[[Warning: The only important part of a Transformers movie is that giant robots will be fighting one another. You know that going in. Spoilers are thus impossible. To the extent that a spoiler might be possible for this film, I will spoil it. If that keeps you from seeing this movie, say "thank you".]]

This movie is bad. All it really needs to do is give a half-decent excuse for robots to beat one another up, and it fails. It does, however, do one extraordinarily thing right: It calls Michael Bay- the movie’s director/producer!- a giant douchebag. I’m not sure he noticed.

Hollywood formulates dictates that there is a girl (Carly Spencer) in this sort of movie. She isn’t there to be an independent actor, but rather to be a Princess Peach– a motivating force for someone else to act on behalf of. Some of the minor characters in the movie actually seem to balk at putting themselves in danger so that the hero (Sam Witwicky) can rescue his girl, but they go along with the plan once they figure out that the world is also at stake.

I’m not kidding about that.

In a triumph for the say-don’t-show school of storytelling, Carly’s is presented as a intelligent, capable individual. We see her working for the White House, running logistics for a global corporation, and are told that she’s worked for the British Embassy in Washington DC. She is in every way more fit to be the story’s lead than the actual dude performing that role.

Perhaps Sam is meant to be an audience stand in. A sort of everyperson hero that we can empathize with. That would help explain his constant inability to quite nail the suave behavior that he seems to be aiming for. After all: who among us hasn’t done some really dumb things that we’d rather everyone forget about? This doesn’t seem quite right, however. Sam’s buffoonery is rewarded. It is as if Director Michael Bay doesn’t know the difference between actually awesome behavior and a parody of such. Could it be that he has mistaken Duke Nukem for something other than a cautionary tale?

In a classic display of the male gaze, through the first half of the movie, the camera reduces Carly to a sex object. When she’s in a shot, her secondary sex characteristics are on full display.

Michael Bay has had this problem with women before. Indeed, in the words of one Bay defender “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality.” Presumably he means “16-year-old [boy]“.

So for the first half or so of the movie, the camera is perving on the female lead. And at one point one of the characters- Bruce Brazos- actually does a double take at her. And everyone in the room reacts badly. Like he’d ruined their fun game by calling attention to it. From that moment on, the camera treats Carly as a human being. I think we can thank the editorial staff for that beautiful and wicked commentary on Transformers and sexism.

Now, if only the writers had come up with something interesting for her to say.

You will be assimilated-- in a sexy dance number

From the first moment I saw 1776, I have been in love with musicals. It was as if reality could involve people spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance routines. As if our world were too big to be as mundane as we live it. Naturally, I had to see a film adaptation of Nine. And naturally I began to compare it to the stage version.

It was irksome to discover favorite songs truncated or left out entirely. It was bizarre to find only eight women, and I believe it was mentioned* that the child was eight and a half.** With all this in mind, I think it’s obvious: this movie is not an adaptation of the stage performance at all. Rather, it’s the best film adaptation yet of the book Tristram Shandy.

To start with, they’re both gratuitously about sex while straight-facedly claiming to be about anything else.*** Shandy claims that the story is about his own life, but can’t seem to advance the plot all the way to the moment of his birth. Nine is supposed to be about a Great Artist’s struggles to make a movie, but instead gets stuck talking about his childhood. The life and struggles for both protagonists are set when they are too young to exert much– if any– influence over that path.

Those are pretty surface level events, however. Structurally, they both do things with the format that are simply not done. For Shandy, this means creating space within the book to jump between time periods– often these jumps happen within a page. The phrase “winding the clock” came to be very dirty over the decade in which it Shandy was published. The book itself, however, wound revolved around a certain set of events, which didn’t quite climax with the birth of the author. See how I said that again, but slightly dirtier? That’s how the book goes. Rather than being a book about a subject, in many ways it’s a book about the act of… being a book.

Nine plays with the structure of film. Remember what I said yesterday about film not being capable of showing the interior life of a subject? Well, that was a thumping lie. What Nine does brilliantly is use music to illustrate the thoughts of the subjects. Contini is not literally sitting with his mother, he is imagining what that conversation might be like. His thoughts are not life-like, but rather larger than life. Musical.

Contini states that it is his ambition to get ideas out of his head and onto the screen with as little “talking about it” as possible. This is a musical based on a play based on a movie about making a musical. It is about the very structure of ideas itself. In that, it is a very worth adaptation of Stern’s masterwork.

*I could be wrong about this, my date noted it and I did not.
**This would, of course, be a reference to the original film 8 1/2 on which the stage production of Nine is based.
*** Wait a minute, you’re asking, is Nine any good? I’ll cover that in a footnote****
****Nine was a musical involving half-naked ladies singing how much they want to get laid. That’s going to be enjoyable pretty much no matter what.

Books are fantastic at creating rich worlds, and showing how people live and think while within them. Books by their nature take place within the mind of the reader. They are, in this sense, an almost pure form of imagination, unconstrained by a need to produce actual artifacts. Books, then, are great at showing the microcosm how an individual mind works, and also very good at simply stating the rules by which a society operates. And yet, the fact that they take place within a reader’s mind has it’s own inherent drawbacks– A poorly described commonplace item, can lead readers to have a wildly different idea of what’s going on than the author intended. This isn’t always the author’s fault– try this exercise:

Take the sentence “Tom sat atop the elephant”, and rework it for someone who has never seen or heard of an elephant. Make it interesting, concise, and fit the tone of the story. 10 different people will come away having drawn 10 different pictures.

The other end of this is film. Film cannot exist without showing the viewer “things”, “artifacts”, “pictures”, “etc”**. Its language is that of camera work and forced angles. Narrative “voice” is controlled not simply by the words used by actors, but also by how the camera responds to various actions. The biggest strength of film (other than it’s communal nature) is that it can take the great writer’s axiom literally: “show don’t say”.

What film doesn’t do very well is show us the interiority of a person’s experience. All actions must exist as shown, with none of the self-justifications and denial that real people experience regularly. Evil is nearly always presented as “other”, and morality is very often shallow.

Games are a very new art form, and are still seeking a universal expressive language***. For now, this certainly counts as a major weaknesses. The strengths of gaming lay in it’s ability to place a player in the middle of an experience, forcing them to make decisions. Granted: players are making decisions at a remove from how actual persons might do them. Still, players aren’t reading someone’s thoughts about balancing a budget, and they’re not seeing someone balance a budget, if they’re playing SimCity or Dawn of Discovery, they’re having to make the choice between guns and butter. Most of us don’t want to slaughter civilians in real life… but it can be interesting to explore the life of someone who has to make the choice of kill or be killed.

All of this is prelude to tomorrow’s post about the movie version of Nine. Stay tuned…

*I feel that I should say something here about audio entertainment. But Alas! I just don’t know it well enough to make intelligent comments. For our purposes, we can think of books and audio as being much the same, though I know there’s a lot of room to call BS on that..

**Yes, yes, I did that on purpose

***Speaking of not having a universal expressive language! English sucks: by all the rules of grammar, that should have been “an universal”, but it sounds funky.

I went to see Mamma Mia last night. I am a musical fanatic. I’ve seen all the movie musicals – old and new – and I’m happy to see that they are on the rise again.

While Mamma Mia is very entertaining, and I’m ecstatic to see older women having as much fun as younger ones, it has its problems. The story is about a white woman and her daughter, and their respective white friends. It could have been easy to put a woman of color among the four friends – they’re supposed to be in Greece anyway – but every woman was a variation of the American ideal. There was unnecessary race differentiation between the main (white) characters and the (Greek/one black man) chorus. The only black man in the movie was sexualized and said only a few lines throughout the movie. It reminded me a bit of how scantily-clad women are sexualized in music videos.

Second, even as this movie was about women (having fun), the director ignored that idea, and went straight to sexism. It began with the black man taking the bags for the white woman. The woman couldn’t get the bag herself – she was living up to her “helpless” role. It makes you wonder how the bag got in the car in the first place. Throughout the movie, women crawl to their men (literally), sit in the presence of their man, be blocked by men, be saved by men, and have men take over their tasks. Not once, did a woman did any of those actions (as far as I could tell) in the movie. Women had no power in the action, only in the song, it seemed.

Yet, after my criticism, I still encourage you to go see the movie. It is funny, cute, appeals to both old and young, campy, and – most importantly – a wonderful musical!

This summer, to decide whether I should really take the extra time and effort to be pre-med, I am volunteering at the hospital. My first couple of weeks have been particularly surreal. From the initiation, where I talked to a fellow who spoke ill of the hospital we were volunteering for and explained that they stick the volunteers in a closet to file papers, to the next week where I was hiding in the corner of a big white room filled with a few doctors and a whole hell of a lot of nurses praying that I don’t faint at the sight of blood.

To say the least, I wasn’t filing papers. Though, I didn’t see much. I could see a bit of skull sticking out of his head, and contusions on his face. I could definitely hear him screaming expletives as the nurses pulled his mangled body into a recognizable human position. I told myself I could hide behind the curtain if I got too scared and felt like I was going to faint, but I didn’t.

I do believe that it is necessary to look straight into the horrors of life in order to become a better person. Whether or not I want to be a doctor, I keep telling myself, it is a good experience to have.

I was late getting home. I rode home on my bicycle, shaky, but alert, and sat down in my chair to play some World of Warcraft.

The first thing I thought was that it was ironic that I decided to play a video game to escape violence and fear of death, but honestly I couldn’t find anything more fitting. In World of Warcraft, you are in a world which is free of death (at least death is very temporary, and as such not really death), and even pain is a bandage away from perfect health. As many kodos might barrel over my tiny, undead body, I am never smushed or hurt. I never end up in a level 1 trauma center.

Granted, Grand Theft Auto, or (lest I sound old) Carmageddon *might* have been a little more harrowing (yes, said trauma described above was a car accident), but the idea is the same. Video games are not about death and violence, because there isn’t any, really. And while I might be completely not accustomed to pain and death in real life, I am plenty desensitized to video game violence.

I really wonder what the video-game-playing members of the US Armed Forces think about all of this, especially since the horror of medicine is nothing compared to the horror of war.