Cretinous

Very funny review of Transformers 2 in the New York Times.

The creative people behind the cretinous “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” the second blockbuster inspired by the popular Hasbro toys, have segmented their demographic into four discrete categories:

1. Young teenage boys who still play with Transformer toys (or keep them under the bed).

2. Older teenage boys who identify with the professional doofus Shia LaBeouf.

3. Somewhat older teenage boys who would like to play with the professional hottie Megan Fox.

4. Boys of all ages who think it would be cool to go to war and run around the desert shooting guns.

and

Of course, viewers can embrace several categories at once; say, those who collect toys and liked Mr. LaBeouf in the last “Indiana Jones” movie. Or those who fantasize about having sex with Ms. Fox while shooting guns, a vision that distills the auteurist ambitions and popular appeal of the movie’s director, Michael Bay.

Is it even possible to have liked Shia LaBeouf in the last Indiana Jones movie? I guess almost anything is theoretically possible - but it never occurred to me, having seen the film.

and

There’s a serious disconnect in the movie between the image of power that those GM brands are meant to convey and the bankrupt car industry they now signify. That disconnect only deepens with the introduction of two new Autobot characters, the illiterate, bickering twins Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), both of which take the shape of Chevrolet concept cars. The characters have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas. For what it’s worth, the script, by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, also includes a crack about Simmons, who’s coded as Jewish, and his “pubic-fro head.”

Transformers

Finally got around to watching Transformers on DVD, and I have to disagree with Lucas [who I cannot insert a link to because he's taken his blog down] - I thought the film was really really crap.

The script was incoherent, the "funny bits" felt forced (and almost without exception weren't funny) and the film perpetuated cheap and unnecessary stereotypes such as the nerdy teacher who can be sweet-talked into giving a student a better grade. There were a few moments of character-development sunshine - such as the family's solicitous and unexplained devotion to their chihuahua and its pain medication - but overall it felt like an underwritten crappy film about a teenager who wants to be cool, interspersed with lots of explosions.

Also - why did the Autobots speak to each other (and have interior monologues) in English, while the evil Decepticons usually spoke to each other in 'robot language' - although when Autobots and Decepticons were speaking to each other it was in English.

Anyway, there were somewhere between 1.5 and 2 good reasons to see the film (and between 0.5 and 1 of those reasons is Australian). See below.

Rachael Taylor (the one that's not Megan Fox) is a Tasmanian girl who scored a mid-size part in Transformers out of basically nowhere.