I was pretty forgiving when I saw Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie in theatres for the first time, two summers ago.  Sure, it had its flaws, but nevertheless it was just an enormous amount of fun to see a live-action Transformers movie realized, complete with amazing over-the-top Michael Bay-style mayhem.

Even through my enjoyment, though, it was clear to me that this wouldn’t be a movie that would hold up well upon subsequent viewings.  (And, indeed, when I watched Transformers on DVD last year I was much less captivated that I had been that first time seeing it on the big screen.)  I immediately began to think of Michael Bay’s Transformers as a movie just like Independence Day — a sci-fi action spectacle that was a TON of fun to see in a packed theatre on an emormous screen, but one that would be hobbled, upon repeat viewings, by the simplicity (and often-times stupidity) of its script.

So what did I think of the recently-released sequel, Revenge of the Fallen? Well, to an astonishing degree, it has exactly the same strengths and weaknesses that the first film had.

As in the first film, Bay’s ability to stage enormously complex, epic action sequences filled with intense, visceral robot-on-robot combat is pretty jaw-dropping.  These movies look EXPENSIVE.  There’s no trickery used to hide a limited effects budget.  No, what we get are wall-to-wall chases, explosions, exotic locales, and a staggering array of CGI characters (mostly beating the stuffing out of one another).

Also as in the first film, sadly, there is a lot of annoying, unfunny attempts at comedy that feels like time-wasting to me.  And, as in the first film, I was constantly frustrated by the movie’s unwillingness to allow us to get to know any of the robot characters other than Prime and Bumblebee to any sort of degree.  There are an ENORMOUS number of robots in these films — and it’s a strength of Bay’s that he is unafraid to think BIG — but it’s a terrible shame that I couldn’t tell most of them apart from one another, and even if I could, I didn’t get a chance to know or care about any of them one whit.

Let’s flesh out the above statements a little bit.  (Some minor spoilers ahead.)

There were definitely a lot of things I liked about Revenge of the Fallen.  There were so many robots of so many different shapes and sizes, that it was a lot of fun to keep seeing what new robot would be in the next scene.  I particularly enjoyed getting to see Soundwave this time (who was utilized very well by the story, by the way — very “in character” for Soundwave — and I was THRILLED that he was voiced by Frank Welker, the original voice from the cartoon).  I also really enjoyed seeing Ravage (the Decepticon who takes the form of a jaguar).  I also think the great Tony Todd (Worf’s brother Kurn from Star Trek: The Next Generation) was a terrific choice to voice the Decepticon master, “the Fallen.”

As noted above, the action sequences are plentiful, and they are spectacular.  Optimus Prime gets a lot more time in this film to fix it up with a variety of Decepticons — it was great getting to really see just why he is the Autobots’ greatest warrior.  The fights are bone-crunching and very intense, and the visuals are just gorgeous.

But I was totally confounded by the complete lack of development given to all the rest of the robots (particularly the Autobots).  OK, we get to spend more time with Bumblebee, but he doesn’t really have much to do in the story, other than drive Sam (Shia LeBoeuf) around all the time.  The only other Autobots that get any sort of screen time are two new charcters, two “twins” that are terribly annoying, not to mention being horribly offensive, lowest-common-denominator African-American “ghetto” stereotypes.  Just terrible.  We get no time at all with the rest of the Autobots.  C’mon!  I wanted a LOT more time spent with Prime’s core “command team” — Ironhide, Ratchet, Prowl, etc.  Why couldn’t some of THOSE guys been the ones to accompany Sam, Mikaela (Megan Fox), etc. on their adventure?  How could we not even get even a brief scene to show those Autobots’ reactions to Prime getting taken out in the middle of the film?  That’s a failure of storytelling, and very disappointing.  I was really hoping that, in the sequel, these characters (who were so central in the original cartoon) would get some attention.

Speaking of failures of storytelling, as with the original (and as with almost all of the big-budget films that have been released this summer) where this film falls down is with the script.  Oh, there’s plenty of story, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that none of it makes a lick of sense if you stop to think about it even for a moment.  The whole idea of the Fallen having landed on Earth — the SAME PLANET where the all-important Allspark landed in the first movie — is an astounding (and ridiculous) coincidence.  Further stretching my disbelief:  Sam just happened to never notice an enormous shard of the Allspark in his sweater for the past TWO YEARS??  The Fallen hid their enormous sun-eating machine right in the center of one of the Egyptian pyramids?  (Haven’t, you know, one or two archaeologists taken a look at those pyramids over the years??)  If Energon can be created by a machine, then why go to all the trouble of finding the one from thousands of years ago — why don’t the Autobots or Decepticons just build another machine?  If the original Primes all sacrificed themselves, thousands of years ago, to defeat the “evil” Prime (the Fallen), then where did Optimus Prime come from?  Just why can only one Prime defeat another?  Just when did the elderly robot Jetfire get to Earth, and what the heck has he been doing all of this time?  (How did he wind up in a museum, anyways???)  I could go on and on.

In the end, the movie doesn’t really have any soul.  The action is amazing, sure.  And the filmmakers do have the right idea about taking the action and intensity up a few notches here in the sequel, and trying to push our heroes into a more desperate place.  But because we haven’t been given a chance to really get to know or invest in any of the characters, those moments feel hollow — because we don’t really care!  There’s no emotion when robot x gets taken out, because if one can even tell which robot that is (often an impossibility), then it doesn’t really matter because one don’t have any emotional attachment anyways.

As I said at the beginning, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has, down the line, almost exactly the same strengths and weaknesses as its predecessor.  It’s just that I’m much less forgiving this time around.  A sequel has to improve on the original — otherwise what’s the point?

I still really love the Transformers — I have ever since I was a kid.  Despite the silliness of the very concept, and of so much of the original cartoon series (when seen through adult eyes), I really do believe that the right people could make an awesome live-action Transformers movie, one that is fun and exciting as well as emotionally engaging.  I just haven’t seen it yet.

The Color Purple, released in 1985, finds director Steven Spielberg at an interesting point in his career.  After having directed the first two Indiana Jones films as well at E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in the early eighties, Spielberg apparently had a desire to move towards more weighty, dramatic material.  But his “serious” films of the late eighties (The Color Purple, along with Empire of the Sun and Always) didn’t meet with an enormous amount of critical acclaim (compared to his successes in the nineties with films such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan).  But, in college, I decided I wanted to take a look at those “middle period” Spielberg films, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by their quality.  It’s been a while since I’ve last seen those films, though, so when I spotted The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun in the discount DVD bin at my local Newbury Comics, I snatched them both up.

I haven’t had a chance to get to Empire of the Sun yet, but my wife and I watched The Color Purple last month.  It wasn’t quite as good as I had remembered it, but I still think it’s a better film than people tend to think.

Adapted from the novel by Alice Walker, The Color Purple tells the life story of an African American woman, Celie.  Growing up in turn-of-the-century Georgia, the poor girl struggles through hardship after hardship.  She is raped by her father as a young girl, and gives birth to two children who he takes from her.  She is married off to a cruel local farmer (Danny Glover), who beats her and forcibly separates her from her beloved sister, Nettie.  Later in life she forms an unexpected friendship with her husband’s mistress, the vivacious singer Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), who sets Celie on a path towards finally coming out of her shell and finding some happiness for herself.

The Color Purple is notable for some terrific performances from some well-known actors who, looking back on the film now, are unbelievably young here.  Whoopie Goldberg, in one of her very first screen appearances, plays Celie, and she is fantastic — soulful and full of life, even though she has very little dialogue in the film.  Whoopie is a talented comedian, but I have found that I’ve always preferred her in straight dramatic roles, and this is no exception.  Danny Glover doesn’t often play the “bad guy” in films, but he does a great job here as the monstrous Albert.  He cuts quite a menacing figure.  Oprah Winfrey appears, also in one of her first screen appearances, as the vivacious and strong-willed Sofia.  Her performance is a little over the top, but it’s hard to complain because she energizes every scene that she’s in.  It’s also fun to see a very-skinny Laurence Fishburne (credited here, as he was in many of his early film roles, as Larry Fishburne) in a small role as a musician.  I must also compliment the two young actresses, Desreta Jackson and Akosua Busia, who play the young versions of Celie and Nettie, respectively, in the early portions of the movie.

Where the film stumbles is its tone.  Most of Spielberg’s films, even his most deadly serious ones, incorporate humor to some degree.  When done successfully, those moments can bring a much-needed lightness and release of tension to the proceedings.  Here, though, the shifts from tragedy to comedy are somewhat jarring.  It’s hard to laugh, for instance, at Albert’s bumbling attempts to find all of his nice clothing (in preparation for a date with his mistress, Shug) after having watched him be terribly cruel to Celie in scene after scene.  These tonal shifts aren’t helped by the on-the-nose score by Quincy Jones, whose music screams “this is FUNNY!” or “this is SERIOUS!” in a rather intrusive way through much of the film.

There is also a lot of over-simplification, in the story and in its execution.  When one of Albert’s kids throws a rock at Celie’s head, she touches her wound and then stumbles, leaving a movie-perfect red hand-print in the snow.  After moving in with Albert, she discovers the ridiculously over-the-top filthy state of his kitchen, and undertakes a Cinderella-esque cleaning.  (Of course, once she’s done, Albert comes in and plops his filthy boots up on the clean table.)  There’s a moment towards the end of the film, when we’re meant to see that Albert’s home has once again become terribly run down — and as the camera pans across, one of the window shutters falls down, right on cue.  I found these sorts of things to be silly and laugh-inducing — surely not the intended reaction.  There’s also a scene, late in the film, in which dramatic events at a dinner table snap Sophia out of the terrible state into which she has fallen.  (After a terrible tragedy results in her beating and imprisonment for eight years, when she emerges it is as a withdrawn shadow of her formerly high-spirited self.)  Something happens (which I won’t spoil here) at this dinner scene that brings her back to herself.  This should be a dramatic, emotional moment.  But the scene is played in such an over-simplified way, in which one minute Sophia is practically a vegetable and then — snap! — the next minute she’s back to her old, chatty self, that it becomes silly and takes the dramatic air out of the moment.

In the end, I wouldn’t list The Color Purple as one of Mr. Spielberg’s greatest works.  But it remains a solid, interesting film, and worth your while, particularly if you’re a fan of Spielberg as I am.

I posted a link to this on Friday, but in case you missed it, this is a must-watch:

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the few films from the past several years that Judd Apatow has had a hand in (he co-wrote the film and was one of its producers), that, despite his involvement, did not receive a lot of love from audiences upon its release.  My own recollection of seeing it in theatres was that it was sort of funny but not fantastic.  However, upon a second viewing on DVD last month, I must say that I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this film!

Walk Hard is, first and foremost, an evisceration of a very specific type of film: the Oscar-bait musical bio-pic (like Ray, Walk the Line, etc.).  In scene after scene after scene, the film mercilessly sends-up every single ridiculous cliche of those types of movies.  

We meet young Dewey growing up in a ramshackle farm down South, enjoying an idyllic life.  But a day of fun with his brother (”ain’t nothing horrible gonna happen today!” the doomed tyke promises) ends in tragedy after a machete-fighting accident.  Out of that grief, Dewey discovers his musical ability, playing the blues (”I got the blues… cut my brother in half…”).  A few years later, a nervous Dewey performs at a High School concert.  (Starting here, Dewey is played by John C. Reilly, despite the fact that the character is only 14 in this scene.  As Apatow and Director/co-writer Jake Kasdan note in their DVD commentary, they were interested in poking fun at  ”just how young the lead actor THINKS he can play” in these sorts of movies.)   Despite the innocuousness of the pop ballad Dewey performs (entitled “Take My Hand”), the concert erupts into a frenzy of sexualized dancing (as, you know, Rock and Roll is wont to cause).  After being condemned by the local priest (”You think we don’t know what you’re talking about when you say take my hand?!”) and his father (”The wrong kid died!”), Dewey decides to leave home and set out on a musical career.

What follows reads like a crazy check-list of the types of scenes one could expect in these sorts of films, charting our hero’s rise and fall and eventual redemption.  Dewey gets an opportunity to perform his music for a disinterested record company executive (played brilliantly by John Michael Higgins, who proclaims: “You have failed conclusively!  There is nothing that you can do, here in this room, to turn that around!”) but, of course, once Dewey plays one of his own songs (the titular “Walk Hard”), the executive is blown away, as are his Hassidic Jewish backers (Harold Ramis — yes, Harold Ramis — Phil Rosenthal, and Martin Starr in delightfully over-the-top Hassidic get-up and accents).  As Dewey becomes a star, his path crosses with many famous musicians, played by an astounding array of actors in one bizarre cameo after another: Frankie Muniz as Buddy Holly!  Jack White as Elvis Presley!  And, in the movie’s funniest scene, Dewey meets the Beatles, with Jack Black as Paul McCartney (”John, I’m sick of you being so dark when I’m so impish and whimsical!”), Paul Rudd as John Lennon, Justin Long as George Harrison, and Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr.  In each case, the casting is so bizarre and yet so weirdly perfect.

The film continues to follow Dewey through the years as he morphs through a variety of musical styles and influences.  He goes through a Dylan phase, creating nonsensical protest songs.  (Here’s a line from the dead-on parody of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”:  ”Mailboxes drip like lampposts in the twisted birth canal of the coliseum/ fairy teapots mask the temper tantrums oh say can you see ‘em.”)  Dewey, like Johnny Cash, is affected by his time in prison (”I understand the common man the way I never did before!”), leading to his writing a “Folsom Prison Blues”-type song called “Guilty as Charged.”  (”If you say my love is too large… then I’m guilty… guilty as charged…”)  Of course, as Dewey gets more and more successful he becomes increasingly arrogant and unmoored from reality.  In the ’70s, in another of my favorite sequences from the film, Dewey becomes obsessed with perfecting his “Pet Sounds”-esque musical masterpiece (”I’m hearing… more aboriginal percussionists.  And I want an army of digeridoos!  Fifty thousand digeridoos!”)  

Ultimately, Dewey’s drug habits drive him to near-ruin and estrangement from his friends and fellow musicians.  But, as always happens in these movies, hitting rock bottom enables him to sort out his priorities and re-connect with his family.  Towards the end of his life, when he is invited to a musical salute to his life and career (in which we get to witness a wonderful and ridiculous cover of Dewey’s song “Walk Hard” by Jewel, Jackson Browne, Lyle Lovett, and Ghostface Killah), Dewey gets the opportunity to sum up his life for the audience in a wonderfully on-the nose parody of the typical bio-pic redemptive finish (”This, is finally what I’ve learned,” he sings: “And then in the end, it’s family and friends.  Loving yourself.  But not only yourself…”)

I’ve spent a while summarizing this film, but believe me I’ve only scratched the surface.  There are so many wonderful digressions.  Apatow, Kasdan and co. left no stone un-turned as, in moment after moment, they take everything that we’ve seen a million times in these musical bio-pics and turn the crazy up to eleven.  Similar to the way that I now find it difficult, after watching Tropic Thunder, not to laugh at the idea of “serious” Hollywood war movies, after Walk Hard I don’t think I can ever again take a movie like Ray or Walk the Line at all seriously.  

I’m not sure why I was so lukewarm on this film the first time I saw it.  It might be because, in this sort of parody film, there aren’t really any characters for one to latch onto, emotionally.  But John C. Reilly is absolutely magnificent in the lead role.  He’s able to ground even the most insane bouts of lunacy in the film, and he’s able to be lovable even when engaging in over-the-top spoiled musician bad behavior.  And he is an astounding musician and singer.  By the way, the music in this film is phenomenal, and that’s something that became much more apparent to me upon a repeat viewing.  The filmmakers have created an enormous catalogue of songs for Dewey, which we hear in snippets throughout the film.  These songs are very catchy (and VERY funny), and the way each song is able to evoke a specific influence and style (as Dewey travels through the years and through an array of musical periods) is nothing sort of magnificent.  After watching this movie last month, I immediately went and downloaded the soundtrack from itunes (which contains complete versions of a whopping THIRTY songs created for the movie).  Needless to say, that soundtrack has been in REGULAR rotation on my ipod.

I also need to mention the film’s tremendous supporting cast.  The Office’s Jenna Fischer is a delight as Dewey’s love Darlene, conveying innocence and naughtiness all at once.  SNL’s Kristen Wiig has a harder role as Dewey’s first wife.  As Apatow and Kasdan describe on their commentary, “in order for our hero to be incredibly sympathetic and still heroic when he leaves his wife for another woman midway through the movie, you need his first wife to be AWFUL to him throughout the whole first half.”  Well, Wiig dives into that assignment head-first, creating a hysterical portrait of a shrewish wife who doesn’t believe that Dewey will ever amount to anything.  Tim Meadows and Chris Parnell are also terrific as Dewey’s much put-upon band-mates.  And there is an amazing array of other very funny people who pop up in small roles throughout the film: Craig Robinson (The Office, Knocked Up), Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up), Jack McBrayer (30 Rock). Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office), David Krumholtz (playing almost the exact same role that he had in Ray), Jane Lynch (The 40 year Old Virgin, Role Models), and many other familiar faces all kill in their small roles.

As an added bonus, the DVD is packed with terrific special features.  There are lots of deleted and extended scenes, out-takes, and an entirely new cut of the film (entitled “The Unbearably Long, Self-Indulgent Director’s Cut”).  There’s also a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes material that chronicles the enormous effort that went into creating all the music for the film.  Finally there is Apatow and Kasdan’s commentary track, which is insightful and funny (as you can tell since I’ve mentioned it several times already in this review).

Bottom line:  If you’ve enjoyed the other movies from the Apatow troupe (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, etc…) but you skipped Walk Hard, I suggest you remedy that oversight as soon as you can!