In Which We Seriously Miss Megan Fox At This Time

Operation: Enduring Freedom

by ELEANOR MORROW

Transformers: The Last Knight
dir. Michael Bay
149 minutes

There is a scene smack-dab in the middle of Transformers: The Last Knight where Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is sitting in a room opposite Oxford professor Viviane Wembley (Laura Haddock) for around two minutes. That is how long it takes for him to refer to her attire as "stripper-wear" because she was showing maybe an inch of her breasts. That no one has thought to arrest Michael Bay and put him in jail for this is a testament to the enduring freedoms possible in our country.

In all other ways, Mr. Bay informs us at length, Dr. Wembley is a piece of shit. Even though she appears to be a tenured professor, she also gives tours at a local museum. She informs her tour group that the Knights of the Round Table probably never existed, which is quite the statement. Dr. Wembley is proved to be an academic fraud shortly after she was objectified by a man she did not even know. Subsequently, we learn her only purpose for being in the film is that she is the only one able to grip a long wooden shaft.

The rest of Transformers: The Last Knight makes a lot more sense, except the parts that don't. Take one subplot involving Seymour Simmons (John Turturro). Simmons appears in two scenes in Transformers: The Last Knight. Both of these scenes take place by telephone – Turturro literally got paid to stand next to a phone and talk to Anthony Hopkins for a few minutes. Why was he in Transformers: The Last Knight? I don't know, is it weird every single woman in these movies is a carbon copy of Megan Fox at different ages? Yes.

At the beginning of Transformers: The Last Knight, Cade Yeager finds a fifteen-year old Peruvian girl (Isabela Moner) in the wreckage surrounding Wrigley Field. He calls her "bro" and allows her to stay in his house. Much later, she hides aboard a dropship, unnoticed by a platoon of soldiers in order to follow Cade Yeager into the upper atmosphere. And that's it. That is her entire role in the movie. I don't know, is it weird that the way we are introduced to Dr. Wembley occurs when she careens into a bunch of bicycles with a car because she can't handle the challenges of an automobile?

In another scene, Anthony Hopkins is trying to evacuate an old Navy submarine that is held in a museum. He screams, "Get moving fat boy!" when one of the tourists does not vacate the premises as quickly as he would like. But why stop there? Why not just bring racial slurs back into vogue, Michael Bay? It certainly would have livened up the proceedings. Without ever having met Michael Bay, is it not terribly hard to conclude he is the dumbest piece of shit of all time. Transformers: The Last Knight features the long awaited return of the ghetto Transformer, who speaks in an African-American dialect siphoned from landmark films like Do the Right Thing and Scary Movie.

Cade Yeager and Dr. Wembley pilot a submarine into a ship buried off the coast of England. Although it is at the bottom of the ocean, there is no depressurization whatsoever as they return to the surface. I don't know why, but this bothered me more than anything else in Transformers: The Last Knight. The cast heads from underwater to Stonehenge, where they have learned the Earth's ancestral name was Unicron, and that the Earth's crust conceals a massive organism beneath the surface. Despite teasing this early on, Bay saves this plot development for a future movie he has promised not to direct.

The worst part of Transformers: The Last Knight, besides the lack of plot of any kind, is the humor. Since the characters have zero pre-existing relationships, it is painful to hear them joke with one another. Particularly cringe-worthy is a transforming butler voiced by Jim Carter responsible for the major comic relief. He is more like a physical manifestation of Michael Bay telling us what we should be laughing at in each scene of the movie. After Anthony Hopkins dies at Stonehenge, the butler explains that of all the lords he served, "you were by far the coolest." Michael Bay hasn't changed since the moment he walked out of The Goonies in 1985.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Voice A Dampish Rat For Your Amusement

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.

In Which This Was Made Largely For China And To Hurt Megan Fox's Feelings

Cavities

by DICK CHENEY

Transformers: Age of Extinction
dir. Michael Bay
165 minutes

I don't throw the word genius around a lot, unless someone is washing my feet or my car. We have long needed an American director who was absolutely fearless, and now we have found him. Michael Bay is willing to destroy his actors to get what he wants onscreen. What exactly is Michael Bay's heart's desire? He wanted to make a movie about a love triangle between a father, his daughter and her Australian boyfriend.

In this he succeeded with Transformers: Age of Extinction. Mark Wahlberg's daughter informs us that she has been "taking care" of Marky Mark since his wife passed. (A robot winks meaningfully after that.) It is a poor choice of words at best, a mild and innocuous felony at worst. Unfortunately, Tessa Yeager (Nicola Peltz) had to die:

This is actually how Natalie Wood died IMO

The lifespan of women in Transformers is limited in the extreme. They get tired and fatigued from running and screaming for help, and heart disease claims them in the end. Megan Fox has actually been dead for over a decade. In the last Transformers movie, which I believe was subtitled Transformers: My Pea Is Your Pod, Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf perished in the warmth of Optimus Prime's nasal cavity, requiring this reboot.

Not a single person from any of those previous Transformers movies is even peripherally involved in Age of Extinction, but all of the characters still talk the exact same.

Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) owns a fledgling robotics company that has not produced a single working robot. When he meets Optimus Prime (Christian Bale), he immediately begins planning to steal the alien technology and use it for his own nefarious means. His household is "under control", because after his wife died, he prohibited both himself and his daughter from ever dating, which I believe is both illegal and extremely creepy unless you're Indian.

She couldn't even get a flirtatious moment with Mark Wahlberg? Racist.

Because Transformers is way more successful outside of America, Bay has included a variety of token ethnicities. After the blowback from his ghetto Transformers incident from the NAACP (they later honored him with a lifetime achievement award) Mr. Bay has steered clear of including any black characters in the entire movie. There is not even an African-American dinosaur robot. 

Instead, Bay really appreciates Asian audiences. That's why he has included a female executive (Li Bingbing) in Age of Extinction, who Stanley Tucci regards as "extremely impressive." Naturally, even though she is his subordinate, he hits on her throughout the film and eventually she seems open to his disgusting advances. (How do you think Michael Bay obtained children?)

There is also a Samurai transformer who appears to be attired like the cover of a Midwestern edition of The Art of War. His accent is so unbelievably sinister and racist that it makes Aunt Jemima look progressive, (Unfortunately, I learned this is Ken Watanabe's actual accent. Sorry Ken.)

I can't feel sympathy for the pricks who tow cars. I really can't this time you guys.

Inside of every Transformer is the life force known as the spark; "we cah that a soul" Wahlberg bleats. In a massive alien ship he finds special transformer killing guns and turns into Rambo.  Cade sends his daughter away but she comes back to fight on the side of the good robots. Kelsey Grammar tries to have the daughter gunned down for no real reason by the evil island spirit on Lost and Mark Wahlberg is like, "Ya tried to kull my dawghter." I miss Dr. Frasier Crane.

The dinosaur part of the story goes something like this: the transformers killed the dinosaurs. The only reason they offered is because they have a less than respectful view of the artistic aspects of The Land Before Time. Mark Wahlberg acts like he would rather be anywhere, showcasing an intense contempt for the man he is portraying. Incidentally "Cade" is a very difficult word for a robot to say, and Optimus Prime goes out of his way not to utter Cade's name so as not to confuse his ethnic Autobots.

Mr. Bay, remember that time you gave that extra brain damage as you screaming, "Autobots Assemble" at her while dressed like Nick Fury?

Even though Cade's daughter Tessa is only 17, she has developed an intense emotional connection with a race car driver. God knows what they have in common or where they met, but it's up to this fellow to prove his worthiness to the girl's father. This disturbing wooing of permission is not only deeply retrograde and sexist, it occurs during a car chase.

The action culminates in nothing very exciting. The last film ended with a set piece that destroyed the city of Chicago, which was at least therapeutic. Age of Extinction concludes suddenly after one of the robots is destroyed; I believe the robot's name was Gastroenteritistron. He wanted to bring Optimus back to his "creator," which is probably Morgan Freeman in a suit if the last ten years of cinema is any indication.

There was no one with brown eyes in this entire movie, it was like a 21st century 'Triumph of the Will'

In the end, Optimus decides he is really very sick of humanity, and would do anything he could to get away from them. He watched his Autobot friends hacked and divested of their Happy Meals and metal belongings, and in doing so he witnessed the destruction of his entire way of life. Age of Extinction had the largest ever opening in China. Every invading culture is quietly subsumed and irrevocably altered by the victims it claims.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location who misses Hot Pie.

"If The Morning Comes" - Transfer (mp3)

"We Don't Have To Be Nice Anymore" - Transfer (mp3)