Category Archives: Film

In an effort to transform our money into their money, Dreamworks has united executive producer Steven Spielberg, the king of family-friendly sci-fi blockbusters; director Michael Bay, the king of spending a lot of money blowing stuff up in terrible summer epics; and Hasbro’s toy box full of Transformers.

While it’s the first time the warring robot races from the planet Cybertron have appeared in live action, it’s not the first time they’ve appeared on the big screen.

In 1986, at the height of the first iteration of the Transformers’ apparently cyclical popularity, the creators of the then two-year-old cartoon series released The Transformers: The Movie:

It was an animated epic that bridged the second and third season of the show, and blew the minds of nine-year-old boys everywhere (mine included).

It introduced strange and foreign concepts to the Transformers world we knew from the toys and ‘toons and comics, including gender, age, swearing and, most shockingly, death. After spending a half hour every weekday afternoon watching the Autobots and Decepticons shoot at and miss each other with laser guns, it was hard to even comprehend the wholesale slaughter that occurred in the film. Just about every single Transformer from the TV show was killed off, some of them quite violently and graphically, including the leader of the good guys, Optimus Prime.

Let’s watch as Megatron mercilessly slaughters our boyhood heroes:

The Bay-directed movie is a reboot, having nothing at all to do with the previous film or the various offshoots from Transformers revivals since, save recasting Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, and keeping some of the names of the Transformers and the surname of their human ally.

Is the Bay film an improvement over the original? In some ways, yeah, sure. In other ways? Well, not so much. Let’s see how well 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie stacks up against 2007’s live-action Transformers. As Prime himself would stay, “One shall stand, one shall fall.”
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It’s always hard to dislike a movie that’s so self-aware that it recognizes its own weaknesses and embraces them in an attempt to make them a strength.

While 1988’s Die Hard is unquestionably an action movie classic, it’s also a rather odd foundation for a film franchise. Sure it spawned three sequels, each with increasingly silly titles, but there’s little in the way of connective tissue between them, aside from the star, his character’s name, the fact that he runs into terrorists more often than Jack Bauer and spends a lot of time talking over walkie talkies, radios and, eventually, cell phones. While each of the three previous Die Hards had their pleasures, it’s been almost 20 years from the original, and 12 since the last one.

So now out of Hollywood limbo comes Bruce Willis as the lucky/unlucky supercop John McClane, older, wrinklier and balder, but still a fairly ideal film hero to ride shotgun with for a an hour and a half, or, in this case, over two.
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In 1966, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four #48 kicked off what might just be the quintessential Marvel Comics story. A giant talking baby in a toga who lives on the moon comes and warns the Fantastic Four that a giant man in a funny purple hat is coming to eat their planet.

Then a silver guy on a surfboard, named the Silver Surfer, shows up–angsting like a dollar store Hamlet in his thought bubbles about what a crappy lot in life he has–to let them know his boss, the giant man in a funny purple hat named Galactus, is indeed totally coming to eat their planet.

The FF ain’t having it, so they fight the giant man in the funny purple hat, inspiring the Surfer to join them and, together, they save the day, leading to a Silver Surfer spin-off series, and about 500 more fights with Galactus over the decades.

As far as Hollywood adaptations go, this 41-year-old story is practically a readymade. Rewrite Stan Lee’s godawful dialogue, think of a more cinematic way to present the cosmic entities driving the conflict and drop tens of millions into special effects and you’re done.

It should surprise no one who saw 2005s Fantatic Four that returning director Tim Story fucked up everything he could about as badly as he could.
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There’s no other way to put this, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it–Once is a musical.

Now, I know that “musical” still tends to be a dirty, dirty word as far as most people are concerned, despite the occasional hit, like 2002’s Chicago, or unique take, like 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, but Once isn’t the sort of musical that those who worry about musicals should worry about.

The level of artificiality inherent in the genre has been stripped away completely. The characters don’t spontaneously break into free-style songs about themselves, nor are there any staged dance numbers.

Rather, the protagonists are both songwriters and musicians. And musicians tend to play and listen to a lot of music.
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Behold the efficacy of properly focused star power! By assembling a truly all-star cast, auteur Steven Soderbergh was able to make a successful and well-received remake of a little-seen (and less cared for) 1960 Rat Pack lark, Ocean’s Eleven.

Which lead to a sequel.

And now a second sequel.

And like the summer’s bigger, more merchandising-friendly threequels, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to stop at three, so long as the eleven-man core of the ensemble–and most importantly the triumvirate of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon–continue to be game (Julia Roberts sits this one out, as does Ocean’s Twelve addition Catherine Zeta-Jones, and they’re barely missed; their stellar wattage replaced by that of Al Pacino).
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Photographer Edward Burtynsky carved out a niche for himself in landscape photography, by focusing on carved-out landscapes: Quarries, mines, junkyards, superhighways, factories and pretty much anywhere human incursion had transformed the earth into a new arrangement.

Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary looks at the same manufactured landscapes as Burtynsky, and looks at Burtynsky while he looks at them, using plenty of examples of his photographs, some narration from Burtynsky, and, in the opening, a rather stunning example of Burtynsky posing and taking a photo, which melds into the photo itself (that’s it at the top of the post), which then melds into people looking at the photo.
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Remember what Mae West said about too much of a good thing? Well I think it’s safe to say that Ms. West has never seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, although I’d be interested to hear her thoughts on it.

For the franchise’s third and final voyage, the creators and cast of the first two return–and I do mean all of them, no matter how small or insignificant their role. So to do the many attributes of the previous installments, and the fewer but increasingly hard to ignore detriments.

The problems that began to surface in Dead Man’s Chest–mainly the ever-swelling number of characters, plotlines and the screen time devoted to each–here come just short of completely capsizing the film.
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The brutal 2006 murder of actress-turned-writer/director Adrienne Shelly was undoubtedly a tragedy to those who knew her. After watching her last film, which sees posthumous release this weekend, it seems like a bit of a tragedy for filmgoers in general too.

While her sassily charming Waitress isn’t a perfect film, it is the work of a creator who had clearly found a way to balance often discordant elements of drama, comedy, romance and even a little tragedy and, perhaps more importantly, was finding her way towards balancing played-out, overly-commercial studio movie tropes with fresh, quirky, indie-style storytelling choices.

Waitress is a movie that would seem equally at home in a 25-screen multiplex or a grungy art house theater, and it’s hard to watch without feeling at least a little selfishly regretful that Shelly won’t be able to hone these skills even further in the years to come. Waitress is a terrific and highly entertaining film; imagine how great her next one might have been.
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If you’ve seen much of Canadian director Guy Maddin’s body of work, it should come as no surprise that he’s rather fond of 1943 Danish period melodrama Vrdens dag (That’s Day of Wrath to you and me).

If you haven’t seen much of Maddin’s body of work, you don’t really have a good excuse. Not only is he one of the most interesting directors cranking out films today, but the Wexner Center has played all of them at various times over the past few years, occasionally bringing Maddin himself along to introduce them and chat about film.

The Wex is welcoming him back again tonight and tomorrow night, but this time he’s coming sans a new film of his own. Instead he’ll be introducing two of his personal favorites, which have influenced his work: Pre-code crime melodrama Blood Money, and the aforementioned Day of Wrath.
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As art forms, film and dance are both visual media defined by movement–at least from the audience’s point of view.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities end (Again, from the audience’s point of view).

While films fictive and non-fictive most often operate on a literal and linear level, dance can be much more abstract and conceptual, the emphasis on the movement of the visuals being created, rather than the emphasized information that the movements and visuals are serving (Did I lose you there? Because I’m pretty sure I lost myself in that paragraph).
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