This post is part of a longer series examining the god-awfulness of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you missed it, the introduction is right here.

When we last left Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a group of African stereotypes got stomped by a robot sometime in the distant past. Today’s installment begins 17,000 years later, with a shot of an industrial hellscape, and another friendly caption:

SHANGHAI, CHINA. 22:14 HRS – TODAY

And what’s happening TODAY at 22:14 HRS? Well, Shanghai is being evacuated following a toxic spill in the financial district. Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, some serious-looking officers are watching the evacuation on some serious-looking monitors, chattering on about Chinese airspace and strike teams.

Then, back to China, where a decrepit ice cream truck putts along a dirt road. A speaker on the truck’s roof announces – I swear – “Any bad robot out there’s better get ready for an ass-whoopin’,” in a voice that sounds like your racist uncle’s Flavor Flav impression. There’s an Autobot insignia on the front of the truck, and a sign on the side that reads – again, I swear this is all true – “[Decepticon insignia] suck my popsicle!”

You hear that sound? That’s the sound of hope dying.

Soldiers move into position, and Optimus Prime’s voiceover fills us in on the backstory: for the last two years, he and the Autobots have joined up with a group of human soldiers to form a “classified strike team called NEST” (which I assume is an acronym for something, although they never bother saying what). We meet a few of the team members: a sleek-looking car that will probably turn into a robot at some point, a group of human soldiers, the aforementioned ice cream truck, and – just to make things confusing – a trio of motorcycles (complete with holographic riders) referred to as “Arcee.”

Fans of the Transformers’ 1980’s incarnation will remember Arcee as the token girl Transformer. They will also remember that there was only one of her. Now, somehow, she is three motorcycles that turn into three robots, but who all have one name. This makes perfect sense, so be quiet and watch the damn movie and stop trying to confuse Michael Bay because you’ll make him mess up.

Also, those soldiers? They were in the first movie, and we’ll be seeing them throughout this one. For the purpose of this review, their names are Lead Guy, Black Guy, Third Guy, and Fourth Guy. Lead Guy explains that the “toxic spill” was just a cover story to get everyone out of the city so they can fight some Decepticons.

Finally, we get what we came for: a truck turning into a motherfucking robot. Unfortunately, the robot is standing so close to the camera that all we really see are unidentifiable bits of truck twisting around and blocking our view of anything else; he starts as a GMC pickup and ends up as an Autobot named Ironhide, but how he got from Point A to Point B remains a mystery. In his robot form, Ironhide looks like a collection of random metal parts welded together into something vaguely man-shaped, not unlike the sculptures that stand in front of office buildings. I wish Tyler Durden was in this movie.

The soldiers gather around some kind of power plant or refinery or something, where a nearby crane transforms into a very large Decepticon and starts smashing shit. There’s an explosion, a weird “BWAAAAAUUUUMP” noise, debris, gunfire, the anguished cries of wounded soldiers. For no reason, some cars go flying across the screen, although we did not see them take off, nor do we see them land. Through all of this, the Decepticon is off-screen. Not in the background. Not obscured by dust or explosions. Just not there. In a couple shots, the soldiers seem to be firing at nothing. When the robot finally reappears, it transforms into some kind of one-wheeled spidery thing and takes off.

Then bunch of shit happens that I cannot make myself care about. Two highlights:

ONE: A Decepticon breaks through a wall and the Arcees pursue him, crashing through the apartment of an elderly Chinese man in the process. Just as the laws of comedy predict, the old man is oblivious to the robo-carnage going on behind him – the robots destroy his home, and he goes right on eating his soup, barely mustering the energy to glance at the giant, burning hole in his wall. If you find this funny, you are my enemy.

TWO: During that same chase, the Flavor Flav ice cream truck returns to drag this movie down into the deepest pit of Hell. The back half of the truck breaks off and turns into a (relatively) squat robot, who does a slapsticky tumble into the side of the building. The front half turns into a similar robot with a similarly offensive jive-talkin’ accent, and he smacks his partner upside the head for his screw-up. If this were a just world, I could say that they never appear again after this scene. Alas, the world is a dark and wicked place, and I will have much more to say about these two in the future.

Eventually, we get back to the giant killer Decepticon. He has somehow found his way to a bridge full of cars, and runs one over with his gargantuan tire. Now, let’s ignore the fact that the whole “evacuation” thing has been completely forgotten, and the fact that some civilians just got killed for the sake of a CGI effect, and focus on the insane hugeness of this fucking tire. Seriously, this thing is like four monster truck tires put together. And we’re just supposed to accept that?

Now, I’m not an expert on cranes. I don’t know what kind of tires they have. In fact, I always thought cranes had treads. So for all I know, some company really does make crane tires that are twenty feet tall and wider than an entire truck. But it’s a lot more likely that the people making this movie have no idea how big things are, and decided that Mister Crane-Bot should be big enough to crush everything in his path, even though there is just no fucking way that much metal could compact itself into anything resembling a piece of functioning construction equipment. But I digress.

At long last, Optimus Prime joins the fight, in the most absurd and unnecessary way possible. No, really: he drives out of a moving plane in truck-form, transforms into a robot as he tumbles through the air, deploys three parachutes, drifts the rest of the way to the ground, cuts the chutes, turns back into a truck, and pursues his one-wheeled foe. The Unicycle of Malevolence, meanwhile, has made his way to a crowded highway, where he is crushing cars, smashing overpasses, and almost certainly killing children by the busload.

And then, somehow, Optimus is climbing around on the monster’s evil head. I had to rewind twice to figure out how he got up there, and I’m still not 100% sure. It doesn’t matter; once he’s up there, Optimus does something that makes the Decepticon crash and die. I have no idea what the fuck just happened, but this sequence seems to be coming to an end, so I don’t care anymore. Optimus and Ironhide approach their vanquished enemy, who manages to croak, “The Fallen shall rise again,” out of his metal mandibles before Optimus blows his face off with a laser or something.

One of the soldiers says, “That doesn’t sound good.” He’s right. We are eight minutes and forty-nine seconds into Revenge of the Fallen, and only pain awaits us.

In our next installment, we finally meet the humans, their pets, and their robot sidekick. We do not, however, meet Mr. Dignity.

This post is part of a longer series examining the god-awfulness of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you missed it, the introduction is right here.

It’s not often that a movie starts sucking before it has even begun, but such is the case with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Before seeing even a second of the movie proper, we’re treated to an ominous hum accompanying the Dreamworks logo, and a series of beeping and whirring sounds as the stars in the Paramount logo fly by. This will become a recurring theme throughout the movie: things make noise when they move.

The first thing we see is a shot of some mountains somewhere, followed by a shot of something lumpy that may or may not also be a mountain. The credits – which make whooshing noises as they appear onscreen, naturally – tell use that this movie was made “In association with Hasbro.” Finally, in the third shot of the same mountains, Optimus Prime speaks in voiceover:

“Earth. Birthplace of the human race. A species much like our own.”

While he says this, two silhouetted, spear-wielding tribesmen ascend one of the larger rocks, effectively laying the groundwork for this movie’s attitude about race. They are either joined by several more warriors, or we simply cut to a shot of some different warriors – it’s hard to tell, since everything is still in silhouette. Optimus goes on, “Capable of great compassion… and great violence,” and a helpful caption informs us that it is all happening in 17,000 B.C.

We get our first look at our warriors, and indeed they are African. I have no idea if their war paint or weapons are even remotely authentic, and I’m sure Michael Bay doesn’t know either. There are at least seven of them now, and they are all staring grimly past the camera.

Some sort of big cat runs by silently, and the tribe (now up to nine!) charges it. We hear a guttural, feline growl as they do, even though the cat is no longer onscreen – clearly, the implication is that this animal-noise somehow came from one of the tribesmen.

So maybe this is what establishes the movie’s attitude toward race. In any case, Michael Bay is an asshole, the cat is revealed to be a tiger, and I have my first “What the fuck?” moment, because tigers live in India. In jungles. This scene, meanwhile, takes place in a craggy desert environment, presumably somewhere in Africa, where being stripey and bright orange is a tremendous evolutionary disadvantage, even for an apex predator.

Also, every shot of this chase seems to take place in an entirely different location, with the occasional presence of the tiger serving as the only nod to continuity. Eventually, an elderly (and therefore wise) member of the tribe makes the universal gesture for “I’m about to do something wise,” while Optimus narrates a bit more:

“For in our quest to protect the humans, a deeper revelation dawns: our worlds have met before.” You may notice that this does not actually follow from his previous statement. If you noticed, then congratulations – you are smarter than basically everyone involved in the making of this movie.

Two seconds later, none of that matters anymore; in the very next shot the warriors are calmly climbing over a ridge (the tiger now completely forgotten) and peering down at some kind of huge, pointy machine being assembled by a team of giant robots. A particularly ugly robot moves toward the camera, thus establishing himself as the leader, and the tribe decides to do something stupid.

We hear another animalistic roar, and this time there is no doubt as to its origin; it is clearly coming from the mouth of one of the warriors. We even get a slow-mo shot of him baring his teeth at his new enemies.

Just in time, it seems, since that lead robot is suddenly right on top of the tribe (he must have walked over while the camera was lingering on that one dude’s teeth), and he starts stomping on people. And then he’s somehow holding a frightened tribesman in his hand, despite never bending down to pick the guy up in the first place. He flings his victim aside, then roars directly at the camera while a set of metal feathers (?) around his face flutter back and forth.

The screen goes black, and a pile of metal scraps assemble themselves into the movie’s title – I assume that the intent was to show us the title “transforming,” but that’s kind of hard to do because it’s a title, and as such its robot form is nothing, and its vehicle form is a bunch of letters.

And that, dear readers, was the first two minutes and thirteen seconds of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I know it was somewhat joke-free, but at least you’ve seen the kind of stupid-to-watchable ratio we are dealing with. You’ve also seen exactly as much of this movie as I can tolerate for now. In our next episode, the story returns to the present, where we learn that robots can magically become bigger or smaller, depending on what needs to be smashed in a given scene.

This afternoon I was inspired to grab an old burlap sack, stitch some little eyes onto it, fill it with dog shit, light it on fire, and leave it on Shane Acker’s doorstep. I didn’t actually do it, but it would have been an adequate expression of my profound disappointment with his new film, 9.

I’d been wanting to see 9 since I first saw its trailer at Coraline way back in February. It looked fucking awesome, with gritty little steampunk robots running around a post-apocalyptic world devoid of life. Hell, it looked a lot like WALL-E, and WALL-E was brilliant. But imagine if WALL-E had sucked. Imagine if the robots hadn’t acted like robots, and the action hadn’t been well-paced, and they threw in a lot of inane metaphysical bullshit. That’s 9. Oh, it looked as beautiful as promised. The landscape was indeed littered with the tragic remains of an annihilated human race. Corpses were strewn throughout the streets. Cars were tipped over and rusted out. A sunless sky hovered over bomb craters and gutted cityscapes. It looked every bit as brutal as I could have wished. But that’s the only good thing I have to say about the whole bloody thing.

Spoiler alert: I’ll probably do some spoiling in the paragraphs below. But I won’t spoil your fun half as much as Acker spoiled a good idea.

So. It’s World War III (or whatever) and in its zeal, the scary generic future government (probably a corrupted version of the U.S., though the film never gets that specific) builds a supercomputer that can design and build giant battle robots, and the robots eventually turn rogue and destroy all organic life on Earth, including humanity. There are shades of the Terminator series here, and there are also shades of an anti-science stance in the exposition, and both are handled with about as much grace as a T-1000 employed as a dog catcher. As the film opens, a dying scientist has just finished building 9, a rat-sized anthropomorphic robot with high-tech eyes, wood-and-metal steampunk arms, and burlap skin. 9 soon learns that he is the last in a series of similar robots built by the doomed inventor, and gradually encounters his eight mechanical brothers and sisters. Each robot displays a one-dimensional caricature of a personality (one robot craves battle, one craves power, one is a coward, etc.), and each reacts to stimuli with far more emotion and empathy than any real self-respecting robot ever would. They react to corpses with revulsion, to sunshine with awe, to perils with fear, and to death with ceremony. In other words, they react like poorly-written humans, rather than cleverly-designed homunculi.

The dialogue is vile and mostly unnecessary, and the reason is made clear by the film’s origin. Before it became a 90-minute disappointment, 9 was originally a 10-minute short film released in 2005, which is still available for viewing on YouTube. It still contains some of the same elements that annoy me in the long version, though as Varius pointed out to me, in this version they, “don’t fuck it up by talking.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the film’s action. Luckily, there’s not much to give away. You know how, in almost every action/adventure movie you can think of, one of the main characters gets captured at some point in the middle? The rest of the characters always say, “we have to go rescue them!” and, heedless of Spock’s assertion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the whole crew hurries off to endanger themselves. Well, this happens in 9, too, only it happens over and over and over again. “Oh no, so-and-so was captured, let’s rescue him! Oh no, such-and-such got captured while we were saving so-and-so, let’s rescue him! Oh no, now whatserface got lost on the such-and-such mission, let’s go back for her!” And so forth. That’s ninety percent of the goddamn movie, though the action does pause briefly so that the robots can dance to a Judy Garland record.

But no amount of repetitive action or clichéd dialogue could have prepared me for the ending. As Jhonen Vasquez said on Thursday,

“If there was one good thing about 9’s ending is it was so stupid it roused me from the impending sleep the rest of the movie brought on.”

Yeah. You want to know how stupid that ending was? Fuck it, I’ll tell you. Souls. The goddamn robots had souls all along. And their souls were saved. The end. To quote the words immediately spoken by my girlfriend as the credits began to roll, “What the fuck?” Does a story about the shabby remnants of a doomed society need a messianic element tacked on at the end? The answer is no. Does a cool science fiction idea need a bunch of metaphysical bullshit glued to its ass like tits on a fish? Again, the answer is a resounding no. Did WALL-E have a soul? No, he fucking didn’t, and we liked him that way.

“I’m a woman, hear me scream!”

-Amelia, Girls Rock!

“I hate myself already, so high school doesn’t, like, degrade me that much.”

-Laura, Girls Rock!

Speaking of documentaries (which I was), here’s another one for you: Girls Rock!, which I finally got to see a few days ago. The movie takes viewers into Portland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is just as awesome as it sounds; girls ages 8-18 have a week to form bands with their fellow campers, take classes with actual lady-rockers, write a song, and perform it for an audience. Girls Rock! had the usual limited documentary release about a year ago, and I missed it. During the last year, though, I made everyone I know watch the trailer on YouTube, often more than once. Now it’s your turn:

You see why I was so anxious for the DVD?

Now that I’ve seen it, I can say that the film is far from perfect (although still quite good). The directors chose to focus on four campers, but we never quite get enough background on them. On top of that, the scenes of rehearsals and intra-band conflicts become repetitive, while the classroom scenes and the final concert are truncated. These issues could have easily crippled the film; luckily, the subject matter is interesting enough to make me forgive just about any directorial missteps.

Honestly, how could anyone hate a movie that features and eight-year-old who spends her time writing atonal dirges about her dog, and inventing new guitar chords with name like “Negative 10″? That’s Amelia, a.k.a. Am, an experimental visionary who happens to be a shy, thoughtful girl with a flower-shaped guitar. The directors also introduce us to Palace, a punk rock demon cleverly disguised as the world’s most angelic seven-year-old (she’s the one growling “Rock ‘n’ Roll!” at the beginning of the trailer). Seriously, she is so fucking punk rock it will make your eyes bleed. If you need proof, you can download her song “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” and hear the magic for yourself.

In addition to these two, we also meet two teenage campers: Misty, a recovering drug addict, and Laura, who is — there’s no polite way to say this — a Korean-American death metal fan trapped in Oklahoma. Aside from offering a more mature perspective on the camp’s proceedings, they also provide a striking contrast with the younger girls. For all her shyness, Amelia can become quite chatty on camera, spinning theories about music and school and her dog Pippi; when she steps in front of a microphone, her inhibitions seem to vanish entirely. Laura, on the other hand, is talkative and social and genuinely funny at times, but will cheerfully admit to self-hatred when asked.

Much of the movie is dedicated to figuring out where and why this disconnect occurs. Scattered throughout the film are brief animated segments, which are really just a way to deliver statistics without resorting to captions or narration. Although I was ambivalent about the segments themselves (I found they broke up the flow of the movie, and took up running time that could have been better spent on the bands in concert), they provide answers to those questions, and raise several new, more difficult ones. What can girls do — indeed, what can anyone do — to get back in touch with the brilliantly uninhibited visionaries they were at age 8? There’s no obvious answer, but I suspect that the people in charge of Rock Camp are on the right track.

I could go on nitpicking, but I’d prefer to end on a positive note. Because for all its little flaws, this is still a movie about a fascinating subject. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even know that Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls existed, and I definitely wouldn’t have “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” on my playlist. If they have to get a little preachy, or overstate a few points, fine. Those points — about society’s expectations of women, the numbing conformity of adolescence, the thrill of finding people like yourself — still need to be made, frequently and at a very high volume.

It also doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack kind of kicks ass.

In 1972, an odd little documentary called Marjoe made its way into American cinemas — but was kept away from the Bible Belt. It took home an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, ran on TV here and there, got a VHS release, and then quietly disappeared until 2005, when a restored copy of the “lost” film was screened in New York as part of a series hosted by the IFC Center. And if it hadn’t been lost, we probably could have saved outselves a lot of trouble over the last 30 years or so.

IMDB and Wikipedia have the basic information on the movie — little more than what I said in that first paragraph — and director Sarah Kernochan has written at length about the effort to resurrect the film on DVD, so that spares me the trouble of going into any of that here. Instead, I can focus on what matters: one of the greatest religious scams ever captured on film, and the charming bastard who pulled it off.

That charming bastard was Marjoe Gortner (pronounced just like it looks), who rose to fame in the late 1940’s and 1950’s as “the world’s youngest preacher.” He was ordained — and had begun officiating at weddings — at the age of four, and spent much of the next ten years on the road, preaching at revival meetings. The Gortner family was able to rake in the donation money with their adorable, Gospel-spouting toddler. The cute factor drew a crowd, but little Marjoe’s talent as a preacher helped his family make a very nice living.

After introducing us to the Littlest Preacher, the movie cuts to the early 1970’s, where Marjoe, now in his late 20’s and looking every bit the hippie, sits down for a series of interviews in which he admits that he doesn’t accept the Christian ideas of sin and Hell, that he spent years resenting his parents for pushing him into preaching, and that he’s not sure he’s ever felt a sincere belief in God. Then he slicks his hair back, puts on his suit, and gets up to preach in front of a revival crowd, where he once again brings the house down.

Such was the life of Marjoe Gortner in the early 70’s: spending half his year preaching to tents full of ecstatic evangelicals, and the other half as a groovy 70’s dude with money to burn. He wasn’t a subversive or a performance artist, and he wasn’t trying to bring down the evangelical movement from the inside. There’s nothing in his preaching that would make you doubt his sincerity — he testifies, speaks in tongues, lays hands on the sick, and takes big, fat donations with the earnestness of a man who truly believes he’s doing the Lord’s work. Then he sits down with the crew back at the hotel, admits it’s an act, and describes some of the techniques he uses.

He had to give up preaching once the movie came out, of course, but that had been his plan all along. He was coming out of the closet as a nonbeliever, and brought along the film crew to take his confession. It’s easy to dismiss Marjoe as a con man, but what does that say about the preachers he worked with? Donations make sense if you’re running a proper church — there are salaries to pay, youth groups to run, tracts to publish, and a large building to maintain — but what about the revivals run out of tents? What about the preachers like Marjoe, who travel from place to place speaking in other people’s tents, with no real overhead of their own? At the end of the night, the people in charge of the revival are more than happy to hand him a stack of bills taken from old ladies’ purses, which he giddily dumps onto his hotel bed and counts, cameras rolling the whole time.

The only difference between Marjoe and those other preachers is honesty, at least when he drops his preacher persona. He’s willing to admit, for instance, that “speaking in tongues” is based mostly on peer pressure — once everyone’s doing it, you feel a little safer faking it, not knowing that nearly everyone else is faking it as well. He flirts with cute 70’s girls in a bar by explaining the tricks behind faith-healing, and the girls seem truly impressed.

In short, he does everything Matt Taibbi did when he went undercover at John Hagee’s church last year, but he did it 36 years earlier, in an Oscar-winning film. If that film, and its remarkable subject, had received the exposure they deserved and stuck around through the intervening years, we could have had a much cooler country. Try to imagine the rise of the Christian Coalition, or George W. Bush, or Sarah Palin, in a country where everyone had seen Marjoe. Those things still would have happened to some extent, but there would have been a whole lot more people calling bullshit, and that’s all you can really ask.

Friday night, prior to heading out to the pub, a friend called me up and invited me to go see the movie Fanboys, which opened, to very limited release, last weekend. While I’d been hearing about the movie for a couple of years now, I hadn’t seen a single ad for the film on TV, so I was surprised to learn that it was out at all. This has to be partly due to the combined facts that Coraline was released last weekend, the new Friday the 13th was released this weekend, and Watchmen comes out in three weeks, all of which means that the wallets of the target demographic for Fanboys is severely stretched right now. Which turns out to sync with my own observed results, as the lines at the theater in Manhattan were huge for the latest Jason slasher, but the Fanboys auditorium was filled barely to half capacity. At this point, Fanboys is basically guaranteed to fail miserably at the box office.

So, you may be wondering, what the hell is Fanboys anyway? Essentially, it’s a tribute to the breathless, anticipatory fervor experienced by Star Wars fans everywhere between the release of Return of the Jedi and the release of the first prequel. The film takes place in late 1998, six months before the theatrical debut of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The protagonists are five Star Wars-obsessed friends who, because one of the friends has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is expected to die before the movie comes out, attempt to break into George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and steal an early cut of the film. It has, therefore, all the pre-Episode I hope and none of the post-Episode I angst.

The writing itself, however, is painfully formulaic. Think of every post-highschool buddy/roadtrip/bro-mance/geek-mance/coming-of-age comedy you’ve ever seen, and turn up the nerd factor fifty degrees, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect from Fanboys. There is, for example, a fat friend with slovenly habits (Dan Fogler). There are also two former best buddies (Sam Huntington and Chris Marquette) who parted ways because one stayed nerdy while the other went to work for his father’s used car business. And then there’s the nerdy guy with glasses (Jay Baruchel) who doesn’t notice that his gorgeous female friend (Kristen Bell, who, by the way, is way hotter as a late-’90s grunged-out brunette than she is with her usual generically blonde look) is in love with him, because he’s always thought of her as “just one of the guys.” There’s even a horrifically-predictable scene in which the boys trip on Peyote. The cookie-cutter cliches are painfully numerous.

That being said, the film somehow manages to remain relatively fun, if only because there’s a Star Wars or Star Trek reference coming about every four seconds. In fact, you can reliably gauge how big of a sci-fi geek you are by counting the number of jokes you understand. I’m relatively certain that I got every single one of them. And the cliches do tend to come with a sci-fi twist. When the boys take Peyote, they hallucinate an Ewok. When the boys discuss overextended metaphors for defining coming-of-age moments, they refer to them as “finding your Death Star.”

The film plays up the supposed Wars fans vs. Trek fans rivalry, which I’ve never been convinced actually exists. But the whole thing’s tongue-in-cheek, as Fanboys features guest appearances by Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher as well as William Shatner. Rounding out the cameo quota are pretty much everyone who shows up in supporting roles in every Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow movie, including Ethan Suplee, Jason Mewes, Joe Lo Truglio, Craig Robinson, and, of course, Seth Rogen in, I’m not kidding, three different roles.

So, is Fanboys actually any good? Well, it depends on how much you like Star Wars. Specifically, it depends on how much you liked Star Wars before May of 1999. You’ll probably like it more than The Phantom Menace, at least.