Transformers: Age of Extinction
Dir. Michael Bay
Right now Transformers: Age of Extinction has already made over $400 million worldwide, and is likely to become the highest-grossing movie of the year. Despite an abysmal 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 2.5 hour-long runtime, and a mostly incomprehensible story, people around the world will still fork over their money to watch these giant robots bludgeon and blast missiles at identical giant robots over and over again. The problem is that this just fuels Bay's worst tendencies; female objectification and racial stereotypes run amok, characters come and go with no meaning or satisfying arcs, plot literally doesn't matter over the spectacle, and audiences don't seem to care. There comes a moment in Age of Extinction where Optimus Prime, fighting a giant robot T-Rex, hops on its back and starts riding it. Within the context of the movie, this makes no sense, but sense doesn't matter in a Bay film. What matters are what he considers a series of "cool" shots, where literally every frame of the movie has to be filled with unrelenting grandiosity, which in effect makes me, at least, numb to everything on screen.
Maybe it's just me, but I found this movie, despite its constant "epicness," to be completely boring. What makes an action movie, or any movie for that matter, work is to have peaks and valleys. Certain moments where characters have a moment of self-reflection, or some time to build character relationships. But Transformers: Age of Extinction is a bloated, 2.5 hour wall-to-wall explosion-filled, nonsensical mess. By the end of the film, Wahlberg doesn't even invent anything - the one damn thing it seemed like his character was destined to do. I know the public-at-large keeps forgiving these movies, saying "hey, it's based on a toy line, what did you expect? Citizen Kane?" While I understand what they're getting at, I do think a filmmaker as talented as Bay is clearly capable of doing better (Bad Boys II and Pain and Gain are actually solid action movies). It's genuinely upsetting to me that a movie like Edge of Tomorrow, which was a fantastic, fun, smart, non-sequel summer action movie, hardly breaks even on its budget, while a pile of crap like this makes hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars for the fourth time. This is why we can't have nice things, guys.
Seriously, I could rant for hours and nitpick every flaw, but I'll try to keep it brief and just say: this is a terrible film. Not just an "I didn't care for it" film. This is an objectively bad, poorly put-together mess that just showcases Bay's pure unhindered id. It represents everything wrong with Hollywood today, with special effects ruling over story, pandering to the lucrative Chinese audience (where there's a big box office pull) by having everyone travel to China for no discernible reason, and more product placement than I've ever seen in one movie (it wasn't even subtle - at one point Mark Wahlberg stops in the middle of an action scene to suck down a Bud Light). I can't understand why they're so popular, but these Transformers movies aren't going to stop anytime soon, and they'll likely continue to bring in droves of moviegoers for years to come, and that fact makes me want to perform hara kiri on myself.
Rating: D-
The Immigrant
Dir. James Gray
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The "American dream" is one of the most overused movie themes ever. Like The Godfather, Scarface, and hundreds of films before it, James Gray's The Immigrant, starring the acting trifecta of Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Renner, and Joaquin Phoenix (his fourth collaboration with Gray), once again dismantles the idea of starting fresh in the "new world." Beautifully shot by Darius Khondji (Se7en, Midnight in Paris), the movie at times feels plucked right out of history, and despite being a low-budget feature, manages to capture the spirit of the era fantastically. Marion Cotillard gives a great performance as Ewa, an immigrant separated from her sick sister upon arrival at Ellis Island and taken under by Bruno Weiss (Phoenix), a sort of pimp/ringleader of a vaudevillian-type show. But things get murky when Bruno's magician cousin, Emil (Renner), starts to fall for her.
While the style and performances elevate the film to a watchable status, I don't think this has much new to say about the demystification of the American dream, and to say it moved at a snail's pace would be an insult to snails. I didn't really buy or care about the relationships with the characters, although all three leads gave solid performances (especially Cotillard, whose daily struggle comes out in both big and subtle ways without being just purely a frail victim). I don't think the script was anything amazing, and often I just wanted to press a non-existant fast forward button, but if you have the patience, the acting and cinematography alone are worth checking out The Immigrant for, if this sort of thing is your bag.
Rating: C+
Deliver Us From Evil
Dir. Scott Derrickson
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Although it had its fans, I was not a big fan of Scott Derrickson's Sinister, which I found to be incredibly predictable, cookie-cutter horror (with the exception of the very opening shot). So when the Deliver Us From Evil trailer was released, and the selected scenes included a bevy of "cookie-cuttery" moments, like a little girl looking under her bed, a priest performing an exorcism, and the lead character not "believing" in spirits, I just assumed the worst. But surprisingly, I found some fresh ideas here; the film basically takes your typical cop drama and interjects all that typical supernatural horror stuff into this other genre, which provides at least a slightly different perspective on the same crap we've seen before. Eric Bana and Joel McHale play two cops: McHale is a wise-cracking tough guy from Boston and Bana is slightly more hard-edged and has a sort of "radar" to let him know when a case is "juicy" or not (in other words, this movie's Shining ripoff). But the camraderie between McHale and Bana was fun, and had the film sustained that relationship through the rest of the film, focusing on the cop-end of things instead of introducing the priest character (Edgar Ramirez) and yet again going through the same "faith" schtick that's been overdone since 1973's The Exorcist, it could have been great.
The actors do elevate the material, but the film gets so bogged down in cliches that by the end I didn't really care what happened. The entire last third of the film seemed to be one long exorcism that felt like it went on and on forever without introducing anything new to the genre. Cops or not, an exorcism is still an exorcism. I would've liked to see more of the procedural "cop" genre implemented here - what we do get to see is fun, but there simply wasn't enough of it. With Sinister, Devil's Due, and even the over-praised The Conjuring, I feel like the only wide-release horror flicks we're seeing today are all the same thing repackaged over and over (although Oculus from earlier this year was a breath of fresh air), and though Deliver Us From Evil brought a few cool ideas into the mix, it didn't quite deliver on its intriguing premise. Overall, not a horrible movie, but cliched and mediocre all the same (and Olivia Munn, playing Bana's wife, was terrible).
Rating: C
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