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Man, Beast and Fox

by DICK CHENEY

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
dir. Jonathan Liebesman
112 minutes

There was a woman who loved a dolphin, and Michael Bay once got a "she's coming onto me" vibe from an orangutan from the San Diego Zoo, but animals have rarely sought sexual completeness from human beings until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Watching Megan Fox ignore sexual harassment from the two lewdest ninja turtles was uncomfortable; the fact that she had to fend off the advances of Gob Bluth (Will Arnett) made it all the more puzzling.

There is a moment in almost every Michael Bay movie where you stop and ask yourself what disturbed sexual fantasy from his past he is reenacting. That moment in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came when Megan Fox was stroking a large CGI rat on his deathbed, and the rat was voiced by Tony Shalhoub. The rat's nose and fur has become somewhat damp as he whinges from her touch. Splinter/Steven Spielberg concordance aside, Megan Fox looked old enough to be that rat's mother.

If this was not the time to utilize the voice-acting talents of Selena Gomez, I don't know what is

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cost $125 million dollars, which is hard to believe given the most accomplished actor in the entire conglomeration is Johnny Knoxville. There is only one African-American character in the film: Whoopi Goldberg plays Megan Fox's boss.

When Megan comes to Whoopi with the true story of how Michael Bay sodomized her and forced her to say that making the Turtles alien warriors from another dimension was a good idea, Whoopi fires her and never appears in the movie again. Despite finding the story of the century and wanting to be taken seriously as a journalist, Fox never breaks the story of humanoid turtles in any publication, even The Huffington Post.

The words "You were too old to play Mark Wahlberg's daughter" hang over this photograph like a Christmas wreath.

The woman (Margaret Lovatt) who loved the dolphin lived with him in a waterproofed environment. The dolphin's name was Peter, and he had a dial-up account with AOL where he posted under the screenname MargLovattsDolfin, mostly about collectible card games and what temperature was best to keep fish at. Margaret took Peter's playful nudges as a sign that he was ready for wintercourse with her. 

"Peter, do you read The Believer? No, you don't? It's a magazine that...oh, nevermind."

Watching a hulking, disturbed, half-blindfolded giant turtle explain how 'hot' he finds the oldest, clunkiest madam in Michael Bay's stable is awkward enough. In addition, Michaelangelo adopts some kind of vaguely ethnic, vaguely Canadian accent that I can't quite pin down; he sounds like if Rachel McAdams was eaten by a salamander. He never consummates his relationship with the brunette reporter or Amy Poehler for that matter, but neither did Will Arnett.

The turtles like pizza, but not as much as you would expect.

Guys, remember. You're fucking turtles.

Since it is no longer acceptable to have male humans sexually harass women in the movies, Bay came up with an ingenious plan to have gruesome assemblages of man and monster tell Megan Fox to spread her legs in a children's movie. I was always told that art imitated life, but I never really believed it until now.

For some reason, Margaret Lovall gave Peter a last name, English. She also gave him a lot more:

"Peter liked to be with me," explains Lovatt. "He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls," she says. But transporting Peter downstairs proved so disruptive to the lessons that, faced with his frequent arousals, it just seemed easier for Lovatt to relieve his urges herself manually. "I allowed that," she says. "I wasn't uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn't rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that's how it seemed to work out. It wasn't private. People could observe it."

"Megan," Michael Bay said, "Would you like to go where someone could observe us?"

After Margaret moved onto a job giving armadillos near-impossible handjobs, Peter wrote to Boston Globe advice columnist Meredith Goldstein, who explained that Margaret was only using him for twelve-inch cock and he should try jdate, where human women were waiting to anthropomorphize him as a dolphin-version of Chris Evans or, worst-case scenario, Ezra Klein.

Women are beings of infinite understanding. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exploits this strength by outnumbering April O'Neil and making the turtles more size-appropriate than were the Transformers. "They're six feet tall!" Megan screeches at one point, as if she had never ever seen anything that large. I remember George W. Bush coming up to me at a state dinner one time with a huge grin on his face. He pulled me close and whispered, "You'd have to be huge to fuck a Transformer!" and practically skipped away.

In the end, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is just an extensive, unimaginative reenactment of Beauty and the Beast. At least in the source work, it took a fabulous library and enchanted castle in order to capture what remained of Belle's heart after a decade of leading Gaston on. ("Gaston, soon! Soon!") The turtles show Megan Fox to their secret lair below the city where they live with their Rat-Dad, and she is very impressed by this. Standards have been lowered precipitously; there must be more than this provincial sewer.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.