My friend saw 47 Meters Down and Rough Night over the weekend. He, quite reasonably, asked me what I thought of them. (He didn't like either one.)
I had to reply that I hadn't seen them and that I might not. All I knew about them was what I'd read in the newspapers (Piers Marchant, who reviewed 47 Meters Down for us, quite liked it). I've decided not to feel guilty about missing movies I don't write about. There are a lot of movies and little time. Most movies are not meant to appeal to my demographic, which is decidedly grown-up. I really don't have much interest in Spider-Man or Dwayne Johnson's ongoing attempt to insinuate himself in the daily lives of most Americans. I like him fine on Ballers.
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy most movies. The more you know about Hollywood conventions and film grammar, the more threads you find to pull at. Almost all of us have seen enough movies to deconstruct them in the manner of the Mystery Science 3000 dudes. But once I start thinking about camera angles and how a movie fits in a star's filmography, I'm experiencing a species of failure. Movies are supposed to transport you to their universe, not cause you to wonder how they fit into ours.
Sometimes you just want a respite from the world. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go to the movies on a hot Sunday afternoon. There's nothing wrong with using movies to escape. The theater trip is of a proscribed duration.
But the movies don't mean as much to us as a culture as they used to -- and they don't mean as much to me. Part of this may be because I've seen so many of them, hundreds of movies a year for about 40 years. I've gotten used to the idea that filmmakers can digitally realize on screen anything they can imagine. I long ago realized that the future of the movies is post-human, as studios will soon be able to dispense with human actors, replacing them with digital simulacra. Our movies are less and less about us anymore.
The big movie this week is about robots from space, based on an old cartoon that was conceived as a promotional device to sell a line of Japanese toys Hasbro introduced to the American market in 1984. I might be skipping it as well.
...
I lost the thread on Michael Bay's Transformers films about an hour into the first installment. I get why some people were excited about the series; people who grew up with the toys and the cartoon series might have an emotional investment in the characters. I didn't and so I was happy not to review the movie, which seemed just so much juddering color and ear-splitting noise, a sharp cut sequence of would-be totemic images.
Bay is the sort of filmmaker who keeps scrapbooks of images he likes; he clips photographs and illustrations from magazines to use as inspiration when he is envisioning one of his films. While you might see this as a kind of appropriation, I don't think there's anything wrong with a visual artist gathering and hoarding images. It sounds like a sensible thing to do, a way of isolating and rearranging the known world for one's own purposes. A director serves as a kind of surrogate brain for moviegoers. He orders the world in the frame -- he tells us where to look and at what. If the trick is done well we shouldn't worry about how it's accomplished.
Bay is not my favorite filmmaker. But I've never been able to work up the kind of vitriol for him some critics and more than a few moviegoers have. I mildly enjoyed The Rock and Armageddon and was too kind in my review of Pearl Harbor. The Bad Boys movies were almost (but not quite) redeemed by the chemistry of Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. I enjoyed Pain & Gain, which may be as close as Bay ever comes to making an art film.
Someone has to make these kinds of movies -- big, loud incoherent blockbusters seeking to rip a hole in our quick-healing zeitgeist. Bay may be the most successful partner that producer Jerry Bruckheimer ever had; his movies either blow up real good or bomb profitably (even The Island, which made only about $30 million domestically, ended up turning a considerable profit overseas). They were crass, dumb and aimed at a demographic that -- as Roger Ebert wrote of Pearl Harbor -- "may not have heard of ... World War II."
An assaultive filmmaker, Bay's vision is industrial and violent and he seems, like George Lucas, to regard human sensibilities as irritants. He's better with machines and metal, with lizard-brain twitch and scurry than with filigreed emotion. And that's exactly why so many people -- especially adolescent males -- love his movies.
Because they aren't exactly movies. They are opportunities to be immersed in his clamorous, insensate visions. Bay might not be the most straightforward storyteller, but he is an artist of another order, the cinematic equivalent of a Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix-style rock guitar virtuoso. It's not his words that are important, but the audiovisual riot he creates. That's why he's the perfect director to make a movie about toy robots.
Still, there were people in the film, and Megan Fox, who was used as a kind of special effect, but they were beside the point, and ultimately dispensable. I left the theater rattled. I wasn't sure I wanted anything to do with the brave new world Bay put up on the screen.
It's 10 years later, and, in some ways the Transformers franchise seems to be winding down. Bay says Transformers: The Last Knight, released earlier this week, will be the last one he directs. Mark Wahlberg, the film's nominal star, says it will also be his last go-around.
Anecdotally, there's little interest in this movie, despite the usual rounds of televised trailers and fast-food promotional tie-ins. I've not had any calls or emails about its opening, none of my movie-mad friends have tried to engage me in speculative dialogue about the film. It has been quiet out there. Too quiet.
But even if The Last Knight is a disappointment domestically -- as was the previous film in the series, Age of Extinction, which earned $245 million domestically (which sounds like a lot but isn't when you consider how much the film cost to make and market) -- there will be more films, with other directors and stars. Because there's money to be made -- primarily in overseas markets. The last two Transformer movies each grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.
Two more have been announced -- a spinoff prequel will be released in 2018, with a sixth film in the Transformers series coming in 2019. Bay says there are 14 more completed stories which could be made into Transformer films.
I don't mind this. I don't have to see those movies. There are great things on television. And there's always baseball.
But it bothers me that, aside from a couple of Bollywood films sneaking into Cinemark Colonel Glenn theater, Transformers: The Last Knight is the only movie opening in Arkansas today.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle on 06/23/2017