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Most of us… well, some other people and I, at the very least… have gone through the phase of nearly absolute intellectual elitism. To be "good" something needs to serve an artistic purpose, hold itself to a higher ideal, and generally needs to be, if not pompous in and of itself, at least lending itself well to intellectual discourse and analysis. It's the sort of sneering intellectualism usually associated with coffee houses, snooty book clubs (often held in same coffee houses), black-beret wearing beatniks (preferably with a French accent), stuffed professors sitting in their overstuffed chairs which are still stuffed less than the stuffed professors sitting in them need to get stuffed, and, of course, the French. These people of course sneer at the masses and their eye candy movies, the emotional propaganda of their banal romances and dramas, and decry "fluff" as perhaps the greatest crime to culture next to book-burning and being a Republican Christian. There's one thing they forget, though. I forgot it too, once.
Even William Shakespeare wrote fart jokes.
The instigator for this rant, at least as the chain of causality goes, would happen to be the new Transformers movie (which, like its animated predecessor "Transformers: The Movie," has the wonderfully creative title of "Transformers"). Transformers got made for umpty million dollars by Michael "WHAM BOOM POW" Bay and has made somewhere on the order of a smallish Third World nation's GNP in revenues, fueled by the rampant nostalgia of people whose age ranges from a year younger to ten years older than my own (and, for reference, I'm 23). This movie got made, got watched, and then the watchers (I tend to ignore prerelease hype, fanboyism, and other such things unless the release in question concerns BioShock) got on the internet and used what it was made for. After getting their fill of as much hyphenated pornography as their hands could take without blistering, they moved on to the other thing the internet was created for. Not being UseNet users, this means complaining on every message board I happened to find myself in, where all these otherwise probably intelligent people were reduced to variations on "OMG IT SUX" rebutted by "NO U SUK" and so on and so forth. When the grumbling was better formatted, using punctuation, correct spelling, and complete sentences, the complaints against the movie could easily be categorized into one of the two following bins, with a good deal of overlap between them. Actually, it's just the same bin, with a slightly shallow middle between two deeper and separately labeled sides:
1) The movie was stupid,
as in it was not intellectually stimulating.
2) Michael Bay directed the movie.
I say these are the same bin because the only kinds of movies Michael Bay directs are stupid ones. Take any premise, any premise at all with any sort of artistic, intellectual value, and Michael Bay will turn it into a guns-blazing rock-out-with-your-cock-out drunken armored brigade waltz through a quaint country town made entirely of china shops. Giant asteroid threatening the Earth and humanity seems doomed to extinction? Other people may turn it into a somewhat intelligent question of morals and human drama, say, like Deep Impact, and still not manage to have sufficient Morgan Freeman in it. Michael Bay turns it into a let's-just-nuke-the-fucker androgen flick where the power of Bruce Willis' manly sacrifice blows up the asteroid into two neat chunks and the power of his perpetual five-o'-clock shadow causes gravity to stop working so said chunks can sail right on by, perhaps grazing the atmosphere but not putting a single tidal ripple in a single kiddie pool. How about the (accidentally) complete surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Dolittle Raid over Tokyo, a perfect example of America's "We may consider ourselves the center of Christendom, but we're not so good at the cheek-turning bit" attitudes? Oh, other filmmakers may treat something as important as an attack which would permanently sorta-militarize America and eventually lead to the Japanese acquiring an intellectually interesting but perfectly reasonable phobia of atomic weaponry with something approaching delicacy. But no, Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor tosses all that aside with ball-breaking action and all the subtlety of the Piranha Brothers making a house call on a squealer with a tactical nuclear weapon. Actually, Pearl Harbor perhaps sucked most when Bay turned away from his strengths (being loud and breaking stuff) and went towards trying to give the cardboard characters some sort of depth inbetween having them being, well, sheets of cardboard that make Anakin Skywalker look like Hamlet that fly airplanes and kill people with a lot of rat-a-tat-tats and booms and other assorted loud noises.
Bruce Willis is a scion of manliness, so much so that
his not-quite-beard has mastery over space and time.
That's not really a digression, as it moves neatly into Transformers. It's a movie about Japanese toys from space coming to Earth, hiding for approximately thirty seconds or so, then, in the words of a true poet, "beating the holy shit out of each other."
This is what all these intellectuals are poo-pooing because it's not intellectual. Because, for whatever reason, they're expecting it to be somehow intellectual.
When really, it's the best possible vehicle for Michael Bay. "Okay, Mike, here's a pitch for you. All you have to do is make a movie where loud stompy giant robots with huge guns and lots of machinery beat the tar out of each other and cause absurd amounts of property damage in the process. You don't really need human characters at all. You really don't need much of a plot either, except the Autobots are good and the Decepticons are bad, defined on how they want to treat humans, and the Autobots eventually prevail after much foot has been applied to ass." Apparently, Michael Bay balked at making a toy movie, but they probably managed to convince him by the fact that said giant robots transform into (if you've been living in a bunker since Reagan ascended to being the POTUS) really, really, really totally awesome vehicles and stuff. Okay, so Bumblebee turns into a VW Beetle but Optimus is a semi-truck (the coolest of all possible conventional road vehicles), Starscream becomes an F-15, so on and so forth.
This is pornography for nerds. Michael Bay is probably a nerd of sorts, and he probably likes pornography too. So he decided to make things better with upgrades and fancier bits until the people demanding a Generation 1 movie wanted him dead but in the end the movie is a tour-de-force of what Cannes would call "the loud, obnoxious, mysteriously arousing stupid American blockbuster." Then Bay went to the United States military and said "I want to make a movie about these giant robot things and I'm going to want some of your stuff for props." The military nodded sagely and thought to itself, 'hey, this Bay guy shoots porn for nerds; he'll make our instruments of death sexy' and said, reportedly: "Okay, sure. Here's the inside of the Pentagon. Oh, and two of the three CV-22s the Air Force operates. You want an F-117 on the tarmac? You got it. Want some F-22s? We got F-22s. AC-130? A-10s? Anything else?" Thus was the movie shot and given the wrong title. It should not have been called Transformers, it should have been called Transformers: We Don't Care If You're Giant Space Robots, We're The United States Air Force And We Will Ruin Your Shit. Two and a half hours dominated by robots, airplanes, bombs, laser designators, GAU-8A Avenger 30mm gatling autocannon fire, other airpower in general, and the occasional carrier group (perhaps the Navy will get a bigger role in the sequels when they roll out Tidal Wave or Broadside as an atomic supercarrier Transformer). I'll say it again: porn for nerds.
Okay, so there's some humans in it, but they're all either clowns or cutouts that make G.I. Joe a deep military figure (*rimshot*) in comparison. Shia LeBouf does an excellent job of playing a loser geek (I think Wil Wheaton would've done better, but hey, that's what happens when one ages); the requisite self-sufficient female jailbait character serves the purpose of "hey, look at my abs" (remember, nerd pornography), and Tuturro once again plays a psychopath with a wee bit more power than he probably should have. So it's there, and mostly doesn't detract. Bay tried once again to inject a little bit of depth, but the good news is he's learned from Pearl Harbor--namely, he sucked at it then--and so it's only a little bit. The bad news is that he still sucks at it and so even that little bit, well, sucks. But the giant robots are there.
I wasn't intending to go into movie review mode, but so you have it. Stupid, stupid, loud, eye-candy movie. Nowhere near 300 levels of Real Ultimate Power ninja pumping-up, but pretty good for that too. Obviously stupid from the word "Trans." And yet, for some reason, all the intellectuals don't like it because it's not intellectual enough for them, as if they expected anything otherwise. Quite a few went to see it, then said "I went and paid $10 to see it but I knew it was going to be horrible. I just wanted to see how horrible it would be" or something like that. Here's my theory. They went, like everyone else, to see giant robots beat the shit out of each other but they can't admit to themselves that they did and so they revile it even more. It's just like pornography; it's wrong and dirty to like such things so if you're already against it, if you secretly like it against what you consider to be your standards, you really come down on it hard: basically punishing the stimulus for your response.
That would have been me back when I saw The Chronicles of Riddick or The Fifth Element for the first time. Those are pretty stupid movies too. I thought Riddick was about as much fun as flipping through Warhammer 40,000 books for the fluff art and the Fifth Element... wow, that was just stupid. A few years later, after I admitted to myself I like flipping through WH40K books for fluff art, I revisted them. Riddick was pretty, but stupid, but pretty in a "grim darkness" sort of way and that's all that mattered and thus it was enjoyable. The Fifth Element is simply, hands down, a riot. End of line. Perhaps all filmmakers see themselves as artists, but in all reality, their work should sometimes really be taken at face value and enjoyed for the superficial things they really are. Plumbing the depths is often a waste of time and, many times, ends up showing the lie in things everyone wants to pretend is deep. Lucas' pulp serial films (the Star Wars "saga," Indiana Jones) are just that. Stupid pulp. The Force is only as mystical as the pulpy plot requires. The Jedi can police a galaxy yet get stabbed in the back by a general order with an actual number because the pulpy plot requires it. Star Wars isn't deep, get the hell over it already...
...hrm, different rant for a different time. Fact is that one shouldn't let one's intellectual mindset spoil one's enjoyment of silly and stupid things. Stupid things are fun, and there's no shame in enjoying them so long as no one gets hurt (or the guy who gets hurt eventually doesn't mind). Rather than pretending some sort of ivory tower superiority over the unwashed masses, we may as well be a little Epicurean and try to get as much pleasure as we can from whatever sources are readily and legally available. If you're going to go see a movie, enjoy it for what it is rather than being determined to hate it at all costs--really, where's the profit in that? If you end up not liking it, that's fine too, but make sure you like it for the right reasons. If it's pretending to be deep when it really is just pretentious fuzz that doesn't even meet the standard of fluff, that's a great reason to not like a movie. If it's trying to be balls-to-the-wall action-excitement-sex and yet it has all the thrill of watching paint peel (Ecks Vs. Sever comes to mind), then that's worth hating too. Still, hating a movie because it doesn't reach something it never aspired to in the first place is inherently unfair. No intellectual bashes The Seventh Seal for not being an exciting swords-out hackfest through medieval Sweden, and that makes sense; would it be asking so much to rein in the gnashing of teeth when it comes to a blatantly stupid movie that would never in a billion years be anything other than stupid not being very intellectual?
I mean, giant robots.
From space.
That turn into Earth vehicles.
Then turn back into giant robots.
And beat the crap out of each other.
At least they aren't pretentious. One's even voiced by Hugo Weaving. To borrow a common internet meme: Intellectual elitists, Agent Megatron Halfelven V demands an explanation for your faggotry!
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