• Ah, credits. God be praised. So yeah, don't see this movie.