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show and tell: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON |
 Rated PG-13 You know that one horrible neighborhood kid who would come over uninvited and gleefully, inexplicably smash every toy in your sandbox while you watched on, powerless to stop him? Michael Bay is that kid. The Transformers, as you know, were once toys, amusing little plastic thingamabobs, fascinating little puzzles that begged to be solved and played with. They had character. They were engaging. They were fun. Then Bay comes around the corner, twists their arms off, lights them on fire, and beats every last joy out of them. To state that Bay’s third chapter of the Transformers screen series is not good is simply not statement enough. It is most certainly bad. But bad movies happen every day. The road to a good movie is an understandably difficult one, requiring the balance of a dozen different art forms—writing, acting, production design, cinematography, music and editing among them—and the breakdown of any can threaten to scuttle even the best efforts of all the rest. The first problem with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is that every single one of these elements fails. |
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show and tell: XMEN: FIRST CLASS |
 rated PG-13 It’s a fairly wonderfully Darwinian kind of thing that in a series that so specifically explores the power of change, evolution, and fear of the new and different, strong elements occasionally do survive. The public fascination that was spawned in the first two X-Men movies (helmed by “Usual Suspects” director Brian Singer) by the character of one famously feral amnesiac loner, Wolverine, gave rise to a subsequent and precipitous mutation into two thoroughly craptastic sequels (not helmed by Singer). Luckily for true admirers of the franchise, the weakness of this strain has ultimately proven fatal, and made room for a superior line to begin to flourish. Among the enduring mysteries that Singer’s first films set into motion was the gentlemanly rivalry between its key father figures: the wealthy telepath Professor Charles Xavier, and Eric Lehnsherr, a holocaust survivor born with the ability to control all things metal, and hence known by his codename “Magneto.” Outside all the blast and bombast one would expect from a superhero blockbuster bonanza like “X-Men,” many of those films’ greatest moments of tension came from simple conversations between this pair about the problems of conformity, racial superiority, and the morality of action in their relatively and equally opposed philosophies. Nicely illustrated by the chessboard that’s so often set between them, it was clear that these men had a history of mutual admiration, but had fallen to completely different sides of a complicated and possibly insoluble argument. |
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show and tell: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES |
 rated PG-13 It’s a great title, but maybe for another movie. Somewhere locked deep in Disney’s vault, there is apparently a secret Pirate Codex that lays out, in great specificity, the elements required to construct and launch a proper “Pirates of the Caribbean” episode. In addition to cutlass-clanging, rope-swinging, rum-swilling and cross-dressing, prerequisites include (but are not limited to) marginalized protagonists, sidelined romance, mutually opposed villains, convoluted plot machinations, and a minimum of 20 extraneous minutes. By cleaving closely to that guidebook, these tides remain wholly familiar. Somewhere along the line, however, someone must have torn out the page that mentioned spark, surprise, inspiration and fun. |
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