God Damn It Michael Bay, Part Two

Celebrity gossip isn't usually something I cover too often on this blog. If there's one thing in this world I will never understand, it's why us humans will gossip and talk shit about everyone behind everyone's back. Michael Bay, however, really seems to deserve it lately. After Megan Fox, lead actress of his new movie Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen, pretty much said what everyone already thought about this movie, he made the decision to chime in with his own two cents, in an interview with Lauren E.K. Schuker of the Wall Street Journal:

It’s interesting that you want to focus on acting. Megan Fox, one of the leads in “Transformers” has criticized your films for being special-effects-driven and not offering so many acting opportunities. Do you agree?

Well, that’s Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, “Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it.” But I 100% disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did Transformers—and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys. Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in Transformers. I like to think that I’ve had some luck in building actors’ careers with my films.

Jesus, could this guy come off as any more arrogant with this statement? Fox isn't exactly being civil here either, but Bay is honestly trying to tell me that he made Ben Affleck, Nicholas Cage, Will Smith AND Martin Lawrence in to huge megastars? It's been pointed out before, but previous evidence would definitely suggest otherwise for all three of them, especially for Ben Affleck (I think Bay owes Kevin Smith an apology at this point). As for Nicholas Cage, I don't think Bay directed Face/Off, and I think Will Smith owes more to NBC and DJ Jazzy Jeff for helping with his career than he does Michael Bay. The second Bad Boys film wasn't exactly cinematic ambrosia or anything.

Also, boy do I feel sorry for Megan Fox right now. We've got Michael Bay forcing her to wash his car to audition for the first Transformers movie (well, according to British critic John Solomons anyway), then he goes and calls her immature for stating the facts. On top of that, I've seen a lot of reviews for Transformers 2 lately, and they hardly have anything good to say about her that doesn't concern her body. Shia the Beef doesn't even want to play Wii with her. She has got to be feeling pretty frustrated right now. Here's hoping she's getting a better chance to prove herself, and a little more respect working with Jimmy Hayward, Josh Brolin and John Malkovich over these next few months.

I know this seems petty, but I'm almost thinking about avoiding Transformers 2 even when it comes out on Blu-Ray, just out of fucking principle.

Anyway, I leave you guys with some hilarious Transformers 2 reviews, one from Charlie Jane Anders of io9.com, another from Rob of Topless Robot, and one last one from the ever-so-snarky Roger Ebert straight from his own blog at the Chicago Sun-Times.

*Sigh* God damn it, Michael Bay.

Reviews have started rolling in for the new Transformers film this week.

Having very limited funds and almost no interest in Transformers in general, I'm very much on the fence about seeing this movie. The kind of stuff I've been hearing about it, though, has not been too promising so far.
What's especially off-putting about this sequel to the 2007 blockbuster special effects rodeo is the fact that, according to Devin Faraci of CHUD.com, Orci, Kurtzman and Bay seem to be taking lessons from the Jerry Bruckheimer School of Racial Sensitivity when creating new robots for the film. Needless to say, Faraci wasn't pleased with what he saw:

These new robots, who begin the film conjoined as a shitty old ice cream truck
but who soon get upgraded into Chevy concept cars, seem to be the most extreme
racial caricatures seen in a movie in decades. The Twins have a simian
appearance, with wide faces and huge ears. One of them (full disclosure: I am
not sure which is which, namewise. This isn't a problem limited to just these
robots in Transformers 2 as I couldn't tell most robots apart, except for Optimus Prime and Bumblebee) has a gold bucktooth. They have a
'playful' back and forth relationship, which includes them talking in some sort
of modern day rap-age jive, calling each other 'bitch-ass' or 'punk,' talking
with an exaggerated, crunked-up 'street' accent. They appear to be stoned all
the time. And they can't read; when asked to translate some ancient Cybertronian
language they sheepishly admit they 'don't do much readin'.' To be fair, only
Prime can read this language, but even the completely idiotic mini-bot (and
Italian stereotype) Wheelie can at least recognize what the writing is. The
Twins are completely illiterate, it seems. I was actually surprised that the
film didn't find a way to make them wear a Transformers version of baggy pants.

Gold teeth, wide eyes and big lips. Christ. I can practically smell the outrage bubbling up. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures and CHUD.com.

These two floating autobots, pictured above, are the alleged racist caricatures in question.

I suppose it's not really noticeable when they're on screen and in motion, but when you look at these two images for a while it becomes apparent that certain features are exaggerated in a certain way. That being said, I have doubts that Bay was legitimately thinking in stereotypes when he created them. Bay has made some bad movies, but that doesn't make him a bad person. Seeing him try to cover his ass by pinning it on the voice actors doing the characters, however, is a little unnerving:

Bay was eager to give all the credit for the Twins to Tom Kenny, the (white)
voice actor. 'When you work with voice actors, especially with the twins, they
did a lot of improv for their parts. We liked their improv and, from there, we
would animate to their stuff. When you're doing character animation and you're
building the character, it's not like an actor where you shoot the scene and
you've got it and you move on. With animation, you get the dialogue and then
some animation and then a bit more of the dialogue and you keep going back and
forth and it just builds until you have the shot you want.'

(For the
record, Bay mentions a second voice actor while IMDB lists Kenny as the voice of
both bots)

Later in the article, Bay mentions something about how he created the robots as a way to market the movie better to teenagers and college students. Faraci believes him, and I'm inclined to agree, but since this is the year 2009 and not 1964, I can't imagine why Bay would think this is a good idea. I'm aware that a lot of the humor in this and Bay's other works (especially The Island and Bad Boys II) caters to the lowest common denominator in a ham-fisted attempt to make as much money at release as possible, but I'd never thought he would go this far, even unknowingly.

What's even more worrisome about this, aside from the potential race-related backlash, is the fact that these characters seem very one-dimensional on the surface. When a story is poorly written or doesn't contain a whole lot of character development, a lot of minor or even secondary characters tend to be personified by either archetypes or stereotypes. If this is an indicator of the kind of stuff they are introducing in this new film to the Transformers franchise, that could be troublesome. I guess I shouldn't expect a whole lot of character development from a movie based around an 80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys, but still, it's pretty bad.

One thing Faraci may be overreacting about a little, though, is the "Italian stereotype" take that Kurtzman and Bay took with Wheeler. Here's a clip of what to expect, from Hollywood.com, Paramount Pictures, and Youtube:

Speaking as an Italian-American, I'm not so offended that Wheeler sounds like a bad Frank Sinatra impression but that this whole sequence, as a Youtube commenter put it, "Looks like a potty-mouth version of something you'd see on the Disney Channel."