Transformers: Age of Extinction

1/2* out of ****

Age of Extinction? Though it is rumored that this is the first entry in a new trio of Transformers films, let us hope that this title means something about this unending franchise of seemingly unending movies inspired by toys.

What is wrong with Michael Bay and his Transformers movies? Better yet, what is wrong with me? I just voluntarily subjected myself to his latest entry in this abominable series and I’m struggling to find a way of conveying the level of self-loathing I feel now. I don’t like this series or its director, so it’s fair to say that I already knew it was terrible before viewing it.

The new movie does one thing right by abandoning the needlessly reoccurring -and quite boring human characters from the previous trilogy. Now we’re stuck with new boring human characters while continuing the story of our planet, caught in the middle of intergalactic robot conflicts. Mark Wahlberg plays a down-on-his-luck inventor living on a farm with his hot teenage daughter played by Nicola Peltz. He attempts, without success, to shelter her. Their supposedly funny banter continues throughout the film -even when they get caught in the middle of a war involving evil corrupt black op assassins sent to destroy the good-guy Autobot leader Optimus Prime, who has been hiding in their barn. Yes I also thought of The Iron Giant and wished I’d been watching it instead.

Meanwhile Kelsey Grammer plays the director of a national security program in cahoots with an evil group of alien robots with the mission to purge the Autobots, while a big-tech industry billionaire, played by Stanley Tucci, profits from their destruction by collecting their “transformium” (yes, “transformium”) for new weapons technology.

Follow? Maybe you need to watch all 165 minutes of the movie to get what I’m talking about. Like the latest piece of Spider-Man cinematic garbage, this is a PG-13 movie primarily aimed at kids under the age of thirteen, who will drag their parents to the theater only to lose their attention halfway through its unnecessarily long running time.

Hasbro toy collectors shouldn’t be hopeful for this film’s inclusion of the Dinobots. They barely play a role in the movie. The overall experience is more of the same: Constant low-angle shots of the film’s characters, conflicts that don’t add up logically or emotionally, no sense of pacing, people surviving impossible odds, BLATANT product placement, the depiction of all young women as potential strippers, BAD comic relief and action scenes that are unlikely to thrill and more likely to cause headaches -or indigestion.

One major setpiece involves a high-rise walk on a cable between an alien spacecraft, hovering over Chicago, down to the top floors of the Willis (Sears) Tower.  I saw a lot of potential in this segment. If five of the film’s action scenes had been scrapped in favor of making this particular scene’s effects look more convincing, the movie would have been better for it.

What I think really brings the Transformers movies down, is that in spite of the filmmakers and CG animators’ efforts to loosely aim for realism, the actual Transformer characters destroy the illusion by delivering dialogue and voice acting, which is more true to the silly Transformers cartoon series from my childhood than anything else. No matter how real Optimus Prime looks, veteran cartoon voice star, Peter Cullen sounds like a guy sitting in front of a microphone impersonally reading from a piece of paper (The trailer for the new Bay-produced Ninja Turtles movie suggests a similar vibe for its animated characters as well).

This is also the fourth live-action Transformers movie and if the very presence of Dirk Diggler, in this one, doesn’t inspire Bay to make one subtle humorous reference to the fan-favorite Stan Bush song, The Touch, nothing ever will!

Bay’s successful career distresses me to the point of obsession. Through the careless stupidity of his films and their soulless mayhem, a personality shines through, which I find deeply off-putting. I can name so many reasons for not liking what he does, but I still feel as if there’s an even deeper reason I have yet to discover.

He’s clearly a hard-working director with a lot of technical know-how but he’s as daft as Tommy Wiseau when it comes to making characters relatable. Is Bay as shallow as his movies, or is he the most cynically condescending director in Hollywood history?

MY TAKE ON Seth MacFarlane

Last week, I made a very last minute decision to view Seth MacFarlane’s new film A Million Ways to Die in the West, a comedy that I had been dreading since reading the first bad reviews from reliable critics. This dread was not out of any kind of loathing for MacFarlane. It was quite the opposite. I really like him. A lot of his creations have made me laugh uncontrollably. I simply wasn’t looking forward to the disappointment.

For me, MacFarlane is like a friend whose company you enjoy even though some of your other friends don’t. You try not to let their opinion of him bother you, but whenever he has his lame moments you start to resent him for not being all that he can be.

When he started Family Guy in 1999, I immediately forgave the show for trying to be a more irreverent version of The Simpsons, when I realized that its jokes were great. At this point, Simpsons was starting to get weak and Family Guy, like South Park, may not have been a replacement in quality animation or progressive messages, but it was quite adequate in giving me the laughs I so desired.

Multiple timeslot changes, a hiatus and an official cancellation followed. It seemed as though MacFarlane couldn’t catch a break. Eventually the advent of DVD television seasons and syndicated reruns escalated the show’s popularity. Before long, it was back on and in the few years that followed, it was at its absolute funniest. MacFarlane started new shows but the ones that lasted never managed to grow in a good way. 

Through writing, directing, producing and providing voices, he proved to be something of a cottage industry, but he was bound to stretch himself thin. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t go out of my way to see a new Family Guy. I have no idea if it’s going to be amazing or terrible.

I've known people who have considered his work to be hit-and-miss. I've known others who have never liked anything he's done either because he lacks the skills to package his jokes with any sense of order, or because his humor is mean-spirited. I've found myself defending him, especially when he hosted the Oscars. No matter how offensive his jokes got, most of them made me laugh pretty damn hard. I felt that if Mel Brooks were young again, he would have said similar things.

What bothers me about him now, is that MacFarlane is a businessman without consistency in his products. One of the greatest things his success accomplished was the ability to afford big expensive throwaway jokes, which might require famous actors, higher quality animation or the rights to use music or clips from famous movies. The other greatest product of his success is his huge investment in one of the most important educational programs to air on network television. But that’s another story.

So why does A Million Ways to Die in the West suck? Well, it showcases very little of MacFarlane’s talents and demonstrates that years of multitasking have prevented him from developing any new ones. He still has some rather immature attitudes, especially about relationships between women and men. He’s also never been an interesting storyteller and is at his worst when he needlessly focuses on the narrative aspect of his work to no avail. This is why the final act of the mostly-hilarious Ted suffered. The results of low-brow insanity followed by sincere drama is like watching a Marx Brothers movie and getting a Frank Capra conclusion.

The trailer for A Million Ways had my enthusiasm. The concept of a movie that shoots down romanticized notions the Old West by showing all the disease, starvation, murder and poverty in a light-hearted context should have provided endless laughs. Instead, I counted about four.

MacFarlane can sing, do voices, run multiple shows, make movies and many other things. The problem is that he can’t do all of this alone and maintain the quality that his long-time fans expect or win over new fans by fixing the flaws that have always plagued his work. He needs to make a change. Mass-success can lead to business obligations, which kill creativity. Just look at George Lucas. An ego can do the same. M. Night Shyamalan is the proof in that area. I just hate to see talent go in a horrible direction. 

A Million Ways to Die in the West

*1/2 out of ****

It's come to this: Seth MacFarlane has gathered all his resources to produce a passion project and the results are mostly terrible. How did he go from a functionally funny film like Ted to A Million Ways to Die in the West?

My guess is that his years of multi-tasking are catching up with him in a big bad way. This has already affected his TV shows, but somehow he allowed the movie that contained his first in-person lead role to be rather embarrassing. He also reinforces his reputation for being smug and arrogant by casting the gorgeous Charlize Theron to play a woman who finds him to be cute and funny. Don't try to be so modest Seth. 

The story follows an unhappy sheep farmer who's down on his luck, lost his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) to a rich man (Neil Patrick Harris) and hates the period of history in which he lives (The movie is on the right comic track when he refers to his town's way of life as though he has a 21st century perspective). Out of determination to win his girl back, he meets a mysterious woman, played by Theron, who is good with a gun and teaches him how to shoot after he foolishly challenges the rich man to a duel. During this process, he will realize that Charlize is hotter than Amanda. He also has a best friend, played by Giovanni Ribisi, who is platonically dating a local brothel whore played by Sarah Silverman. 

The movie's mockery of westerns may seem like an attempt at making a new Blazing Saddles, but it made me think of Woody Allen's Love and Death, which lampooned Russian literature. Just like Love and Death, the protagonist is a coward, thrown into an unwanted conflict and must prove himself to a woman who isn't interested in him. The production of that particular film was also quite devoted to an authentic historical tone, which made its silliness funnier.

The difference is that Allen played his role in a more self-deprecating manner, avoided any hint of sincerity and he did his homework. In A Million Ways MacFarlane constantly treats his leading-man status like a self-esteem booster, allows the seriousness of a love interest (Theron) and her villain gunslinger husband (Liam Neeson) to get in the way of the comedy and there is barely a reference to any classic western film.

MacFarlane is great for pop-cultural jokes and I don't know why they're so seldom in this film. Is he trying to prove that he can make good comedy without many of them? No Oregon Trail jokes? He's also great at musical numbers and there's only one, which is okay, but he's done way better.

The movie has a few laughs, yes, but anyone watching this should be able to detect the wasted potential. The beautiful cinematography of Monument Valley, the Elmer Bernstein/Aaron Copland-style score by Joel McNeely and the whole production of this film seems like a great setup where MacFarlane and his writers failed to come through with a decent punchline. 

Edge of Tomorrow

*** out of ****

Edge of Tomorrow is surprisingly engaging -and a rather accessible sci-fi action film. This is a movie filled with ideas and imagery, which will be familiar to fans of the genre. Its ad campaign communicates this so well that the movie may fail at the box office for looking generic. While the movie doesn’t contain anything dazzlingly new, I was reminded that any idea, no matter how familiar or original, requires a good sense of structure and internal logic to work. This is the saving grace of Edge of Tomorrow.

The story takes place in a world ravaged by a war with an alien race. Mechanized war suits have been built to combat the enemy’s speed and strength. A military spokesman, Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is cowardly forced into a battle where he is killed… and surprisingly wakes up to relive the 24 hours leading up to that battle… where he is killed again… and again. Realizing that this is the day the aliens will conquer humanity, he tries to find an alternative approach to beating them.

During the experience of this time loop, he meets a soldier named Rita (Emily Blunt), a.k.a. The Angel of Verdun, who was once victorious against these seemingly unstoppable beings. It helps that she was also once stuck in a time loop where she spent an eternity repeating the same battles while building skills until her ability to start over went away. The logic as to how the time loop works and where it comes from is best left to discovering through the movie.

The two soldiers work out a system where Will can use his time loop to meet Rita every day before the battle happens, re-explain his situation and work on new strategies. The battle is still lost again… and again… until they make a big discovery.

A lot of people have correctly labeled this movie, an action/sci-fi version of Groundhog Day, but it’s not the first time that’s happened. 2011’s Source Code – starring Jake Gyllenhaal - was a pretty gripping thriller about a man reliving the same ten minutes over and over on an ill-fated train. The unique angle I see with this film, is how it shows the time loop in the context of life becoming a videogame where you can die but start over at the beginning of an unbeatable level.

Given that this film is based on a Japanese illustrated novel (All You Need Is Kill) it is no surprise to me that the story deals with multiple abstract concepts. It’s like an anime movie, giving its audience a lot to think about. This story has to balance a future world of high-tech warfare, alien invasion and time travel. It’s a tad convoluted and potentially alienating, but it stays together -mostly due to a tight screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Jez Butterworth and his co-writer brother, John-Henry.

A story about someone who can die without consequence has a lot of humorous possibilities and the filmmakers do not avoid them. Like in Groundhog Day, the editing is clever in establishing inevitable events so they can be skipped over when they’re implied to repeat. The actors make it work too. Tom Cruise knows how to humanize characters in physically strenuous situations. Apparently, Emily Blunt can too. She can do everything. I love her.

I wasn’t blown-away by the film, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems a lot tidier in its execution than most of the blockbusters dished out recently. It has what it needs to be entertaining. If there was any element that failed to elevate the film, it was Christophe Beck’s effective, yet conventional sounding music score.

Before going into this movie, I wasn’t reassured that its director, Doug Liman, would have anything interesting to offer. I liked his first film, Swingers with Jon Favreau and I loved his second one, Go -a character-filled dark comedy about weird happenings surrounding the night of a rave. His early work was so fresh, that I was a little disappointed when the success he found with the first Bourne film trapped him in a world of entertaining, but less-daring big budget action movies. By the time he made the lousy Jumper starring Hayden Christensen and Jamie Bell, I was fed up with the path he'd taken.

Edge of Tomorrow may still be on that path, but Liman is still good when working with a competent cast, good writers and inspiring source material. This may be a timeline where Liman only makes action movies but maybe he could improve his career by zapping back in time, replacing Jumper with this movie and moving from there to projects that better suit his talents.

The Immigrant

**** out of ****

James Gray’s The Immigrant, stars Marion Cotillard as a Polish woman who arrives on Ellis Island in 1921 only to have her accompanying sister quarantined for tuberculosis while other factors give cause for the possibility of immediate deportation. A seemingly kind man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, comes to her help and bribes one of the officers to allow her to leave the island with him. His ulterior motive becomes clear when he slowly lures her in to a life of burlesque shows and prostitution. He convinces her that she can earn enough money through him to get her sister back. Later, she meets a charming magician, played by Jeremy Renner, who wants to rescue her from this terrible life.

I can’t stress how beautifully this film is made while framing a despairing story of someone’s bitter entrance to the “land of opportunity.” In spite of some nudity and language, the film has a very classic tone in its drama and story of hope overcoming harsh circumstances. I highly recommend this one.  

Palo Alto

*** out of ****

In Gia Coppola’s directorial debut, Palo Alto, a family legacy continues. Francis Ford Coppola has handed down filmmaking advice to his family in the same way one patriarch may share secret ingredients or life lessons. It may sound cheap for me to attribute artistic ability to a family name but I can’t help but observe a lineage of ambition in some areas. Francis knew how a scene needed to be lit, what it was about and what needed to happen but if unpredictable crap got in the way, he wasn’t quick to fight it off. This is the reason for a cat in Marlon Brando’s lap during the opening scene of The Godfather.

So… What does this have to do with his granddaughter who has just made a film about wealthy white suburban teens in California? Well, it feels like a film by her Aunt Sofia and a little bit like one by her Uncle Roman. All of these people seem to know how to frame a shot, get the actors comfortable and just go with whatever comes their way. They all succeed in creating aimless but hypnotically atmospheric films.

In each filmmaker’s case, they work from what they know. Gia has made a film about modern teens who are kind of smart but don’t understand their feelings. She directs with the kind of ease that one may feel when their high school years are behind yet still in the rearview mirror. She shows empathy for their problems and displays their recklessness without apology. The adults in their lives are absent and sometimes obliviously contribute to their delinquency.

The film is written by Coppola and based on short stories by James Franco, who also appears in the film. Emma Roberts, Nat Wolff and Jack Kilmer get the most focus among the characters. They are all good young actors who meet the task of inhabiting the world that teens create when they lack aspiration.

There is an audience for this movie but not a big one. It falls into the “mumblecore” realm and is committed to its troubled characters so realistically, that it may turn off a lot of people.