Transformers: ROTFL (2009)

Come on, now. Shame on you for trying to review this movie, Jacob. This movie is indifferent to opinion. This is the king of Shamelessness. With this sequel, Michael Bay has officially established himself as an auteur of bad taste. He is the Bill O'Reilly of filmmakers, a businesssman disguised as an artist, and he is laughing his ass off to the bank.

The idea that there is a race of aliens capable of highly advanced technology that somehow managed to shape themselves in the models of automobiles from a planet they just discovered is...really...fucking...stupid. But who cares? In fact, who cares about the human actors in this movie? I didn't. At all. I only found myself wishing I existed within this universe of Bayhem. Every girl adds a new classification to "hot". There are explosions every minute, and no one ever gets hurt. Entire cities appear to be anything but intact in a matter of seconds. It's a 2 1/2 hour car commercial.

I prematurely guessed before the movie started that there would be close to 50 solid explosions. Forget that: I'm pretty sure there were hundreds. This is why I cannot condemn the movie. It's not a movie; it's ADHD porn. It's smut, no worse or better than buying People magazine. It's a movie that may have been made w/o a script. Don't believe me? Someone came up with a MacGuffin called The Matrix of Leadership. It was at this point that I started thinking about The Power Rangers Show. It's the same level of cheese.

And you know what? I'm rooting for this movie. I'm rooting for it like I root for Michael Bolton. Of course it's bad; no shit. You can walk into a beautifully rendered and well-kempt McDonalds. It doesn't change the fact you're still ordering a Double Quarter Pounder and McFlurry. I hope it makes a shitload of money. It's not taking itself seriously at all; like the Automabotatonalots, this movie is an advanced machine. It's mindless, and like Lady Gaga, soulless. It's here for a good time. It's a two hour, one night stand, which is way more time than most of us can brag about.

Indy

Literally 5 minutes ago, I just saw Harrison Ford walk 20 feet away from me. He's shooting a movie called Morning Glory with Rachel McAdams.

Cardboard Raindrops.

They were the darkest eyes he'd ever seen.
Midnight snow.
When the night feels like day
and the day feels like night.
Purple leaves falling on the brush of a bed.

He couldn't help but feel confused by those eyes,
their purity conflicted with the steel of a hideous ring.
And the poison of an innocence corrupted.
All around him, the poison seeped through
Million dollar cars and million dollar smiles.

But the eyes remained,
Hard and blazen in the night,
Black as the charred moth.
White as the ruffled sheets.
And he couldn't help but wonder
Why the stars existed tonight, tonight,
While Midnight snow blanketed the ghost Sun.

Dialogue From a Night

In the middle of a Kings game.

Drunken Girl: "Never have I ever done it up the butt."
Giggles, Chortles, and a few fingers go down.

Jacob: (swinging for the fences). Never have I ever been on an airplane.

Everyone's fingers go down. A blatant attempt to separate himself from the upper class.

Across the table, a Jew in an orange polo stops his annoying (but still successful) attempt to get inside a girl's pants. He looks at me, and then back at her. He is aware that she and I go to JMU.

Orange Jew: What kind of kids are you hanging out with down there?

The girl clearly feels embarassed that she is being associated with someone of the middle class. She looks at Jacob and her cheeks redden. She is somewhat humiliated. She looks back at Jew and rolls her eyes. An hour later, they will be in a bedroom together. But before that, Jew will challenge Jacob to a race. Jew's father's Porsche apparently goes really fast. Jew, however, is unaware that Jacob drives a van. Jew goes along with Jacob's challenge until he realizes that Jacob is joking.

Jacob finishes his drink and walks away from the table. He proceeds to stand by the counter at this point and pour Jew's vodka into his drinks. Despite the blurriness, Jacob has a distinct understanding of who he is, what he is.

Whatever Works (2009)

At the beginning and end of the movie, Boris Yellnikoff, the most recent embodiment of the Allen hero, looks helplessly at the camera and waxes his laissez faire philosophy: Whatever works. And it holds true. Whatever you can cling to in this fucked up universe, take it. The cliches about love and success are exactly that, cliches. We take whatever we can get because we can feel the infinity of chances disappearing into the night. The absurdity of true love is a tagline for a Hallmark card.

At least, according to the painful pessimism of Boris, a man who gave up on aspirations strictly so he could speak down to them. I think he would have preferred the "possible Nobel nomination" rather than winning it himself. It's fun to make excuses when they're not really there to begin with.

Have you ever seen Woody Allen speak in interviews? He sounds nothing like his writing. He, himself, comes off as extremely serious and articulate. He doesn't stammer or yell or constantly self-deprecate himself. You can detect the artist within him that wants to make a point. I'm amazed at how he takes the serious existential fears of life and reduces them to side jokes. The influence of Bergman is clearly there, and Allen is fast to pinpoint it. Like Tarantino, he wants you to see the reference. And then he spins it.

And Whatever Works does that quite nicely. It takes a sad story about a man who acts like Gollum, who has pushed everything away just so he can insult it, and tells a quaint love story that is too hard to believe. There's no way anyone can find his insulting nature attractive, but even Boris pinpoints this absurdity. So for a 16 year old beauty to fall in love with him, to defy virtually every odd, well...why not? The most touching scene involves Boris' realization of their luck. How did she get to him in the dark of the city streets? And not only that. Born decades before her, what magic allowed her to travel through time into the dark hours of the night and on his couch?

It's exactly this existential musing that attracts me so much to Woody. He finds the right cue for love because of its inexplicable nature. Its ability to confound us humbles us every time. But in this movie, I sensed a lackadaisical nature towards the great questions that often put the director to torment. For Allen, this is a fairy tale, and like every good fairy tale, there certainly exists "the horror! the horror!". But everything comes together nicely at the end. Relationships are lost, suicide is attempted, cheating, homosexuality, it's all there. But it's not serious, because to take love serious is murder. For humans to step out of their egocentric boxes and observe that this happens all the time, that love unites in the strangest places. One of the main themes is that the x-factor of Luck plays a massive part in love. We take what we can get. We ride the wave until another one comes along. Should we be mad at each other for this? Ehh, what's the point? The pendulum swings, entropy crashes in, and we find love through the shards of a broken window. Don't try to plot your life. Take the hits as they come. Smile. As Alvy would say, we need the eggs.

Up (2009)

Let me get this out of the way. The first 10 minutes of Up are the absolute best work the company has ever done. Period. Better than the celestial moondance between Wall-E and his Eve. Better than their classic short, Geri's Game, and better than the coral reefs of Nemo. It is utterly heartbreaking material, and in their recent style, most of it is silent. A montage of the married life of Carl and Ellie (her grown self doesn't even have a speaking part in the film), it is the most poignant and sincere romance that I think I've seen at the movies. It reminds me of Charlie Chaplin's romance in City Lights; I was sitting in the theater weeping.

Pixar has mastered a style of emotional gesture that is only capable through animation. The characters in Up are not realistic, but they move and respond within the emotional boundaries that we as human beings have a fundamental and instinctual understanding of. Notice the way Carl crosses his heart in the film; he does it many times. As a child, he does it very fast and honest, trying to keep up with Ellie. He moves faster than a human is actually capable of, but because it's animation, he moves with the rhythms of the human heart. It's stunning to see it, but it's hard to notice, because it feels so natural to us. Pay attention to it. It will come back throughout his life, and it will never be as fast and as pure as when he does it as a young boy.

The opening scene also continues Pixar's tradition of presenting adult material within the context of a kid's movie. There is a shot that may surprise some filmgoers. It takes place in a hospital, and I couldn't help but wonder what the kids were thinking as they saw that. How bold of them to do that, and it adds so much gravity to the opening montage. Also, the shot of them in the cornfield is heartbreaking. It's on an incline, with Carl at the top, and Ellie struggling towards him. No words, but we get the message.

After the opening scene ended (I've included the absolutely essential soundtrack by Michael Giacchino), I thought that the film just could not maintain that level of excellence. And while the film is good, it only recaptures the purity of the opening scene a few more times towards the end. THe rest of the movie is a romping, escapist, fairy tale that is plain fun. And funny. The movie has some great humor within it. Dug is very very funny, a lot better than the disappointing Bolt. However, I have to say that I was somewhat conflicted with the talking dog aspect of the movie. While I thought Dug was funny and inventive (they have started integrating the oddball techniques of Hayao Miyazaki), I thought that it took away from the poignancy of the story of a man on a quest. It didn't have the right hue as the rest of the story. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that the conflict of the movie almost felt superfluous. I didn't respond to Charles Muntz like I responded to Carl. I never once felt restless when Carl and Russell were on the screen, along with their animal associates.

But this is all being too harsh on the movie. I was so uplifted from Pixar's maturity with Wall-E last year, that I was taken aback when they went back down to the more playful level. This movie is outstanding, an absoulute joy. I'm so relieved that Hollywood is starting to go away from post-apocalypse. Up is as far away from Wall-E and Terminator and The Road and etc etc as you can get. And I'm thankful for that. It's only fault is that it's not as fully conceived towards one vision as Wall-E was; rather, it's a limitless barrage of colors and ideas and emotions that reaches strictly for the heart. It's a triumph of the spirit. Don't feel bad if you cry!

Miss Havisham and Estella

"What have I done! What have I done!" She wrung her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. "What have I done!"

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and willthat reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which bad become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

-Great Expectations, Chapter XLIX

I think this might be the passage that forever cements Miss Havisham's poor soul into the canon of my memory. Abandoned on her wedding day, she never lets go of the anguish of being wronged. She stops the clocks at the exact moment of her devastation and closes all the windows in her now shrouded and shadowed mansion. Being wronged was worse than murder, for she still has to go on living this horrible existence. She still wears her wedding gown as she wafts in and out of the haunted rooms, never surrendering her victimization. When Pip meets her, she is fully lost in her lamentation, but she has brought someone with her. Her adoption of Estella revealed a chance for Miss Havisham to seek vengeance against those that ran away with her life. She weans Estella to adopt a heart of ice; through Miss Havisham's teachins, Estella is fully incapable of love. She destroys men around her, possibly without even realizing it. Her nurture has been the love of a vulture, the care of a siren.

Naturally, Pip falls madly in love with her. Who wouldn't? She sucks him in because he is easy prey, and she feeds off his attention. And the relationship, sadly, seems parasitic; all he receives from her is anguish and devastation. And it is not until Miss Havisham sees this anguish fully wrought in Pip's face that she realizes what a terrible mistake she has made. All her life after her fiance left her, her only imput towards the world was the furthering development of her vengeance against men; through Estella, she could control and break them. Yet, seeing all of this happen to Pip brings back the memories of what happened to her. Vengeance is a deadly retribution because when it's over, there usually isn't much left. She never sought equilibrium; no, those who seek vengeance want to tilt the pendulum back their way.

And what's most astonishing about the passage is Pip's awareness of Miss Havisham's poor life. How terrible for her to have to undergo such humiliation, only to dedicate the ruins of her remaining life to something that had to extend to his character. I think he's witnessing the tragic futility of revenge on the innocent and the guilty. At first, he wants to tell Miss Havisham that, indeed, her influence on Estella has ruined her and broken Pip's heart. But his anger only hurts Miss Havisham more, and he realizes this. He watches her and sees how hollow her vengeance has made her, twisting her into a Gothic monster with a broken heart. She reminds me of Belle's beast, whose suffering comes not from being a monster, but from having a conscience hidden beneath his deformation.

I think of the horrifying image of Miss Havisham sitting in the shadows in her wrinkled wedding dress, now yellow from the passing of time. Sitting in the dark, she strokes the hair of Estella, her weapon of mass destruction against the villains that wronged her. I think of that, and then I think of the woman who wanders the halls of her mansion at night with a single lit candle, running from the past that refuses to leave her. What a poor, poor, soul.