Transformers 2, and Red Box

Last night, after visiting hours were over, I wanted to grab a couple of more movies. I'd been doing some low-level bitching about Blockbuster, so my mom said, "Why don't you go to that Red Box thing? Your dad likes it a lot."


Sure, what the hell? We've got 'em in LA, of course, but there I typically just rely on Netflix.

I went to Albertson's. There was a Red Box. It had a large board showing mini posters of the available movies next to it. The Red Box has a touch screen interface. It was easy to understand, but I was still dicking with it minutes later. I couldn't understand why I wasn't able to find the touch screens for the movies I wanted, until the obvious dawned on me - they were out. Every one. Okay, score one for Blockbuster, which I knew had a bajillion copies of every recent release.

So thus did I get TRANSFORMERS 2, a difficult title to type on the iPhone.

Red Box charged me a buck for this rental, plus tax. It should be noted that Blockbuster is in the same strip mall, about four doors down. They would have charged me five bucks, plus tax, for the exact same movie. In their defense, I would have gotten the movie for five days whereas Red Box wants it back within 24 hours. It's still a buck a day. But if you're the type to sometimes have movies sitting on your counter for a few days before you watch them (which I very much am), there's Netflix.

This is why Blockbuster is fucking doomed. Their core business model is no longer competitive. They're getting their asses kicked by a combination of red boxes and red envelopes. I suppose if I had to watch a non-new release RIGHT NOW, they would fill that gap. But how often does that occur? For me, a couple of times a year, and even then I usually hit a local place like Rocket. It's simple supply and demand. And, once VOD becomes ubiquitous, they're going to be in the horse and buggy business. Blockbuster is a brontosaurus wondering why it's gotten so cold lately.

Anyway, T. (I'm not gonna keep thumb-typing it out). I liked it about the same as the first one, in similar ways.

Bay's considered to be a guy who's an action maestro, and not much good at anything else. My experience with both T movies is the exact opposite. With each, I kinda enjoyed the hyper goofy first acts, with unexpected moments of actual comedy. In the second act of each, we get one really cool Optimus Prime fight. And the third acts are non-stop action, which I ironically found dull.

In the first one, the climactic fight was so fast cut and weirdly staged I had trouble tracking what was going on. For me, it was a lot of shots of something punching somebody, and then something else (maybe?) blowing up. It was hard for me to connect, and so I just watched the images flash by like I was in the summer popcorn version of the CLOCKWORK ORANGE treatment, sans vomit.

In the sequel, the climactic fight involves Shia trying to run a half mile across a battlefield to revive Optimus Prime. It's the longest half mile run in cinematic history. Bay pulled way back on the cutting, so I was able to track the sequence. I just didn't care. It's one long series of booms, like a fireworks show that goes on for four hours. I started watching Phantom Menace videos on YouTube, and glancing at the movie from the corner of my eye. A giant robot is trying to blow up the sun. How do you make that scene boring? Watch this movie and find out.

It also has a weird, shifting tone. The humor is very, very broad, almost infantile at times. And yet we get some salty language, and an overtly sexual come-on scene and drug references. I wasn't offended, just confused as to how those pieces fit with the nosepicker sense of humor. Who was this movie for?

I realized that Bay makes movies without theme. They aren't talking about anything, beyond yelling short sentences at the audience. "Sexy!" "Gross!" "Boom!" "Uh-oh!" He has an admirable respect of the military, but even that's very surface level, like a long Go Army commercial from the '90s. For instance, we're given a government bureaucrat who has no function except to make the military guys look cooler and smarter than in juxtaposition. Is our military so insecure that we need to give them straw men to beat up in summer franchise movies?

But critiquing Michael Bay films is an exercise in futility. The guy gets movies made, and those movies make billions, so apparently he's giving the general audience what they want.

I expect a third movie to come along, I expect it'll be more of the same, and I expect civilization will continue unaffected.