Academy
Monday, July 09, 2007
What's amazing about these sped-up Academy Award winning films is how well they lend themselves to the technology used to create the effect. The newer the movie, the louder it becomes, the more like ghosts, and the more frightening.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:38 PM, ,
Transformers
Saturday, July 07, 2007
1) I can't think of a better scenerio for a movie than one in which ordinary cars and stereos fold themselves 10,810 times (that's the number of moving parts it takes to animate Optimus Prime, according to the press release) into humanoid robots with an innate sense of good and evil. 10,810 times! But wait--Transformers is also directed by Michael Bay, who may be one of the few big-name directors left in the non-French-speaking world who still create explicitly ideological movies. Which is to say that the man wakes up in the morning and says, not, how am I going to put bread on the table while avoiding the authorities, but rather, how can I make this Japanese toy franchise (or whatever) meaningful? How can I make exploding cars with lips and eyes celebrate American Freedom (or whatever)?
And so, like the proverbial lab rodent, the freedom-system-obsessed mind of Micheal Bay burrows and is zapped and corrects itself in clear-plastic intestinal vacum tube maze of ideological reasoning and becomes by all measurements smarter. Yes, Bay is smart, or seems to be: he's obsessed with surface and cinematic time to the degree that his movies become uniformly hollow and weird. His characters wheel into and out of this plotless surface like empty vessels who refer more often to freedom than to the things and events around them. One leaves his films unable to talk about anything other than movies. He's the American director most like Godard.
2) I remember the toys. They did not fold anywhere near 10,810 times, which was good, because their numerous little joints and hinges were exceedingly fragile and probably couldn't have taken that much folding. I remember taking some pleasure in adding to thier chassis little stickers which identified them as good or evil. I would do this even before the first transformation, possessively brand them with their little stickers, which over the course of a week's worth of play would begin to peel and fray slide down the plastic. As robots they did not stand up on thier own and could hardly move their arms, and once the hinges began to wear out and the doors fell off, their car forms would begin to droop and melt, too, like something out of "The Persistance of Time." They did not dampen or otherwise harm my sense of imagination, nor did the repetitively plotted cartoon that played every afternoon to get me to desire and personalize them. I remember adding a particularly tired Transformer to a collection of superheroes I had designed to occupy a fort I had made, complete with a working elevator, out of Quaker oats cannisters and shoeboxes. The Transformers, as toys, were mostly disappointing, but filled me with a desire, especially after they'd worn out, to buy a new one. They were probably good preparation for summer blockbuster watching.
3) John Voigt as Donald Rumsfeld before his dismissal, rolling up his sleeves and crisply barking orders. Contrast with John Turrturo as George Tenant: hyper-explicit shot of an American car standing up on two legs, fumbling at its crotch, unzipping a sort of fly, and urinating motor oil on the head of the officious "information officer" as he ("What the...?!") sputters and dances in the stream. That's how we sacrifice our lambs in America, douchebag.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:05 AM, ,
