If you have a spare 45 minutes or so — and really, that’s about how long it’ll take to get through this thing — I highly recommend reading the grammatically challenging yet shockingly insightful take down of the entire Twilight phenomenon penned by — well, the Hulk.
Seriously, for the most part this is a dead-on peeling apart of what makes the books and the movies so insidious — not to mention shitty entertainment.
Bad-Ass Digest: Film Crit Hulk Smash: Hulk vs. Twilight/11.17.11
Having already introduced Tom Hardy as Bane to the world with that creepy over the shoulder shot back in May, Christopher Nolan and the team behind his third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, have revealed another first look at a new star.
Found in the official website, here is the first image of Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, the alter-ego of Catwoman. Hathaway, to say the least, looks much different from past Catwoman actresses, with the glasses, lack of any ears or mask and gigantic motorbike (actually, is that the same bike from The Dark Knight?) setting her apart from Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry.
Warner Bros. has released the first image of Henry Cavill in his blue bodysuit and red cape for Man of Steel, the Zack Snyder-directed reboot in which he plays the Kryptonian do-gooder.
To fit into that suit and attain the built look of Superman, Cavill’s been on a crazy diet and workout plan, which was recently revealed involves 5,000 calories a day.
Epic rap battle is epic
Not mine of course…*sniff* I’m ok
Oh, how far we’ve come.
On a relative scale, I do have to concede that this is the best of the Transformers franchise so far, and it is far, far better than Revenge of the Fallen. Everything that was so horrendous in Revenge admittedly has been greatly toned down in Dark of the Moon. The racist twins, Skids and Mudflap, are gone, there’s no dog humping and no Devastator’s scrotum.
This time around we do get a plot that takes itself seriously. We get a narrative that makes a token amount of sense and shows something almost resembling discipline (even if there is no tonal consistency). The film hits us with a couple of genuinely surprising plot twists and allows about 30 minutes of ‘really bad stuff’ happening before we’re off to the races which goes a long way to add gravity to the final act. And when the action does come, it delivers the goods.
The final hour is more-or-less one non-stop action sequence and there is a sizable increase in both the quantity and quality of robot-on-robot smackdowns. And that’s exactly what we want from a Transformers movie. We want to see Optimus motherfucking Prime kicking ass and taking names, preferably in slow motion. And rest assured, in this movie, Optimus’ robot johnson is swingin’ long and low.
That being said we still have needlessly campy and generally intolerable middle-school humor (Deep Wang? Really?). We still have Shia LeBeouf trying to wring sympathy from a lead character who is an obnoxious douchebag. We still have a needless female lead who exists purely to be ogled.
Which brings me to my biggest problem with Dark of the Moon and the entire Transformers franchise in general: Despite the marked increase in Autobot bad-assery, once again The Transformers are supporting characters in their own movie. Even though Dark of the Moon does put the Autobots center stage when the action begins, the story still primarily revolves around the useless human protagonists. Which wouldn’t be such a bad thing (I get it, CGing giant robots is expensive) except all the main human characters are annoying jackasses.
To get to to the good stuff we have to sit through a lot of ‘character’ and setup, we have to watch Shia LeBeouf being an obnoxious asshole, bitching and moaning about his life with his ridiculous DC penthouse and supermodel girlfriend, being painfully unprofessional in job interviews and being borderline abusively-jealous of his girlfriend’s millionaire boss.
We have to continually endure the open leering over Rosie Huntigton-Whiteley who neither distinguishes nor embarrasses herself but does seem much more comfortable being shamelessly exploited than Megan Fox.
We even have to struggle to tell the robots apart. With a few exceptions the Transformers are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. This is especially true when it comes to the Decepticons who are all incoherent gun-metal gray collections of gears and wires. They were so hard to tell apart that I thought Megatron died three different times during the course of the movie. Would it really be so hard to give at least the main Decepticons differing color schemes?
Even though I can’t in good conscience recommend it, this is probably the best we are going to get out of a Michael Bay helmed Transformers movie. On the one hand, we have about an hour (out of 2h 40m) of exciting action sequences involving giant ass-kicking robots, on the other…Deep Wang.
