Meets the Eye

[Even on the small screen, I still liked Transformers the second time, still worth the price of admission twice, for Megan Fox under the racing-striped hood and for the other two hours.]

Ah to be home again, in Michael Bay’s America, where top presidential aids read USA Today on Air Force One while seated above boom boxes that morph into humorous, yet deadly, robots.

If shit goes wrong I can just roll in Strike Package Bravo who will “make it rain” (in a non-strip club setting).

If a guy points a gun at me and says “I’m gonna count to five,” I whip out my better looking weapon and say, “I’m gonna count to three!”

If all else fails, I will send an Anaconda-spry Jon Voight on a steady jog to fetch me a shotgun.

The thing is, this movie holds together better than Armageddon or Pearl Harbor. It features God Loves the Beef (Shia LaBeouf) performing competently as an actor (a competent God Loves the Beef equals an overwhelmingly fabulous Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood). Also enjoyable is the kid from Elephant briefly playing an androgynous tree-climber. And I like Megan Fox’s torso enough that I’m willing to forgive her for having this guy’s named tattooed on her body:


And I now like Michael Bay enough that I’m willing to forgive him for making Megan wear the same outfit (with three layers!) the entire second and third acts…like really, she couldn’t have been inexorably sucked into the Deceptacon death games in this outfit?


But really, Michael is now directing post-Bay films—we must giggle at the fatso with the handheld video camera running around yelling, “this is like a hundred times better than Armageddon!” Which is 100% accurate. Later a child mimics the audience reaction to battling transformers crashing through freeway off ramps: “Cool!” The imagery here is clearer than the evening news and more realistic.

The f/x in Transformers are so good I saw what might have been acne scars on Megan Fox’s face. But she pulls it together, her ponytail has a little more perk and she tows broken Bumblebee with the command, “I’ll drive, you shoot.” Hell, I too would risk my life for him, his incredibly evocative robot blue eyes.

(Sadly there is no "sad Bumblebee" image widely available on the interweb.)

Any robot that can transform into a Chevy Camaro with ironic taste in music warms Midwestern heart. Though evil Megatron is surprisingly sexy, calling God Loves the Beef “fleshling” and saying, in his low metallic purr, “give me the All Spark and you can live to be my pet.” God Loves the Beef certainly could have used some more Mega-pointers in his largely thwarted quest to acquire Fox’s “All Spark,” ifyouknowwhatimean.

Finally, I approve of Transformers because in the end Megan Fox is wearing the only appropriate attire: WHITE TANK TOP.

(Please note: WHITE TANK TOP did not create the image above. Despite my admiration for its subtle humor, misspellings are unacceptable.)

Nothing

Quite a nice re-viewing of Persona recently. I like the archetypal nature of the characters quite a bit, so I will refer to Liv Ullman's character as the Actress and Bibi Andersson's as the Nurse.


Among the things I blocked from my first view of this film: the whiteout to erect cock opening sequence. The vein in the eye close up I could hardly watch thinking there was going to be some Buñuel-style slicing open. The disturbingly egg-like boy from The Silence abandoned again by his beautiful mother (this time, Liv Ullman’s actress, again later with Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata). I forgot also the way Bibi Andersson’s Nurse constantly had to push the hair off her forehead.


One thing I did not forget: the Nurse monologue where she describes her nude encounter with two young men at the beach (it seems all the earlier shots of the rocks surrounding the ladies at the shoreline were just to confirm no boys lurking). If Scarlett Johansson in The Girl with a Pearl Earring putting her lip inside her mouth to lick it is a shatter-the-glass-in-the-palm-of-your-hand moment, then the Nurse in Persona recounting how the boy’s sperm exploded everywhere and how she came “again and again” on the beach is a shatter-the-glass-in-the-palm-of-your-hand-then-pick-up-another-glass-and-shatter-that-one-in-the-palm-of-your-other-hand sequence. Not enough time for a glass shatter refractory period. I do want to note that I would have promptly cleaned up the broken glass, and not left it underfoot for my patient/lust object to step into. That’s just fucked up.

I admire the way Bergman is able to convey the suffocating pall of illness and despair in Persona, but in a less obtrusive way than in, say, The Seventh Seal (Persona being set in the present and not involving any characters named “Death”…it also less chess). We have first the hospital scenes where the rooms are just a tad stark, even considering that Scandinavian minimalism we all admire. There we see the appeal of immolation, people praying at the monks conflagrated in black and white (body and blame). We have the warm mushroom picking scene, the two women pondering their A-bomb shapes under their mushroom cloud straw hats. Then gorgeous, recurring moving pictures of their white faces in all black against the raw pine interiors of the beach house. Sometimes just dark faces with light off cheekbones and noses. These images are Bergman to me.


Aside from the rattling good beach talk, I wonder if this might not have worked as a silent film. Long tracking shot would have been better silent—we know what had to be said—particularly with subtitles the words took away from the elegant cinematography. The Nurse’s climactic, bitter evisceration of the motives behind the Actress’ silence is done twice so you see the pain and then receive the pain yourself. I loved the progression of deeper and deeper close-ups so we are reminded of the intensity in a film like The Passion of Joan of Arc. It seemed clear why the Actress stopped talking, it’s the same reason I would do so that one might stop lying, desist with the lies we have to tell each other every day. Take the great last words of the film: “Say it after me. Nothing.”

Addendum: the laughably slight interview extras are notable only because Bibi expresses her initial reservations about Ullman because she was Norwegian. Love that Scandi-rivalry! Just for the record: both actresses are lovely in advanced age: their eyes still glowing almost as bright blue as Bumblebee’s in Transformers.

Grizzly Man/Viscera

This film is not about grizzly bears. And despite all the other amazing things in Grizzly Man, I am most fascinated by what Herzog must have thought when he first got his mitts on this footage. The first time he ran through a bizarre fox-petting shot with 15 takes. I imagine the slick German accent inside his head: “Wow. This is perfect.”

Just teed up for him. It is anti-civilization. I could see this when he gave old Klaus a shout with “I have seen men go mad on camera.” Had to eat up the obvious mental illness, the deranged friends, the surprisingly artful footage. Right back into his Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo wheelhouse.


There was a moment (dare I say “touching”?) when Herzog defended Treadwell as an artist even if the man was tremendously flawed. Loved the windblown moment when Timothy sets up a shot on a narrow path, the small, whipped trees obscuring the way, unintentionally filming the metaphor of his whole life. Herzog deserves all the credit in the world for highlighting it.

Loved the unguarded, lengthy, completely fucked up Treadwell take on his sexuality, his sensitivity, the stuff he knows he’s ”good at” in bend, how easy gay guys have it, etc. Loved the lisping fucking baby talk with the half-ton animals (Herzog so right on how Treadwell was wrong here: this world—like any—is ruled by chaos and death, not peace and justice). Loved the fact you never saw his girlfriend’s face because Tim had to be “alone” in nature. Loved that his differently-surnamed father pointed out Treadwell was a “family name”—the strange connective pride that parents still maintain. Loved the most rational people interviewed all said Tim was a misguided nutjob—“you aren’t a bear,” “people and bears are separate.” Loved Treadwell’s “best friend” at the beach telling the incredibly important story of how Tim’s bangs covered his receding hairline even whilst body-boarding. Loved the psychotic Kodiak, Alaska coroner with his descriptions of the pitches of screams and the pictures of bags of viscera.

And you absolutely cannot beat the fact that Treadwell’s life hinged on his second place finish for the role of Woody on Cheers (certainly Harrelson would play Treadwell in the biopic—he owes him so much!).


I only wish Grizzly Man would have pushed further towards the idea of man becoming a bear. There is reference to the many shots of Treadwell on all fours acting the beast but we didn’t see enough actual image (Frank Bidart would remind us that the best within can drink till it is sick but it cannot drink till is satisfied). I had to console myself with the two shots of Treadwell worshipping warm bear shit.

I’m so bitter I didn’t know more this about the film when it came out (perhaps I hadn’t seen enough Herzog to really “get it” at that point though). I might have seen it thinking it was just a nature documentary maker lost, March of the Penguins with a sad ending. But it’s the second coming of Grey Gardens, if not more.