Here’s Penelope Spheeris’s seminal Hardcore documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, in its entireity, live on the Internet. Don’t say I don’t give you anything.

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Transformers Dark of the Moon review

It is fitting that Michael Bay’s most personal and heartfelt film to date is released in the same week that the New York state legislature signed in to law a measure legalising gay marriage. Millions of New Yorkers have seen the world change, or transform, around them. Some are homophobes, others are simply emeshed in traditions where that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and for them the change is comparable to the transit from our celestial companion’s familiar surface, visible every night, to its shadow. But Michael Bay is far too subtle a filmmaker to simply contrast light and dark: this is a film built up of the moments where one notices that night has fallen, that summer is over, and his genius is to capture this moment of vertigo on celluloid.
Fittingly for a film so enmeshed in the American experience, Dark of the Moon begins in 1969, as Neil Armstrong takes his first steps out of Apollo 11. The moment is beautifully captured, and made all the more poignant by the moment when the signal cuts. America’s triumph lasts barely a few minutes- the world keeps on turning. Sic transit gloria.
In the present day Sam (Shia LeBouf) is struggling to find work in the post-collapse economy. His girlfriend Carly (played with notable poise by Rosie Huntington-Whitely) is supporting him through her own lucrative career as an aide to Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), an investment banker, one of the very people who caused the crash, and a tragic figure in his own right. Dylan lives in the shadow of his father, inheriting not only his wealth but his means of acquiring it through duplicity, something Dylan can neither condone nor escape from.
In the hands of a lesser filmmaker Sam’s arc would have been to find a job to keep the girl, with the multi-faceted and fully rounded person that Whitely has so meticulously constructed reduced to little more than a princess being held in the tower of Dempsey’s evil wizard. Sam is no clean-cut prince: he is entitled to the point of sabotaging job interviews, which a potential employer more than willing to let him start out in the mail room (a surprisngly restrained John Malkovich) puts down to him wanting ‘the job after this job’, being unable to understand the connection between effort and reward. Sam’s mother (the criminally underused Julie White) refers to him as a ‘millenial’, shrugging off how horribly her generation has broken Sam’s and offerring only vapid self-help books and the typical baby-boomer emphasis on sexual liberation after Carly and Sam break up. But LeBouf’s character is not simply a stand-in for everyone born after 1990. He does find work, and we are treated to the tedium of office life until this, like the moon-landing footage, is interrupted. The suicide of one of Sam’s fellow employees, a former NASA employee now cut off the world in a corner office played by Community actor Ken Jeong, operating so far from his comfort zone that he is almost unrecognisable, is portrayed with heart-rending sensitivity- it may be too early to call Best Supporting Actor, but in less than ten minutes of screen time Jeong more than earns it.
Elsewhere in Bay’s tapestry soldiers Lennox and Epps struggle to adjust to a post-Don’t Ask, Don’t tell world. A mentor finds that his pupil has surpassed him. A once great leader staggers through the desert in rags, surrounded by vultures waiting for an easy meal. All the while we are told that a new world is coming, though it is likely to be as cold and mechanical as the one before it. The connections between dispirate plot-threads is purely thematic. There is no superficially pleasing ‘we are the world’ statement of the interconnectedness of human life here, as was so dissapointing in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel and positively excretable in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The characters exist within their private hells, tortured by their own self-conciousness.
Easily more beautiful than any of the above is a single scene in which a group of men jump from a building. We have already been primed by Ken Jeong’s character’s suicide by falling and some near-subliminal 9/11 references to expect the worst, but instead we see them open up their ‘wingsuits’ and float between buildings, falling like leaves or meteors depending on the shot. Bay, a famously controlled filmmaker, included the scene at the last minute after seeing base jumpers on 60 Minutes. Art, as they say, is never completed, merely abandoned.
Of course no review of Dark of the Moon is going to be complete without two things: a mention of Megan Fox’s abscence and a comparison to the only other film released this year that can stand alongside Bay’s magnum opus, Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life. Fox famously left the trilogy after 2009′s Revenge of the Fallen, in which the ossification of relationship between her character Mikaela and Sam took place amidst the literal and geo-political ruins of the Middle East. Her portrayal of Mikaela is so iconic that it is hard to imagine the films without her- in many ways she was Transformers. Sam refers to her only briefly, saying that she ‘couldn’t handle’ the pressure of being with him, and in doing so reveals far more about how deeply he has been poisoned by the toxic culture of turn-of-the-millenium America than he would by pining over her.
Mallick’s film shares many themes and techniques with Bay’s, but the latter is slower, more contemplative, whereas the former hammers home its message with special effects bombast- and frankly, Dinosaurs? Mallick seems to think that his audience are fourteen year-old boys. Bay also eschews big-name stunt casting in favor of a tightly knit ensemble working at the height of their powers- Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Alan Tudyk each give career-best performances, and in finding Rosie Huntington-Whitely Michael Bay once again shows the ability to find and nurture actresses that saw him give this generation its Audrey Hepburn in Fox.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon will inspire many critical theses on its dramaturgy and cinematography, but it will also inspire people with the simple but beautifully wrought message that the only constant in this universe is change.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is in cinemas now. Click here for the exclusive Terror Fabulous interview with Director Michael Bay and star Shia LeBouf

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Is Inception the Manliest Movie of the Summer?

This post contains spoilers for the film Inception.

Inception fails the Bechdel Test: while it has two female characters (three if you consider the fact that Cillian Murphy is prettier than most girls)- Marion Cotillard’s Mal and Ellen Page’s Ariadne- and they do indeed talk to each other (for all of ten seconds) but it is, ultimately, about a man. If you’re picky you may even argue that by the virtue of Mal being a projection of Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) unconscious there is only really one female character (played by the only self-identified feminist actress of her generation). In his truly bizarre review* Andrew O’Hehir calls Inception a ‘grindingly self-serious boy-movie’. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this, and I say that as both a feminist and a gentleman, though I would prefer that O’Hehir refer to it as a ‘man-movie’, even ‘dick-flick’, if only because the only verifiable boys in the theatre when I saw it loudly declared it to be ‘well gay’. Clearly not the target market. I really do think that Inception is a ‘manly’ movie, told from a male point-of-view to a presumed audience of males- and that this is okay, since in presenting male subjectivity un-self-consciously (Christopher Nolan didn’t set out to make an especially manly film) it allows for nuance and honesty about male-ness (which isn’t the same as masculinity) that a self-concious man-movie like The Expendables won’t touch.

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Unofficial Inception Poster by Ibraheem Youssef

World Famous Design Junkies » Intercepted!.

Bootleg film posters are an increasingly popular means for aspiring designers to ride the coattails of already famous phenomena to greater recognition. A little like inserting Britney Spears Nude Pix OMG MUST SEE into a blog post.
Normally such naked, but not actually naked self-promotion wouldn’t get a link from me, but Youssef and other poster-hackers are a reminder that real life film posters just aren’t interesting enough, that even a film as innovative as Inception is promoted by a picture of the cast and a tagline that doesn’t do it justice (‘your mind is the scene of the crime’). It reminds us that our billboards and bus stops could be covered in art instead of advertisements.

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All of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films are now available for free online

“Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” – Ingmar Bergman.

Excitement. The entire ouvre of one of the greatest directors to have ever reflected light onto a camera is now available online via the director’s webpage, accessible through the link below via Openculture. Stalker and Solaris are two of the finest science-fiction films ever made and The Sacrifice one of the finest films ever made. You need to set aside a day or two and just watch them.

All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture.

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I have great love for Fox’s House, and not just because it affords me an opportunity to view Olivia Wilde’s charmingly hexagonal face, but because it can be genuinely smart, morally daring and the concept episodes are usually based around a conceit that actually works (cf every Star Trek: The Next Generation episode involving a broken holodeck).
This isn’t House, it’s Hausu, and Criterion Collection will be releasing it on DVD in September. Just watch the trailer.

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