THINGS I LEARNED WATCHING “TRANSFORMERS”

--“Bros before hoes!” I don’t agree with that sentiment, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never actually utter it because it’s sexist and immature and total bs but I thought I’d throw it out there because this movie represents the only time in my life I’ve actually heard anyone say it, even if it was a moronic minor character in a reprehensible Hollywood blockbuster/CGI-commercial directed by Michael fucking Bay. If I have time I’ll track down the gif pic of Hilary and Obama, standing side by side and smiling, with the legend “Bros Before Hoes” below their faces, and post it here. Just knowing that thing exists brightens my day, even though it’s totally un-P.C. and I’m leaning towards casting my vote for Hil in the primary. One more time: “Bros before hoes!” Okay, okay.

--So this is what Danny McCoy was upto on Las Vegas when Special Forces showed up at the Montecito and was all “you’re going back to war”!

--Mean jock assholes in not-getting-inevitable-comeuppance shocker!

--Driving home after seeing Transformers with my cousins was weirdly scary in that I was convinced that my car and the ones behind me would suddenly turn into giant sinister robots and start beating the transistor fluid out of each other.

--The government eventually buries the carcasses of destroyed Decepticons in an undersea graveyard to ensure that no-one will ever know what happened and debriefs the humans involved. WTF? When a dozen alien robots slaughter hundreds of people and cause millions in property damage on highways and in major cities – and much of it is televised in the process -- the general public and countless witnesses can attest that some crazy, out-of-the-ordinary shit went down and plausible deniability isn’t an option. Even Dick Cheney would concede that. Oops – I didn’t say “spoiler” before I wrote that, but I don’t care if I somehow ruined this movie for you because it’d be a waste of time and beer money for you to watch it.

--Speaking of which, somebody in the theatre where I saw this last night had a royal buzz on; all I could smell was hops.

--Wait, Bumblebee’s a Chevy – not a VW? I cry revisionism! Right, right: Chevy’s a major sponsor. At least there’s a contextual nod to the 80s comics/tv-show/ toys version of the canary-yellow chrome dude. (Props to the music-licensing supervisor for busting out Tomoyasu Hotei's “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” from Kill Bill when Bumblebee upgrades himself from a rusty 70s Chevy clunker to a sleek 00s Charger because, you see, Uma Thurman sought vengeance in a yellow bodysuit, etc.)

--This Voguing to Danzig post was brought to you in part by Pontiac, Nokia, Chevy, Nike, Hasbro, the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, eBay, Mountain Dew, Hummer, and, um, the Strokes.

--Yep, the Strokes. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf, channeling One Crazy Summer-era John Cusack like his life depended on it and thereby becoming the only enjoyable aspect of this disaster) inexplicably rocks a Strokes tee during most of Transformers’ running time. I mean, shouldn’t there be at least one Strokes tune in this flick – as opposed to Taking Back Sunday, the Used, and Disturbed? The possibilty exists that, I dunno, “What Ever Happened” pops up somewhere in the action (if not on the retail OST) and I totally missed hearing it all together what with all the shouting and explosions and violence and steel-on-steel mortal combat and cars full of passengers being crushed like afterthoughts and whatnot. Honestly, I can barely remember any music at all besides some stock film score crap that happens while Jon Voight, John Turturro, and Anthony Anderson are chewing scenery and trying to transmit Morse Code from inside the Hoover Dam while a Short Circuit-cum-Gremlins II beastie slings throwing stars at them, then we get a Corgan-less whiff of new Pumpkins song “Doomsday Clock” (I think) when Michela (Megan Fox) is driving a towtruck in willy-nilly reverse through traffic whilst a legless, jury-rigged Bumblebee blasts Decepticons from the back, then the sappy-ass ending cues up Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” as Michela and Sam gear up for that first liplock and Optimus Prime checks out a sunset. God, what a horrible, soulless movie this is.

--Side note: Sam, as a character, is so haplessly uncool that it almost makes sense that he’d be a Strokes fan in 2007, when even critics and hipsters en masse don’t care about the Strokes and can’t quite recall now why they ever did. Village Voice movie reviewer Nathan Lee on Sam: "Whack Attack” and “Wit-wickety-wickety-whack.” These rank among the funniest things anyone’s said about this garbage-fest yet, which is saying something. (I think Jess Harvell was overly conciliatory in his Baltimore City Paper assessment, but I dug it nonetheless.)

--By this point, you may be getting the impression that I didn’t like this movie; not only are you right, but my estimation of Transformers – both the celluloid itself and my extreme childhood fandom -- is actually sinking the more I think and write about it.

--Cameo from that short, annoying-but-cunning Jewish defense attorney guy who guested on Law and Order a few times a coupld seasons ago, as Sam’s bored teacher. Good to see him getting some work and probably a nice paycheck; hopefully this is the first in a long series of a career of largely overlooked character-actor roles that’ll help put food on the table.

--Too much Frenzy, not enough Starscream! But then, there never was enough Starscream, by my reckoning.

--One point that I’ll defend Bay on: the blurred, hard-to-discern robot fight sequences. The crit mafia is whining that the shifting parts of the Transformers move too fast when they change and that the action can be jarring, confusing, and disappointing. But look: the movie basically unfolds from the human POV – unusual for this franchise – and if you’re a puny little human being on the ground experiencing this chaos first-hard, chances are that it’ll look something like it’s presented here. Loud, scary, crazy, etc., and hard to keep a handle on because you’re in the middle of a war zone with no control over what happens. (Which is actually a pretty on-point description of how it feels to watch this movie.)

--On the other hand, fuck Bay and this movie for glorifying destruction and death to an unforgivable extent. “Oh Ray, lighten up – it’s mindless summertime popcorn fare, you’re overreacting. Big robots that turn into stuff and back! Explosions! Car chases! Scantily-clad chicks! Optimus Prime’s booming yet comforting voice!” Sure. I might have agreed if this had been released in 1995, when I was 18 and the world was a decidedly less frightening place and people weren’t dying everyday in a pointless, atrociously managed war. That was then, and this is now; Autobots and Decepticons alike are now rendered as totally creepy mechanical monsters, real people die real deaths (in cinema like this implication equals reality), etc. It isn’t really entertaining or fun; somehow, in the transition from cartoon-to-live-action my favorite childhood toys have turned sinister and frightening and seriously dangerous, a heavy threat that even Megatron’s ruthlessness couldn’t touch back when Reagan was sweating the Iran-Contra hearings and people were buying Duran Duran records. I remember being a second grader at recess, and fourth-graders teasing me by telling me that Transformers weren’t real; I replied “They are too real, and they’ll beat you up!” Man, I was stupid, and in my youthful delusion couldn’t imagine how a world infested suddenly with warring factions of robots could be a deadly one. A couple years before I gave up on X-Men related comics, the various X-books had a crossover storyline titled “Inferno” wherein a demonic presense flooded New York City, resulting in mailboxes and beauty-shop chairs and buildings and gargoyles and other inanimate objects turning into demons with evil demon grins and teeth, attacking and eating people. Other stuff happened but that’s what stayed with me – the freakishness of things coming to life to wreak havoc. There’s a scene in this movie when Sam, urged on by Prime, is dashing through the streets with the Allspark (don’t ask) and assorted machines nearby grow sentient; the results are far from pretty. That Bay leavens this disquieting, sub-Terminator 3 scenario with sub-80s horror/action silliness (see above refs to Short Circuit and Gremlins II, throw in various John Hughes teen movie plots) dilutes this mess even further.

--Oh, come on, Hasbros: wasn’t showing a little girl in bed with a gigantic My Little Pony a smidge too crassly gratuitous, too obvious? Grown fanboy bros before Kid Sista hoes!