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I genuinely can’t see how someone could see these movies enough for them to be their favorite and not come to the conclusion that Optimus is a murdering psychopath. “Honor to the end” immediately after backstabbing and splitting a robot in half. Good guy? Sure loving thing.
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Jun 20, 2020 12:14
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K Waste that was a really good post. I guess I would ask a dangerously middlebrow question here - are the Transformers movies actually ambivalent? What I mean is, they play all the repugnant and crude and fascist stuff completely straight. They don’t do anything to push the viewer towards an ambivalent stance, there’s no Jim Halpert character staring at the camera while Optimus executes prisoners, no Black character staring in disbelief at the racist robot twins.They leave it up to the viewer to realize what’s really happening-the only ‘push’ they provide in that direction is simply piling on more straight faced obscenity and atrocity. Is that itself the ambivalence Sontag means? Maybe I’ve answered my own question. I guess what I’m really asking is, does stylization require a conscious, reflexive self-awareness like you get in a Scott Pilgrim or Watchmen? Or can it be purely formal, without any wink or cue to the viewer? I hope that made any kind of sense.
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Jun 20, 2020 14:28
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You gotta admit that Optimus in these movies is, if nothing else, insanely American.
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Jun 20, 2020 14:28
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General Battuta posted:K Waste that was a really good post. I guess I would ask a dangerously middlebrow question here - are the Transformers movies actually ambivalent? What I mean is, they play all the repugnant and crude and fascist stuff completely straight. They don’t do anything to push the viewer towards an ambivalent stance, there’s no Jim Halpert character staring at the camera while Optimus executes prisoners, no Black character staring in disbelief at the racist robot twins.They leave it up to the viewer to realize what’s really happening-the only ‘push’ they provide in that direction is simply piling on more straight faced obscenity and atrocity. What you’re looking for with the ‘Halpert winking at the camera’ thing is the opposite of ambivalence; it’s that stance that art must have utility as moral instruction. Bay’s films (as distinct from the characters portrayed) are amoral - which is extremely different from being immoral. (It’s actually kinda odd that you bring up Watchmen as a contrast, because Watchmen doesn’t have any particular ‘winks’ either. How do we know that killing millions of people is wrong?)
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Jun 20, 2020 16:00
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Goons ruin everything.
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Jun 20, 2020 16:30
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Jamie Faith posted:"cringey passive aggressiveness" like implying someones dumb and haven't seen any other movies because they like a movie you don't like? I seriously don't know how you can start off a convo in bad faith like that and expect a good faith reply in return. I'd genuinely like to hear your take on Optimus.
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Jun 20, 2020 17:41
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General Battuta posted:K Waste that was a really good post. I guess I would ask a dangerously middlebrow question here - are the Transformers movies actually ambivalent? What I mean is, they play all the repugnant and crude and fascist stuff completely straight. They don’t do anything to push the viewer towards an ambivalent stance, there’s no Jim Halpert character staring at the camera while Optimus executes prisoners, no Black character staring in disbelief at the racist robot twins.They leave it up to the viewer to realize what’s really happening-the only ‘push’ they provide in that direction is simply piling on more straight faced obscenity and atrocity. In addition to what SMG has said, I think that part of what makes Sontag's essay so prescient is that part of what she's talking about is the contemporary problem of critics of art to be very practiced in discussing content, but not so much even in the basic appraisal of form as the primary vehicle for our experience. So, for instance, I have made the claim that the stylization in Bay's films betrays an ambivalence about their content. But far from looking for that ambivalence in where I said you'd find it, in form, you have asked for an expression of ambivalence in content; specifically, a character reacting with offense or breaking the fourth wall. Now, to a certain extent, we can be blurring the line between content and form, here. Cutting from a robot doing black face to a close up of a black character being offended by this is a formal choice, after all. We can even discern how an actor's mere performance is inherently formal. But as SMG noted, and as you yourself seem to suspect, a form that communicates "self-awareness" is not the same as a form that communicates "ambivalence." I would argue that it is precisely the absence of obvious "cues" to the spectator, coupled with Bay's stylized excess to the exclusion of what the conventional significance of a shot or scene is "supposed to mean," that is definitionally ambivalent. And even on the level of content, the issue is clearly not that Bay plays his films "straight." Just look at Bad Boys II or Transformers 2. The heroes of his films are thoroughly demoralized and violated all the time, often in overtly sexual ways. In Armageddon a totally unremarkable civilian gets crushed by a meteorite and then his legs are sticking out of the crater like Wile E. Coyote. One of the good guys of the same film is literally a registered sex offender. The only way we get to this content being played "straight" is through the prism of the artist as "subject supposed to believe," whereas the form of the films themselves is frequently criticized for not being straightforward, and even being incoherent. The problem is that, as Sontag outlines, there is frequently expressed in discourse on popular cinema a neurotic dependency on the works themselves having "moral utility," which is how you get to rejections of the "Bay-hem as Satire" reading because Bay has done nothing to "push" his audience to accept a clear moral standpoint. This neurosis is inevitably compounded as societies enter into periods of precipitous decline. We need clear moral statements from artists because what's at stake is literally the sum total of any kind of communitarian value. The same arguments were leveled against Paul Verhoeven as his Hollywood films first began to develop cult followings on home video: that he doesn't do anything/enough to push his viewers away from fascism, that the fact that so many (never substantiated) people play them "straight" is evidence that they are actually counterproductive. Inevitably, however, nobody arguing in favor of an art of moral utility -- of the highest art being both formally good and having a clear, progressive "statement" -- ever substantiates that these works themselves "push" anyone in the right direction. And we can't, because we do not fundamentally engage with art as "statement." We engage with it as experience. quote:A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
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Jun 20, 2020 18:26
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There really was no need to be rude.
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Jun 20, 2020 19:17
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Y'all forgot the universal greeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJYS76GBqZU
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Jun 20, 2020 21:00
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General Battuta posted:You gotta admit that Optimus in these movies is, if nothing else, insanely American. Movie optimus: what your trumpist boomer dad fantasizes he is/would do to "the libs" if given a chance Edit: letting millions of humans die to prove a point = "suffering builds character" Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 21:54
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Give me your MASK
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Jun 20, 2020 21:56
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It should be noted that, where Bay’s films don’t feature any particular moral instruction, they do feature very obvious truths. Like, it’s simply true that the Mikaela Baines character is not an object. She’s objectified by the male characters, but that’s an entirely different thing (though fake progressives tend to get them mixed up). Waiting for Office Jim to turn to the camera and tell you that this woman is a person means you are shirking your responsibly to treat all women as people - regardless of what you’re told, regardless of how much makeup they wear, etc. What Bay does is simply make that issue inescapable. There is absolutely nothing ‘natural’ about how Meg Fox is presented. The mistake of liberal reviewers is that they ascribe this disruption of nature to Bay’s corrupting influence - Bay as despotic jouisseur. What they miss is the truth that there is no nature. Nature doesn’t exist.
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Jun 20, 2020 23:42
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Captain Invictus posted:G1 optimus: idealized/idolized heroic father figure Optimus was also partially based on John Wayne, so G1 Prime would be John Wayne in movies, while Movie Optimus is John Wayne in real life.
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Jun 21, 2020 00:20
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PhotoKirk posted:Goons ruin everything. As if you are going to stop 🎶buying their playsets and toys🎶.
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Jun 21, 2020 04:27
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https://tfwiki.net/wiki/To_sell_toys
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Jun 21, 2020 05:56
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It should be noted that, where Bay’s films don’t feature any particular moral instruction, they do feature very obvious truths. The fundamental problem with this argument is the material reality of how Fox was treated by Bay throughout her career - sexualized as a child and treated like dirt. https://twitter.com/reservoird0gs/status/1274538711175356417 But we all know you don't care about human experiences or abuse.
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Jun 21, 2020 14:37
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General Battuta posted:K Waste that was a really good post. I guess I would ask a dangerously middlebrow question here - are the Transformers movies actually ambivalent? What I mean is, they play all the repugnant and crude and fascist stuff completely straight. They don’t do anything to push the viewer towards an ambivalent stance, there’s no Jim Halpert character staring at the camera while Optimus executes prisoners, no Black character staring in disbelief at the racist robot twins.They leave it up to the viewer to realize what’s really happening-the only ‘push’ they provide in that direction is simply piling on more straight faced obscenity and atrocity. Why would a black character need to react to skid and mudflaps, who are way more coded as hillbillies than anything else? Jim Halpert characters are not present in Dredd or Starship Troopers or 300 or Full Metal Jacket, and we know these films are popular amongst people with a variety of political viewpoints. Some chuds definitely like the movies, music, restaurants, sports teams etc that you like - so what? If you want to draw out the politics of a given thing, you gotta start properly with the thing itself before getting into how diverse/monolithic it's reception is, otherwise you starting backwards and will just end up lost. DoctorWhat posted:The fundamental problem with this argument is the material reality of how Fox was treated by Bay throughout her career - sexualized as a child and treated like dirt. The argument is obviously not about Bay or Fox as real people in all their moral quandaries, but about the fictional characters they created in context of the story they're in.
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Jun 21, 2020 21:58
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Skids and Mudflap are absolutely not coded as hillbullies, they are outrageous racist caricatures of African-Americans. It's hugely intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Reno Wilson talks about being instructed to portray Mudflap as a "wannabe gangster type". I don't disagree that the Bay films are rife with meaning, and worth discussing. I think their sociopathic disregard for human life and kindness is absolutely fascinating and entirely on purpose. But we can have discussions about these films without caping for and minimizing the racist and sexist production decisions that inundate them.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:27
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Interesting that you mention "kindness". I just tried to think of any examples of kindness in Bay's movies, and I had to go all the way back to "I didn't want your child to grow up without a father" in The Rock. (Which was of course immediately followed by a cynical joke, but whatever.) There may be something later, but it's not coming to mind.
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Jun 21, 2020 23:33
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DoctorWhat posted:The fundamental problem with this argument is the material reality of how Fox was treated by Bay throughout her career - sexualized as a child and treated like dirt. Right, so let’s break down your thought process here. Step 1: you’re watching Jimmy Kimmel, and you conclude from an anecdote that Michael Bay is definitely a pedophile. No point dancing around it with euphemisms. Step 2: if Michael Bay is evil in this way, then we can presume that the depictions of sexist behaviour in his films are wholehearted endorsement. Step 3: if those parts are wholehearted endorsements, then it follows that the other similar depictions are also wholehearted endorsements. Bay straightforwardly just loves the death penalty, for example. The moral of Pain & Gain is that the death penalty is great because it’s funny. This is just one of many things Bay definitely believes. Step 4: effectively, the entire runtime of a given Bay film consists of a demonic Bad Halpert imploring to do harm for petty reasons. Step 5: against this threat, it is necessary to create a Good Halpert, who will battle Bad Halpert at the end of days. Hence the above embedded tweet, and your very earnest complaint that we just aren’t caring enough.
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Jun 22, 2020 01:25
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right, so let’s break down your thought process here. What the gently caress is this Halpert bullshit. I never said any of that poo poo. I'm not imploring that the Bay films, or any other movie, use any particular rhetorical technique to convey their satire or political message. Furthermore, I don't care whether Bay is endorsing the sexual exploitation or framing of teenagers ironically or sincerely, and I don't care whether or not the satire, or lack thereof, is competent or effective. In the grand scheme of things, the on-screen depiction of Mikaela, or even Fox's character in Bad Boys 2, is not all that impactful. The depiction of teenagers, fictional or real, as sex objects for adult consumption is a worldwide media plague that leads directly to child sexual abuse and exploitation, but Bay isn't its architect. Riverdale does it, popular anime does it, queer fanfic writers on Ao3 do it. It's a tremendously commercially successful and popular trend that draws on high-school nostalgia for adults, maturity fantasies and wish fulfillment for teens & tweens, and a worldwide eroticization and fetishization of neotony in general. In that regard, Bay is a drop in a bucket. Of acid. It's the actual, real-world act of Michael Bay, on a movie set, telling a real-life 15-year-old - a child - to dance seductively under a waterfall in a bikini that's grotesque. It prioritizes either shock value and transgression (if satire is assumed) or erotic enjoyment (if we assume outright pedophilia or its endorsement) ahead of the emotional safety and well-being of a real-world child. This was wrong to do, regardless of Bay's artistic motivations or heart-of-hearts desires. Projecting bad-faith arguments onto my criticism, assuming I'm coming in here with an axe to grind, is absurd. A cursory glance at my post history in this thread would reveal that I more-or-less agree with Terry's read on the films and believe in Bay's intent to convey, at least, a similar message. My intent is to make clear, to desperately impress upon passers-by, that no work of art justifies the treatment Fox experienced from Bay throughout her career. DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 01:59
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All that poo poo is unarguably terrible but it doesn't contradict SMG's statement at all. "Child exploitation is bad" and "characters in stories should be read as subjects" are not in any way in conflict. It's also kind of rich to say "you don't care about human experiences or abuse" and then follow that up by claiming the other guy is projecting bad-faith arguments.
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Jun 22, 2020 02:14
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Payndz posted:Interesting that you mention "kindness". I just tried to think of any examples of kindness in Bay's movies, and I had to go all the way back to "I didn't want your child to grow up without a father" in The Rock. (Which was of course immediately followed by a cynical joke, but whatever.) There may be something later, but it's not coming to mind. The Ed Harris detective in Pain & Gain takes on the case pro bono. He's really just doing it as a hobby, though, and the movie treats his humility cynically ("It's the simple things in life that really make us happy," Harris says as the camera pans over his palatial seaside estate.)
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Jun 22, 2020 02:19
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Schwarzwald posted:All that poo poo is unarguably terrible but it doesn't contradict SMG's statement at all. "Child exploitation is bad" and "characters in stories should be read as subjects" are not in any way in conflict. I agree. quote:It's also kind of rich to say "you don't care about human experiences or abuse" and then follow that up by claiming the other guy is projecting bad-faith arguments. I'll admit that was tactless and uncalled-for. Much like Bay, I can not pretend to know the contents of SMG's heart. That being said, I have never once seen SMG respond to criticism of his rhetoric on moral grounds with anything I would describe as unqualified empathy. But I don't spend much time in CD anymore so I could be gravely mistaken.
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Jun 22, 2020 02:21
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DoctorWhat posted:Skids and Mudflap are absolutely not coded as hillbullies, they are outrageous racist caricatures of African-Americans. It's hugely intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Reno Wilson talks about being instructed to portray Mudflap as a "wannabe gangster type". How are they coded so? Genuinely curious, I see it get claimed a lot but I can't remember how it's supposed to work. Their names reference trucking/off-road culture, their pride in their ignorance, bad teeth and accents all seem more redneck to me than black. Wanting to be tough wise guys is certainly their motivation, but I can't recall anything in their dialogue or behavior that explicitly references race. Admittedly it has been a long time since I watched the movie, I could be wrong! Jazz on the other hand is obvious, but for some reason he's rarely used as an example. Edit: Drift is also a good example of an undeniably racialized alien robot Blood Boils fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 09:30
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DoctorWhat posted:What the gently caress is this Halpert bullshit. If we’re to talk about the material reality where actors work, then we are talking about their material conditions. But you’re not really doing that, because the content of a given movie isn’t particularly relevant. You’d have to admit that an actor wearing full Victorian dress on Downton Abbey or whatever is also being exploited - because they are, by definition. Megan Fox herself made that point at the peak of her career, when she became interested in overidentifying with her celebrity persona in a confrontational way - saying that all actresses are objectified. Her work in Transformers is a sort of auteur statement, akin to how ScarJo keeps taking on roles where she plays a murderous fembot. The decision to keep working on the Transformers up until she was sacked is a part of this. (I find it infinitely curious how nobody ever talks about Fox as an artist who, like, makes choices with her performances). We’re getting into the fact that there are no good movies by this standard, because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. I’m siding with Dworkin here: patriarchy is all-pervasive, inescapable. If this were only about teens in swimsuits, then just shut down the waterparks. (Though, to be clear: I do say “shut down the waterparks.” They’re a genuine obscenity.) Depressingly, I probably have to explain now that the above obviously does not excuse sexual harassment, or ‘make it good’ - let alone far worse actions. That would be the cynical take, and I am not a cynic. The point is that the horizon of feminism/antisexism cannot be just cleansing the system of its symptoms through such as twitter callouts. That’s not enough to protect people. Like, one issue is that it’s just horribly inefficient. It’s as Zizek notes about the Catholic church: it’s not that the church is being corrupted by evil priests; something about the very institution of the church is causing priests to become molesters. This leads to a second point: when you see people voicing fears about violent or sexual content in movies influencing people or whatever, that’s being done as an ersatz substitute for the critique of ideology. Measuring levels of blood or skin (or, on the flipside, combing a work for deeply-embedded “hidden meanings” and “subliminal messages”) is an escape from the political. In truth, a “G” film can obviously have a far worse influence than an “X” film. And then, we have to ask what it is about our society and economies that makes people susceptible to such influence? (It’s like in the case of MLM schemes: obviously they’re terrible cult-like things, but they wouldn’t work at all if the public weren’t already primed to accept them with stories about Jeff Bezos or whatever.) Anyways, the story in the youtube is that Fox was working as an extra on Bad Boys 2 -playing an adult character. Like, the point of the character is that she’s drinking in club (although regulations meant they couldn’t show her drinking alcohol). Notably, a big chunk of the anecdote is about the people overseeing the production and making sure that everyone was following the rules. So my take is a lot like how Fox seems to take it: she found it amusing that she ended up working on a very crass movie, and that Bay apparently just treated her with indifference. This is the only shot, lasting about one second, in which Fox actually appears in the film: 
SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 17:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Notably, a big chunk of the anecdote is about the people overseeing the production and making sure that everyone was following the rules. So my take is a lot like how Fox seems to take it: she found it amusing that she ended up working on a very crass movie, and that Bay apparently just treated her with indifference. BTS interviews have also provided context for the environment of the shoot - most of the dancing was done by the second unit without Bay even being on the set, and despite a bunch of scantily clad women walking around everywhere, the whole thing was a fairly mechanical process of moving from take to take because it's a bunch of people under hot lights all day shooting the same 5 minutes of club footage over and over again. It's hosed up that the Hollywood machine functions in a way that allows her to even be in that scene, but it's disingenuous to paint Bay as the sole culprit, especially when Megan Fox's episode of Two and a Half Men aired a few months after Bad Boys 2 was released, and the premise of the episode was that Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer wanted to gently caress a teenager.
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Jun 22, 2020 19:09
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It should also be noted that the club scene in the movie is presented according to Bay’s usual associative nightmare logic. It’s a club where men pay to get drugged up and lie immobile on cots? while women in underwear gyrate over them, indifferently. The horror-movie camerawork and lighting emphasize that, from their perspective, the men are looking up at a literal glass ceiling where the bosses stand back and dispassionately count money. Like everything in all Bay’s films, this is like the least erotic scene ever. So this is where the contortions start, because maybe being entirely unerotic is Bay’s fetish??? If we follow that assumption, then Bay must have this utterly perplexing alien psychology. And then, who knows what this intruder is capable of?
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Jun 22, 2020 22:01
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Blood Boils posted:
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Jun 24, 2020 16:25
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It should also be noted that the club scene in the movie is presented according to Bay’s usual associative nightmare logic. This has sort of reminded me, in an abstract way, did you ever write anything on Titanfall? It seems like a game you'd have thoughts on. I'd like to read them if you have.
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Jun 26, 2020 02:56
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The links in the OP are dead for me 
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Mar 15, 2022 00:46
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General Battuta posted:The links in the OP are dead for me You bumped a thread that hadn't had a post in nearly two years and the OP was last edited in 2014. This shouldn't be shocking.
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Mar 15, 2022 01:31
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Yeah but they're wonderful artifacts of forums culture that need to be preserved!
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Mar 15, 2022 01:33
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I noticed the links were down last month and went looking to see if a copy had been preserved by the wayback machine. No luck there, but it was archived on PDF Archive. I didn't even realise this thread was still live, or I'd have posted it here.
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Mar 15, 2022 02:43
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Dabir posted:I noticed the links were down last month and went looking to see if a copy had been preserved by the wayback machine. No luck there, but it was archived on PDF Archive. I didn't even realise this thread was still live, or I'd have posted it here. Thanks for this, Terry did incredible work on this thread and it would be shame to lose it.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:56
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With our second movie of the post-Bay era out in theaters, the Bayformers movies are undergoing a similar process that Star Wars did, where the new films that try to correct for the problems of the past films actually highlight what the older ones did well and make everyone nostalgic for them instead Learning to Love Michael Bay's Transformers Movies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVVSl9wtToc Transformers Rise of the Beasts made me miss Michael Bay... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7iIaopRRv8
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Jun 23, 2023 20:49
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Ew
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Jun 23, 2023 21:37
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Assepoester posted:With our second movie of the post-Bay era out in theaters, the Bayformers movies are undergoing a similar process that Star Wars did, where the new films that try to correct for the problems of the past films actually highlight what the older ones did well and make everyone nostalgic for them instead
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Jun 23, 2023 22:13
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Assepoester posted:With our second movie of the post-Bay era out in theaters, the Bayformers movies are undergoing a similar process that Star Wars did, where the new films that try to correct for the problems of the past films actually highlight what the older ones did well and make everyone nostalgic for them instead I'm halfway through this, and this video clearly draws on this very thread (even showing it in the video), but it makes a lot of new points and has fascinating ideas and developments of things in the later movies in that framework. It's awesome, basically. Especially when it gets into the Unicron stuff. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 08:08
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The OP convinced me to take a 2nd look at these movies, and one thing in RotF sticks out to me. The opening of hunting down the 2 decepticons is obviously messed up, but it becomes even more jarring with Jetfire's introduction and the tiny decepticon turncoating after basically a timeout.
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Jun 25, 2023 23:34
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