*Spoilers*

George Clooney regularly plays that guy many of us secretly wish we were: suave, well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, confident – in other words, the Oceans Eleven Clooney – or for that matter, simply that general image we have of George Clooney with those aforementioned qualities, devoid of any discernible weaknesses or personality flaws. Certainly he has also played roles where he is paranoid,  troubled, even ‘kooky’, but regardless of the odd exception which has seen him gaining weight or growing a beard for certain parts, there’s that marked disconnection between the audience and him and his characters – where its particularly difficult to even picture him wearing anything other than a suit or even just with a different hairstyle. In fact I’ve often wondered whether he’s been ‘doing a… Read More

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Clint Eastwood directed films, for me, come in two categories: his best films such as Unforgiven, Gran Turino, and Letters from Iwo Jima are amazingly sentimental, whilst his worst ones suffer from, and this might be a little harsh, extreme emotional manipulation – take the ending of Million Dollar Baby, the overacting in Mystic River, and pretty much the entirety of Changeling for instance, the latter category of which I consider to feature several of the most overrated movies of recent times. So then along comes Invictus, a drama about the 1995 South African Rugby Union World Cup winning team and Nelson Mandela’s input in using the sport to unite… Read More

Two things I love: ridiculously bad films, and bargain price DVDs. So when we spotted Toughest Man In The World, a 1984 TV movie starring Mr T for $5.99 in the Specials/Cheap pile at my local video store, a friend and I thought we’d give it a try. It would be, in some ways, the equivalent of consuming movie junk food: cheap, nasty, yet still inexplicably and morbidly satisfying. But what does one expect from a Mr T film, really, especially a doubt-raising one like this with a PG-rating? What sort of anticipation is humanly possible for such an anomalous celebrity, particularly someone like Mr T who seemed to have somehow achieved fame and a copious amount of jewellery for no real reason at all? Unintentional humour is all well and good, however there must come a point where such blatant disregard for basic standards of one’s mental health turns horribly into a sick form of sadomasochism, particularly when this kind of trash is on the cover:

Well all right then: Junk food, check. S&M, check. Onto the review. Read More

How do you take a very ordinary, very formulaic film idea and turn it into something so over the top that it becomes an over-spectacularised mess of explosions and colour? Well if you’re Michael Bay, you:

(a) Shoot every scene with a moving, sweeping camera so that you end up focusing on the bottom of people’s chins. Or the bottoms of “hot girls”. 

(b) Base the action around America’s world-superiority and military might and exaggerate it to the point that it makes the pro-Americanism sentiments of the likes of Rambo First Blood Part II  and Rocky IV seem like dissident communist propaganda.

(c) Get as many helicopters as the film’s budget can pay for, which in the case of Transformers 2 is a lot, and have them fly around next to each other for a third of the film’s duration.

(d) Have multiple “funny” characters of various stereotypically ethnic backgrounds, particularly the African-American ‘homie G gangsta’, to balance out the hardcore caucasian American patriotism in order to, presumably, deepen the experience of the movie. 

(e) Have your CGI artists do the directing for you while blowing up as many things as possible. 

And there you have it, the five step formula for a Hollywood blockbuster. However unlike Pearl Harbour, Armageddon, The Rock, and Bad Boys I & II, Transformers started out as an excuse to sell toys to kids with the flimsiest and most nonsensical excuse of a plot holding all the figurines/characters together. Flimsy as in mechanical shape-shifting good guy aliens coming to Earth to fight their mechanical shape-shifting bad guy equivalents, all of them masquerading as vehicles while befriending humans and learning to speak English; nonsensical to the point that if a major character like Optimus Prime dies (in order to pave the way for another series of all-new toys) then no worries, just resurrect him with a convenient plot device like The Matrix of Leadership. In other words, with a film license so full of “anything goes”, Michael Bay hit the jackpot.