Last three movies seen….

Its been a while since a movie really impressed me.

Iron Man comes very close.  Robert Downey was very good, and Jeff Bridges was very bad (and I mean that in a good way), and the effects were among the best I have seen.  I do however have a few quibbles.  If this had been a shoestring budget film I wouldn’t even mention these things but this was very very expensive which to me means that every nut and bolt in the script (IN THE SCRIPT!!!) should be tight.

There is a really nice development of Downey (Stark) having false starts both in building his carapace and in learning to control it.  And this is presented as difficult even for someone who is brilliant and talented.  Yet when Bridges for the first time steps into his monster, (using a power source that it was not designed for and yet miraculously fits like a glove), he wields the suit like one used to it.  In reality, he would have been thrashing about uselessly as Stark took him to pieces.

Small matter but like I say when you spend the bucks, they should go toward the writing and continuity as well.  And I am a little tired of the pro military bent in all these types of films; buying into the shoot down whatever you don’t understand mentality. They attack Stark, they lose a plane, and blame him because he had the temerity to survive them trying to kill him without provocation.

(If you haven’t seen it treat yourself to the Iron Man techno remix I posted a while ago).

But this was genius level stuff compared to Transformers.  Don’t even ask me why I turned this on in the first place but I had heard it was up for awards, had actually won some, and thought “it might be fun”.  Once again, no problems with the effects, but c’mon, who doesn’t have amazing effects these days?

I think what really pissed me off  about this film is that no one ever mentioned that it was a childrens’ film; it should have had an only under 13 rating.  If I had thought of it as a kid’s film it would have been fine.  But it was marketed a little higher than that.

Once again, millions and millions of dollars towards brightly coloured objects and none thrown towards the brain. (And yes, Megan Fox almost made it worth it and you know if it would have been just a two minute loop of her stretching over that car engine, I might have called this a good and maybe even an important film but it ended up being just a little bit of silver in this heap of dung).

If there is one thing other than advanced alien species having only the intelligence and command of language as, oh maybe this very film, it is that a member of this same advanced species chooses to stay on Earth as a pet to a not particularly bright teenage boy rather than go home and rejoin his former life.  This may in fact be a real telling trope in juvenile films, that brilliant advanced species desire to be our pets and toys.

And I am sorry but Shia LaBeouf not only has the most ridiculous name in filmdom but I just don’t get the appeal…he’s like a seriously downmarket Giovanni Ribisi (sorry about that Giovanni).

Overall, what disturbs me is this mirror aspect of the modern teenage film.  Not only does this genre dominate the screens but it is self reflective and usually concentrating the most mundane and cliched aspects of coming of age.  Why in my day (try to hear an old geezer voice here) we looked ahead.  We wanted to see where we were going rather than where we were.  We knew where we were; we were more interested in exploring.  As a teenager going to movies, the most thrilling films were about people older than myself.

I’m not saying there are no good coming of age or teenage film.  Brick is brilliant, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is smart, and there are many more but still they are a very small percentage of films aimed at that crowd.  If I was to generalize I’d say we are in a golden age of films for the under 13s, and there are many good films being made for grownups, but the teenagers are suffering because not only do they have to wade through this crap, studio hacks are screaming at them that this is the only thing they should be watching.

And Transformers also has the hackneyed average gawky teenage boy managing to score with the very much more socially advanced and much much better looking girl; the film really can be summed up in a gooshy “oh wouldn’t it be great if I could save the world and then Mikaela would hold my hand and we would be in love and then a robot would come live with me and be my friend…”.  And I almost forgot -directed by Michael Bay or who is he continuing to fuck to keep getting work?

Now to a slightly better but still flawed film…Eagle vs Shark.

This is a kind of loser relationship movie and it lost me because though the girl starts off as an idiot, she appears to get a lot smarter and better looking about fifteen minutes into the film while the boy she is drooling over, though at first not quite a total moron, reveals himself very early in the game to be an anti-catch.

Its funny and sad and odd and I wish it worked but the fact that this girl is so out of this guy’s league just pulls this movie apart. And there is some quirky animated bits of apples and apple cores dancing which really do not help this movie at all. But great Kiwi dialects for the ears…might be worth it just to listen to them speak and there are memorably odd scenes.