What we talk about when we talk about kung fu movies.

Shaolin and Wu-Tang: Two great tastes that taste great together.

I. Something You Should Know About Me

I notice that, to the extent that I write about anything here, I've scarcely mentioned martial arts films - I think they've only been glancingly alluded to in the context of my Tsui Hark binge a couple years ago, although I'd have to check through more thoroughly to be sure.

Let me correct this unfortunate oversight: I really love martial arts films.

"Transformers" - More or less what meets the eye.

Whoops, sorry, wrong one!
(Image: DEG and In the Grip of Hysteria)

"That was the worst movie I've ever seen," said my friend as we walked out of Transformers: Dark of the Moon last night. "Why did you want to see that again?"


Uh, it's a little hard to explain. Basically, I wanted to see it for academic reasons. No, seriously, bear with m... shut up.


I've been kinda out of touch with Hollywood blockbuster culture for years, since moving to a city where I can go to the movies all day every day without ever seeing one of the behemoths (though there are always a few each year that attract me). More specifically, I felt it was well past time I saw a Michael Bay movie, and this one looked pretty in the ads. And also it was 104 degrees yesterday and I was tired and gross and I wanted to sit in some air conditioning in the dark and not have to think, or even read subtitles, which I normally have to do when watching my preferred action movies.


Bay has spent the last decade as, on the one hand, the designated whipping boy for critics down on the modern American action film, and on the other hand, as possibly the most commercially successful director working - basically, he is the 21st century avatar of the blockbuster form, the way Spielberg was for the latter 20th century (sorry, James Cameron, you'll have to make more than a movie a decade before you're eligible for the title). In film geek circles, everyone has an opinion on the guy, except me. Yes, basically, it was peer pressure.

Don't you love it when directors turn out to look exactly
how you thought they would?
(Image: The MacGuffinMen)

Verdict? Not as bad as I thought it might be - certainly not the worst movie I've ever seen by a long shot. I enjoyed some of it. With all that I've read about Bay and his big toy commercials, there were few real surprises. I'd expected the migraine-level noisiness and busy-ness of it; the split-second ricocheting of tone among grim portentousness, continent-broad comedy, gauzy sentimentality and rah-rah fist-pumping; the script sodden with "wha? who?" expository dialogue on the series' mythology; the third-rate-comedy-club ethnic stereotyping. So just some random observations on aspects that caught my attention:


-When stuff was blowing up and robots were jumping around and smashing into each other, it was, I'm almost reluctant to say, kind of brilliant, sometimes. The possibilities of state-of-the-art digital effects are pushed to their limits of batty visual extravagance, with often strange and beautiful results (the intricate detail of the robots and all their tiny moving parts is astonishing). I've heard lots of complaints about Bay's typical epileptic-seizure-style shooting and editing, but, as others have observed, the 3D format seems to have tamed that tendency somewhat, as it requires shots to be smoother and held longer in order for the depth of field to register. So here Bay has a nice line in sweeping tracking shots that use the 3D well, and he displays surprising taste in largely avoiding the hurling of objects into viewers' faces (I wouldn't have minded a little more of that, actually). So sometimes Dark of the Moon is actually thrilling, though not nearly as often as the bombastic music tells us it is. It's at its best in an extended sequence wherein a team of human protagonists scrambles around the inside and outside of a slowly collapsing skyscraper pursued by the Bad Robots, especially a gargantuan, burrowing worm-like one that plunges into and out of the building with phallic glee. This is when this type of movie justifies its existence by making my jaw hang and my brain mutter, "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before."


-I was also well-forewarned about the Maxim-photo-shoot treatment of the women in the movie, particularly the puffy-lipped model-turned-actress playing the Shrieking Love Interest. But I was still slightly shocked by the extent of the movie's crude objectification. Practically every woman onscreen looks, dresses and is photographed like she's in a hip-hop music video. The most notable exception is Frances McDormand as a semi-harridan Uniformed Authority Figure. Her face is made-up and lit to look as unflattering as possible - most of her shots seem like calculated insults, to the extent that I wondered if she ever asked Bay what the hell he was doing. Or maybe she knew without asking. I'm guessing Bay is too much of a real man to have a shrink, but if he does, I'd love to get a look at the notes about his relationships with women.


-Which leads indirectly to the question: What the hell are FRANCES MCDORMAND and JOHN MALKOVICH and JOHN TURTURRO doing in this thing? Besides cashing a fat paych... never mind.


-But what the hell is BUZZ ALDRIN doing in this thing?


-On paper, the weirdest aspect of the movie is the flesh-and-blood hero, uberdork Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBoeuf (much better cast than he was as a rough-and-tumble greaser in the fourth Indiana Jones). In the eye of Bay's perfect storm of macho attitudes and obsessions is this slight, high-voiced, yammering little dude whose tremulous inadequacy as an action hero is a running joke. It's almost subversive, although I'm not sure Bay is self-aware enough to intend it that way. As long as I'm psychoanalyzing the director from a distance, I'll speculate that Sam is the scared little boy inside him who wants to be surrounded by explosions, cool-ass machines and centerfold models so that he can forget that's what he is. But I'm probably making that up.


-Michael Bay is America's Wong Jing - the Hong Kong director, producer and Emperor of Crass who fills much the same role over there for critics and cineastes.


-I'll see a fourth Transformers movie if Tsui Hark directs it.

Boys, girls and swords

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark (Image: HBO & Stellar Four)

Let me lay my bias on the table right away: I'm a huge fan of George R.R. Martin's series of doorstop-size fantasy novels collectively titled A Song of Ice and Fire.  And no big-screen cinema event this year eclipses, in my mind, the unveiling last Sunday night of HBO's new ten-episode, small-screen adaptation of the first volume, A Game of Thrones.  For the most part, it did not disappoint me - more on that in a few weeks when I put up a fuller review, after I've absorbed the initial installments. 

So clearly, I'm far from objective when evaluating criticisms of the series - especially the significant number of accusations floating around in the online chatter, from professional critics and blog commenters alike, that the grim, graphically violent and sexual show is misogynistic.  A pretty representative sampling includes pop culture columnist Whitney Matheson at USA Today ("a 13-year-old boy's wonderland"); an articulate-if-enraged Salon reader going by the handle of Setsuna777 ("Sexually violent, sexist, nauseating"); and, to a lesser extent, critic Ginia Bellafante in an already semi-notorious New York Times pan that didn't explicitly address issues of misogyny but dismissed the entire fantasy genre, and GoT in particular, as "boy fiction" that no woman she knows would bother with. 

My own pre-formed opinions notwithstanding, I think I'm on solid ground when dismissing these complaints, almost (but not quite) entirely - and I say that with full awareness that, given the pervasive sexism that still exists in contemporary entertainment, a feminist is well justified in approaching what she watches with some skepticism. 

Does everyone care about Uncle Boonmee? Should everyone?

(Image courtesy of Kick the Machine and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's blog)

In his rave review in the current issue of Film Comment magazine, Chuck Stephens makes the rather remarkable statement that "everybody who cares about cinema has already long been stoked about seeing Uncle Boonmee."  In case you are somebody who Just Does Not Care About Cinema, I shall inform you that he refers to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the latest feature by Thai avant-garde filmmaker Apichatpong "just call me Joe" Weerasethakul and the upset winner of the Palme d'Or for best picture at last year's Cannes Film Festival.  As usual for The Joe, it includes Buddhist and animist mysticism, animal transmogrifications and ruminations on reincarnation, references to Thai folklore and more oblique references to Thai history and politics, homey low-key humor, and lots and lots of jungle vegetation and chirping cricket sounds.  I suppose this is as good a paragraph as any to fulfill my obligations under the law governing all writers on Uncle Boonmee by mentioning the monkey ghosts with glowing red eyes and the disfigured princess who receives oral sex from a talking catfish.

Now, as someone who Cares About Cinema, and who is furthermore a fan of Weerasethakul's work, I was certainly stoked about seeing it long before I did last fall at the New York Film Festival, and was almost equally stoked about seeing it a second time, as I did last month at Manhattan's Film Forum when it was finally released for a U.S. run.  But the combination of that second experience and Stephens' above-quoted assertion got me thinking again about the gap between the quite small group of cosmopolitan-intellectual-professional film pundits and the more-or-less-casual paying audience, and how wide that gap often is even in the cineaste circles of a town like New York.