A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length
This week’s episode has much to do with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and men with long flowing beards. We actually took great care to not pass our own personal judgement on the film, as neither of us has (nor, mostly likely, ever will) see it. Instead we tried to address the critical response in comparison to the enormous turnout for the movie. Roger Ebert’s review features the most succinct and visual explanation of the film:
“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.”
This is pretty much what I expected. It’s also essentially a description of the first film as well, and yet Revenge of the Fallen has broken all sorts of records, bought Michael Bay a plane for each day of the week, and will make a crapton of money, because no one cares about characters or plot in their event movies, especially during the summer. In fact, everyone I know who was going to see it made a point to tell me that they knew it was going to be terrible but they just wanted to see robots punching other robots. I can imagine robots punching other robots right now, and it didn’t cost me anything and didn’t take two hours and fifteen minutes of my life away.
I drew a picture of two robots fighting to put here but the scanner at my office isn’t working so I’ll put it up later. One of the robots gets Direct TV:
As mentioned on the show, Ebert’s got a certain knack for tearing bad films apart. If you go to the “Advanced Search” section of the site, which it won’t let me link you right to for some reason, you can sort by rating. The zero star ones are good but the half star ones seem to be more amusing.
Here is a link to George Lucas: Maker of Films, the 1971 interview selected by Jose for his Best Thing Ever this week. The accompanying article does a great job of setting the stage for the time period and where Lucas was in his career when he sat down for the interview. The interview itself is embedded on that page.
