In Which We Sympathize Purely With Decepticons

Robots In Disguise

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Not a single human being dies during Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which is something of a major achievement considering the film represents something like thirty-eight separate military engagements. War isn't hell, is Michael Bay's main message here, appropriate for a director with an IQ barely above retarded.

Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the most boring movie I've ever seen? Probably not -- it shows the pyramids, a human achievement I have yet to witness in person. Occasionally, we get a flattering angle of Megan Fox. That's about the run of it. There is still the collected oeuvre of Tyler Perry to dull our mind and senses. But it is up there, quite high up there.

It is amazing to think that 200 million dollars spent on this film couldn't rescue it from being a dreadful bore, but it is. Asimov and Heinlein brought intelligent machines and war to Terran shores, and Bay completely tears apart any interest we might have in them. What could 200 million dollars have done for cancer research, or buying me an Xbox 360? We will never know.

can we execute him and bernie madoff together plzStakes is central core of drama - without it, there's only so much debris can interest us. At the end of the first Transformers film, we felt this kind of gnawing disinterest in what had up until then been a fairly potent departure from the usual special effects-related mayhem. Optimus Prime and Megatron battled, and I had a fairly tough time differentiating between the two. Optimus had a shade of blue in his coat. A handsome creature, a pretty, gravelly-voiced machine.

If you modify the tenor of your voice to sound like Peter Cullen, the dude who does Optimus Prime, you can create more excitement in your kitchen than this movie did with oodles of cash and a signed contract with Megan Fox. But basically there are more robots coming, and the government doesn't get that they are different from the good autobots. Really? Have they ever refused to give in to an automaker before?

For good measure, Bay throws in twin dumb robots with gold teeth and African-American voiceovers who don't know how to read and spend most of the time threatening to cap each other and speaking in jive. Sigh. I realize Bay despises political correctness, but did Jar Jar Binks change the world for the better? The Twins help Shia LaBeouf find something called The Matrix. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Was it the turning point of the second National Treasure film?

Really, it's all just an elaborate prelude to get robots whizzing and buzzing on each other, in each other. Two robots fighting each other is satisfying momentarily, like watching felines whirling into messy balls of fur. After a while, you just want to the fighting to stop.

This is most assuredly not what the American military wants however. Know you what our 'government' spends on such things? The opening scene of Revenge of the Fallen features the pursuit of a rogue Decepticon, a military operation that must have cost billions. Guys, can't you just let a Decepticon be?

War is even more of a specious creature in this world, where the persecution of creatures known formally as Decepticons continues unabated. We find out later that some of them aren't so evil, but nevermind that - one is sucking sand into its mouth for no real reason! Admire the money-making power of your not-talented overlord, Michael "I Physiologically Lack a Penis" Bay!

Autobots are sympathetic to the American military insofar as their soldiers attack and destroy the Autobots' main competition for 'energon' (Transformer fuel, smells like eggs and Meg Ryan), the Decepticons. Autobots are brothers in full to Army men who looks like Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson. Why do I care about these people? Anyway, what fun for these boys to play soldiers in world where no soldier dies. Come to real world - we can use you!

michael, you left the lens cap on againOne life form needs the sun intact, to fuel machines which empty themselves, destroy atmosphere and other life forms. (I speak of humans, Autobot sympathizers.) Another life form, prettier but without portrait in Maxim, desires sun to break it apart so that it may provide lifefuel for the resurrection of its home planet, Cybertron. Interesting moral conundrum? Michael, don't sleep during our meeting, please.

don't worry: you are safe here. according to percentages, you account for 53.8 percent of this film's box office"Alien wars are of no concern to us." Michael Bay has a dumb Obama flack say this - flack prefers negotiation, reconciliation, surrender - but the flack has the right idea. Here is a war between two forces. Perhaps we should wait and see where it takes us, before committing more than we have. After all - we're proud owners of General Motors now. They need all the money taxpayers can spare!

The same reason the original Transformers was such an unusual thrill is why Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen sucks balls. Michael's cinematic modus operandi is to throw manic scenes together without transitions of any kind - sort of how I write reviews of his movies, but nevermind that. A film should cohere more closely than what I write, should offer plausible explanations for how retarded it is. I'm only one man! They had 200 fucking million dollars.

There is a forty minute segment near the end of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that truly tested my patience. Without irony, joke, or distraction, Bay simply had Megan Fox jiggling her jugglies and running with her hair blowing back in the wind for what seemed like forever. Didn't anybody ask why we needed to watch two kids jog miles through the desert? It's a movie - put them next to where the action is. Maybe a fucking Autobot can carry them? Is that so difficult? It took forty minutes of a rigorous rock soundtrack and sand particles flowing over perfectly made-up faces to end this farce, ruining the career of John Turturro on the way. Do not see this movie!

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Triangle Walks (james rutledge edit)" - Fever Ray (mp3)

"Triangle Walks (radio edit)" - Fever Ray (mp3)

"Triangle Walks (tigas radio edit)" - Fever Ray (mp3)

In Which We're Up Early And Moving Like Leonard

from Journal

by LEONARD MICHAELS

We made love all afternoon. Sonny asked, "Was it good?" I said, "Never in my life" etc. The irrelevance of words, the happiness of being free of all such clothing. I lie on my back. Dumb. Savoring dumbness. My mother said she found my father on his back on the bedroom floor, staring up at her with a dumb little smile on his face, as if it weren't bad being dead. He'd gone like himself, a sweet gentleman with fine nervous hands, not wanting her to feel distressed. It's a mystery how one learns to speak, the great achievement of life. But when the soul speaks -- alas it is no longer the soul that speaks.

Billy says, "Why don't you let me do it? Afraid you might like it?"

A huge fellow with the face of a powerful dullard stood behind the counter. He turned for items on the shelf and I saw that his pants had slipped below his hips, where he was chopped sheer from lower back to legs. No ass to hold up his pants. His bulk pushed forward and heaved up into his chest. He had a hanging mouth and little eyes with a birdlike shine. I bought salami and oranges from him, thought I no longer felt any desire to eat.

We made love all afternoon. Sonny asked, "Was it good?" I said, "Never in my life" etc. She said, "I should be compensated."

Alone, you hear yourself chewing and swallowing. You sound like an animal. With company everyone eats, talk obscures the noises in your head, and nobody looks at what your mouth is doing, or listens to it. In this high blindness and deafness lives freedom. Would I think so if I hadn't left her?

She pressed my leg with hers under the table. Conversation stopped. She continued pressing, then pulled away abruptly. She did it to excite herself, that's all. Her makeup was sloppy, her clothes were stylish. She'd start to say something, then laugh and say, "No." I'd never seen anyone more depressed. She said, "Driving to work I brush my teeth. I'm the invisible woman." I said, "I locked myself out of my office and my car. I don't even exist." She said, "I lost my checkbook and sunglasses. Nobody needs them." "I forgot my appointment. Nobody wants to meet me." She frowned. "You're trying and that's sweet. But I don't care."

Deborah's dentist, a little Jewish man, talks incessantly and she can't say a word because her mouth is pried open, under investigation by steel instruments, and also hooked like a fish by a suction tube. Nevertheless her dentist says things that require an answer, so she grunts and moans to say, yes, no, really, how nice, too bad. Last time she saw him he carried on about Buddhism, which he studies with monks in a temple. He said, incidentally, that he'd learned to levitate. She asked him if he meant "meditate" rather than "levitate." He said, "No, I mean levitate." She asked him to show her. He said, "No, no." She pleaded with him. He refused. She refused to leave. He said, "Just once." He turned his back to her, crouched slightly, and lifted off the floor. I waited for Deborah to continue, but hat was the end. She had no more to say. I snapped at her, "He did not levitate." She said, truly astonished, "He didn't?"

Sonny was my best friend. Then she says, "I met a man last night." My heart grew heavy. I couldn't count on her anymore for dinner, long talks on the telephone, serious attention to my problems, and she'll no longer tell me about herself, how well or ill she slept last night, and whether she dreamed, and what she did yesterday, and what people told her and she them. She said, "I don't know why, but I feel guilty towards you." I said, "What's he like?"

She said he is some kind of psychotherapist, divorced, lives in Mill Valley. His former wife is Korean, a fashion model. She made him install a plate-glass window in their living room so birds would fly into it and break their necks. She had them stuffed.

"Oh, I know the guy," I said. "Women find him attractive."

"How do men find him?" I was conscious of the danger.

"He dresses well. He likes classical music, and hiking. He goes sailing. He's a good cook. Doesn't smoke."

"You think he's a prick."

You can find the first three entries in Leonard Michaels' Journal here, here, and here.

"Your Moon" - Sun Airway (mp3)

"Waiting on You" - Sun Airway (mp3)

"Swallowed by the Night" - Sun Airway (mp3)

In Which We Are Surprised At Ourselves

A Spike Lee Grew in BK

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

Rosie Perez, in impossibly tight clothing, jukes to "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy. It's Brooklyn, or at least a re-creation of it, and as she dances alone, angry and with impenetrable gusto, you quickly realize, before the film has even begun, that Spike Lee's best joint is also the best film of the '80s.

Straight forward, Do the Right Thing is a film about doing the right thing, whatever that may mean. Buggin' Out, all thick specs and Kid 'n Play haircut says, "I'm just a struggling Black man trying to keep my dick hard in a cruel and harsh world," and as a 20-year-old Black female from the burbs, I somehow get that.

What does it mean to do the right thing when street violence plagues your neighborhood and the only applicable justice is vigilante justice? What does it mean to do the right thing when hundreds of years of violence, racism and slavery have immobilized an entire population from somewhat recovering in the face of "get over it?"

What does it mean to do the right thing when you can't even open up a business on your own block? What does it mean to do the right thing when, despite your friendships, the most problematic and inopportune of situations inevitable clouds one judgment, stripping away rational thought and instead, replacing it with "us vs. them?"

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing came twenty years ago on the tail end of a decade of mental deterioration, social destruction, and cultural extinction. A means of shedding light on and telling one story for a population systematically ignored, it rattled a hell of a lot of feathers and left a sour, near-painful taste in the mouths of the sect who would have the means to watch the film in theaters, though not personally relate to its context on the sort of visceral level that the average Black American would.

It seems fitting that Lee, as Mookie, was the star of the film. It was completely his story to tell and like a gust of strong wind or a punch to the gut, Lee reflected on the past with a touch of humor and a ton of responsibility.

On the cusp of the politically correct '90s, Do the Right Thing spat in the face of social apathy, two years before the residents of South Central LA did the same thing.

Brittany Julious is the senior contributor to This Recording. She writes at Glamabella and Britticisms.

"Of Moons, Birds and Monsters (Soft Rocks Late Night Screening Mix)" - MGMT (mp3)

"Of Moons, Birds and Monsters (Holy Ghost! remix)" - MGMT (mp3)

"Of Moons, Birds and Monsters (Modernaire remix)" - MGMT (mp3)