Choire Sicha reviews Transformers 2:
Have you ever fallen into a city-sized Cuisinart that is grinding its way through a vast Chinese scrap metal field and had your face abraded with shards of aluminum and eyelash-size scraps of rusty torn iron, so all the skin is peeling off your face, your delicate nose-bones being flayed by grinding gear bits and yesterday’s shredded microchips and at the same time that song “Citizen Soldier” from the National Guard commercials is blaring at top volume, and somewhere in the distance you can see that “The Hurt Locker” is screening for no good reason and there is sand inside what remains of your teeth and then Megan Fox float-flounces by (like the cow in “Twister”!) with her nipples nearly pouring out of her crop-top camisole and some kid is trying to give her a flower but she is like “I am sooo busy getting highly paid and even though the makeup department set their mirror to ‘evening’ instead of ‘day’ and so my beautiful perfect skin is sort of plastered needlessly with foundation, I am still the hottest sex doll on two legs,” and so she doesn’t take the flower, the poor sad flower, which stands for natural beauty, a flower which is then blenderized like a sad goose sucked into a jet turbine?
I found that reading this aloud to my girlfriend made it that much more understandable. Of course, being a single, long sentence, I did tend to run out of air as I spoke.
While that bit grabs the attention, the rest of the review is pretty bad. And a little offensive if you’re the sensitive type. Basically summed up as “I didn’t like this movie and I’m going to make you feel like an idiot if you did. I’m also going to make the movie seem like a misogynistic porno just to scare away those who had some inclination of seeing it”.
No, it’s not Gone With the Wind, get over it.
So… was it good?
If grammatical and representational convolutedness were CGI robot battles and supple bosoms in peril, this review would be Transformers 2.
After I saw the first one, I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever want to see a sequel. (I was gonna say I couldn’t imagine why they’d made one, but of course, it’s the money.)
They suckered me in for the first one, I’m not falling for the okey-doke the second time around!
Um, did you say nipples?
I lost all interest when I saw Bumblebee in a preview acting disappointed that Shia’s character wasn’t going to take him to college with him.
What?
Ouch
Thought admit it. Bay makes great Eye Candy. I get suckered into watching Pearl Harbor every time it happens to be on TV just for the attack scene and if I have time I wind up sticking through to the Dolittle raid.
Sicha was practically glowing compared to Roger Ebert:
“If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.”
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090623/REVIEWS/906239997
Hmm I may have to rethink my earlier stance given the ebert review.
Sad thing is that as long as it makes box office, Hollywood will fund these things.
Also the critics panned Casa Blanca
Hmm I may have to rethink my earlier stance given the ebert review.
Sad thing is that as long as it makes box office, Hollywood will fund these things.
Also the critics panned Casa Blanca
“..they enter into many encounters where they whirl around, but if you are any kind of normal person, you won’t be able to tell which machine is which..”
This was my impression of the first one. Most scenes look like a big bowl of sharp fragments of colored glass were thrown at the camera, accompanied by the sounds of bowling balls bouncing on high tension wires, jet turbines being fed bucket loads of sand, and flying insects shooting directly into my ear
#12: Yeah, I had a hard time distinguishing one Transformer from another as well. It made me really not care about what was happening on the screen.
But my base complaint about the first Transformers, besides the inclusion of Shia Labouf, was that Jazz swore a couple of times. I’m no angel and generally I curse like a sailor, but it’s just not in the spirit of the original TV show.
If I recall the critics also panned “Ishtar”.
Enoch and Tox, I had that problem with the recent Star Trek movie. I liked it, but the fight scenes were an incomprehensible blur of body parts due to the overuse of xtreeem tight shots. If you can’t see both people throughout the majority of the fight scene, you can’t know what the hell is really going on in the fight.
I guess it helps make up for a lack of good choreography? Maybe they should have hired Jackie Chan, that’s his real talent. (That and a willingness to harm himself for his art!)