Matt Yglesias

Michael Bay Gets Political

More than meets the eye?

Reviewing Transformers: The Rise of the Fallen for io9, Charlie Jane Anders memorably proclaimed that Michael Bay had finally produced a high-concept film and “used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers’ worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.”

I think there’s a lot to that, but one shouldn’t miss the extent to which TROFT is also an incredibly engagé political text, a searing indictment of Obama’s liberal fascist United States of America. After all, though the film doesn’t dwell on the point, one critical turn in the storyline comes when a heroic Major in the United States Army (or possibly Air Force) decides to disobey orders and mutiny against a civilian operative specifically sent by POTUS to take command of the operation. But what’s more, this is no rogue special forces officer, he’s clearly supported in his action by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who elects to turn a blind eye, and leave President Obama (who’s named specifically) in the dark as he cowers in fear in an underground bunker. Obama, you see, has ordered American forces to attempt to appease the Deceptecon threat by halting all collaboration with the Autobots, and agreeing to turn Sam Witwicky over to the forces of evil. By defying Obama and staging what amounts to a coup, the military saves the day.

What’s more, the film appears to indicate that Jordan and Egypt share a border right near the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. For this to be the case, of course, Israel would have to be wiped off the map. The film doesn’t specify how this horrific turn of events took place, but I think we can take for granted that Obama’s cowardly of a settlement freeze is ultimately responsible.

SoCal High School Noir?

Ezra Klein justly praises the excellent 2005 film Brick. But he also describes it as “the best hard-boiled noir ever set in a Southern California high school.”

I remember thinking when I saw Brick how strange it was that this film came out at the very same time when Veronica Mars was on television. Suddenly the world was full of Southern California high school noir. And then just like that, the genre vanished. At any rate, I think I liked VM slightly better than Brick, although arguably the TV show doesn’t qualify as “hard-boiled” so we could draw the distinction there.

10 Years of Dr. Manhattan

Watchmen is hardly the first movie to try to employ web-based spinoffs as part of its marketing campaign, but it may be the first one to have actually done it well. Here, for example, is a YouTube video of a 1970 NBS broadcast taking a look back at 10 years of Dr. Manhattan:

For many of the same reasons that Watchmen was long deemed unfilmable, it seems uniquely well-suited to this sort of thing. It’s not a literal adaptation of the interstitial material in the book, but it’s true to its spirit.

The Wrestler

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read anything written about movies recently, but The Wrestler is a very good film and you should go see it.

Crimes Against Australianity

Nicole Kidman is one of the world’s top two most famous Australians. And yet, she rarely gets to play an Australian character. That’s because, of course, one rarely writes a film that calls for Australian characters and since she can do an American accent perfectly well there’s no need to randomly create Australian characters just so she can play them. When I saw that she was going to be starring in a movie called Australia, however, I just took it for granted that she’d be playing an Australian. But no! Chris Orr:

One might imagine that in casting Nicole Kidman, one of the globe’s most famous Aussies, in a movie titled Australia, you’d actually let her be, you know, Australian. No such luck. Her character’s name, Lady Sarah Ashley, tells us pretty much everything we need to know. The first time we see the prim English lady she is striding across the Australian scrub as stiffly as a mime doing “schoolmarm.” The only way the caricature could’ve been more broad is if you’d cast a man in drag.

This seems pretty outrageous. The quasi-continent of Australia has made really outsize contributions to the world of cinema (Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Mel Gibson, Peter Weir, etc. all from a country with basically no inhabitants) and if you’re going to make a film called Australia that would be a great opportunity to write some Australian parts.