Monthly Archives: June 2009

Transformers 2: ROTFL (Review)

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Last night I had a dream.  It was so scary, so soaked in anxiety, that it woke me up at around 4:30 a.m.  So maybe I should say I had a dream this morning.  It started off innocently enough.  I was standing in some kind of steep hall, with friends, watering the carpet with a garden hose.  Some kind of thing, it was either a polar bear or a malevolent ice cream truck, was playing around at the bottom.  Naturally, we hosed it.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

Virtuality: Pilot or Movie?

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Fox ran a “movie” called Virtuality tonight.  Produced by Ronald Moore, the genius who crafted Battlestar Galactica, I thought it would be worth a look.  It skitters dangerously close to rehashing things that have been done well already, but there is a core of original thought going on here.  In fact, if things evolve in directions different than the obvious, this could turn out to be great.  With Ronald Moore behind it, you have to allow for that possibility.

It does steal from some good movies.  The opening scene is an obvious reworking of the Outlaw Jose Wales.  Several scenes evoke 2001, and Solaris is also hanging over the whole thing.  The downside is, as several internet commentors pointed out, the Star Trek holodeck.  Almost every holodeck episodes was bad.  The pure invention of the holodeck was an acknowledgement that the writers were running out of ideas.  But, if virtual reality was introduced a different way, somehow making sense in the story, it worked even in Star Trek.  One of the best episodes had Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a couple others trapped in a replay of the OK corral.  Except they were on the losing side, and they knew it.

The thing about Virtuality is that it doesn’t work as a movie.  Most of the time is spent introducing characters, then introducing a couple plot elements, and staggering around one decision, which we always knew.  But it didn’t end, not really.  The official story is that it was written as a pilot, but Fox nixed the deal and aired it as a stand-alone.  But it’s not a stand-alone, even a Fox exec knows that.  Fox may be evil, but they specialize in satisfying television audiences.  This did not.

My theory is that Fox knows people will want more.  They want to buy the show, but to make it a success, they want to be pressured into it.  Create a fan-base, a buzz, a demanding group of outsiders.  They’re willing to be the bad guys, so that we can force them to do something in a way that makes them another pile of money.  And if it doesn’t work, they aren’t out much, just a Friday night movie that did okay.

True Blood (first two episodes)

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I like Vampires. (as literary tropes, not as actual beings, of course.)  I like nudity.  Also–this is unrelated–I like Anna Paquin.  Or at least I think I do.  I also like the occassional mind-reading story.  I really, really like the name: Sookie Stackhouse.  It’s an awesome name.

Maybe someday I’ll grow to like True Blood.  But, two episodes in, I’m struggling.

The premise, which seems to have spread through script-writers like a plague, is the vampires have largely given up their bad, bad ways, and want to live among us.  Like regular people, except sexier and more dangerous.  More like pro athletes, I suppose.

Sookie Stackhouse, played by the somewhat adorable Anna Paquin, can read people’s minds.  Most of this mind-reading seems to be picking up the bad guy-thoughts that float around her trim body.  Guys, in her world, either think about sex in a really creepy way, or are somehow too pure.  Or gay.  Naturally, since guys are too disgusting to date if you know what they’re thinking, she has given up.  Until she meets a guy whose thoughts she cannot read.  Naturally, he’s a vampire.

Now, I know a lot of guys, and I don’t think we fall into the two or three categories allowed for by this movie: creepy predator, hopeless romantic, or gay.  In fact, most of us do think about sex, and we think about affection, and romance, and videogames.  Some of us even think about the world around us.  Also, I know a lot of women.  They KNOW we think about sex.  To a woman, they know a lot more about what men think than the writers of this show.  Or at least the writers of the mind-reading parts.  And they still seem to like us.

Anyway, why do I like Anna Paquin?  I’m not sure about that part, either.  She was chilling in The Piano, but after that, nothing stands out.  Sure, she was the tragic, untouchable mutant in the X-Men, a role that seems to have prepared her for this, but Rogue wasn’t that great a character even in the good X-Men movies.  Now she seems kind of generic as the good-hearted waitress in a sea of not-so-good people.  At one point the vampire asks what kind of thing she is, because she’s not as vain, stupid, greedy as the rest of the cast.  Maybe she’s just normal?

I suppose I’ll watch a couple more episodes.  There are two characters I like, her brother, and her friend, Tara.  But I can’t see how these secondary characters can hold up the show if the leads continue to be self-absorbed in their own “unique” goodness.