Sunday, July 05, 2009

Addendum to the TransFormers thing

One more thing that bothers me wherever I see it and is absolutely a form of stupidity if not outright racism in itself: Aliens did not build the fucking pyramids, the Egyptians did! I realize that reading is probably as much anathema to Michael Bay as it is to his robo-buffoons, but please, Mister, please just read a fucking book. Culture did not just appear out of the sky in 4,000 BCE. The defining attribute of the species Homo Sapiens is that we are able to link our little societies and villages and tribes into a larger patchwork of communication and idea-sharing than any other animals on the planet. Archaeology has only records of culture in humans dating back about 12,000-14,000 years but that doesn't actually mean that's when Humanity as a big letter concept started. In fact, that suggests to me that there were cultures before that time that the remnants we have were built from. Monkeys and dolphins have tools, humans have had tools since before the "missing link" came into existence. Our troglodyte and neanderthal ancestors had tools in the hundreds of thousands of years ago. There is actually a lot to explain just in the written histories of the world how it came to be that an ancient people like the Egyptians could have come up with the design elegance that resulted in the pyramids and that's taking into account the unbelievable amounts of oral tradition and written records that the world does not or maybe even can not ever again have access to! So, please, to Michael Bay and all other cultural imperialists that believe everything they've heard is all that has ever been known - you don't know anything and you should leave the wild speculation alone. God begins where explanations have run their course, not because that is his doing but because that is where our answers stop. It's easier to say, "God took it from there," than it is to simply admit, "I can't understand anything beyond this point and maybe there isn't actually an answer to the bigger question. Maybe it's just infernal coincidence." Humans built the pyramids without any extra-terrestrial help.

TransFormers 2: Pretty Much What Meets the Eye

I'm 32 now and I've spent a lot of time the last week and a half (post being run down by a car on Hollywood Blvd) watching old cartoons from my childhood. I still love them even though the stories and characterizations are pretty much universally horrible. The animation stinks and episodes are repetitious unless they were part of a mini-series or movie. I don't know that my enjoyment is derived from a purely nostalgic viewpoint, either. I think I really just like the idea of giant robots and crazy villains. So let's try to look at TransMorfers 2 from that viewpoint.

Last year I spent some amount of mental capacity trying to come up with a reasoned analysis for why The Dark Knight was a great comic book adaptation and a really cool movie without actually crossing the line to being a great movie. I gave up after a while because I couldn't find a throughline and because I wrote a decent draft that then got erased by the wonders of blogspot converging with the frailties of my apartment's power supply. So I have a couple of paragraphs of rambling left to show for it and a reasonable expectation that "serious" film criticism is a dead dog that might not even mean much to the next generation of film students, let alone an uncaring general populace. So this is my obverse of that abandoned project, my attempt to reclaim some territory I hadn't even finished staking out yet. I come not to bury TransFormers but to praise it. I haven't actually seen TransMorphers yet, but I'm really glad to know that it exists and fully intend to avail myself to its potentially considerable charms over the next few weeks. Go-Bots and Voltron? Any producer with a dollar to spend who's looking for a writer, come see me! Now, on to the most-hated and most-watched movie currently in world cinemas.

There is a large faction of new media voices who assert that the new TransFormers movie is racist, and they could be right. I do see the Twins characters as shucking and jiving bastardizations of hip-hop culture but I don't know that this necessarily makes them black. Lots of white kids go through wannabe stages of hip-hop pandering and either throw off the casing as a past mask or actually grow in understanding enough to be comfortable in there own skin and just grow into hip hop on their own terms. So it is conceivable that the Twins are alien-wiggers (for lack of a more understandable term) who are just culture-jacking and wouldn't really be set up as a separate "race" of AutoBots. In some ways that is balm to the part of my soul that actually likes big dumb robots exploding things. I realize, though, that when taken in the context of a vapidly misanthropic film such as this (and perhaps in the larger context of a vapidly misanthropic sheen to most, if not all, of Michael Bay's films) it is impossible to say that the filmmakers didn't just look at the Twins from their own culture-jacking eyes and say, "Well, shit, them colored folks sure talk funny. What about if we's made two dumb robots that talked like them colored folks?" Maybe they even said it in those words. Even so, I think it is more likely a symptom of systematic racism that associates swagger with idiocy and tries to subvert the threat of otherness through mental emasculation. I mean, Mr. Bay probably looks at his work on music videos, on the Bad Boys movies and says to himself, "How could I be racist? I love black people - they pay me!" And then he dives into his money pool, a la Scrooge McDuck. So, this ugly element of the movie (a marked contrast to the at times aggressive attempts at PC inclusion that the cartoons and comic books) does stain the experience for me quite a bit. I'm not saying the film doesn't deserve the derision it receives on this one point because it does. Still there's more open hostility and hate in the Michael Bay canon that should perhaps be put on trial here.

Culture jacking is a serious discussion but it is tough to put much personal perspective on it because it does require some distance to even begin the discussion. (Along the lines of, "I can make pronouncements on race because I am above this discussion", which is never true but is somewhat necessary to even address the issue.) On the other hand Michael Bay is almost violently sexist in a way that doesn't need so much personal distance. What is going on at the "Ivy League" school that Sam goes to? His roommate is running a site called The Freshman 55 (actually a cultural reference, way to go Bay, Kurtzmann & Orci!) that goes completely uncommented upon because EVERY GIRL ON CAMPUS IS A SUPERMODEL. Digression - everyone on campus is also over 22 years old, which is weird. The one super-hot, unattainable blond bombshell that Sam's roommate slobbers over? The one that actually has an awareness of her sexuality? She's actually a killer robot. Really? I know the idea that's sold for union considerations is that the movie was written in like an hour or something but nobody noticed that? No, because nobody cares! The new feminism is that girls should get what they want through sex because it seems to work out pretty well in the long run. Well, it's pretty bad that this can be out in the open like it is. And this comes from someone who does consume as much sex culture as I have available to me. I love sex, I love talking about sex, I love watching sex acts and I love the fact that sex is our most important biological function (big picture here!). And yes I am asserting that racism is trumped by sexism in my defense of the movie. Thereby admitting that the movie is casually sexist and racist. On these cultural points I do concede.

I was thinking, you know what? TranFormers 2: Rolling On The Floor is not as bad as everyone says. It had giant robots fighting and they were sometimes cool to look at. And they made me want to make my own TransFormers movie. Something involving Unicron that could replace the uncomfortable schism that occurs in this franchise from feeling the need to focus on human characters at the expense of cultivating any personality for the real stars, the robots. But you know what else? Fuck Michael Bay for being such an inhuman prick. I wish I had never paid to to see this movie. I'm ashamed to admit that I did. I really thought I could form an advanced argument to say this is not such a bad movie. It is a horrible movie, however, I do still think it has more entertainment value that the garbage that was delivered in the first installment of the series. So there, faint praise indeed.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Thank You For Your Help!

If I believed I had an audience I probably would have already blogged about getting hit by a car. If you have stumbled over this post and don't know me - I was hit by a car while riding my bicycle. This happened last Thursday. It hurts. Today is Wednesday. I have also had my car towed and still have no income. So my car has been on lockdown for about a week now until I could get $$$ from my momz. Yeah, I'm 32, jobless, borrowing from my mom. I am awesome, thanks for asking!

My thank you for this article goes to WaMu/Chase for doing all they could to keep the money I received from actually helping me. I got a check from momz on Monday that would cover my little situation enough to get the car back and get it fixed (probably) so I went to my bank with boundless energy. I don't actually know what to call my bank now, by the way. WaMu has been becoming Chase for a while now. When is that chrysalis finally thrown off?

My initial plan for the check was to cash it for some greenbacks in case the tow yard requires that sort of blood money. (I still need to write my blockbuster action flick about tow trucks...) The first problem was that they said the check needed to be held so they couldn't give me more than $100, which would help in 1923 but not now. So the guy just asked me if I wanted to deposit the money. Thinking I had no other options because I assume money will always work against me I told him, "sure, go ahead!" and cried my way out the front door of the bank. When I told my girlfriend that the money would be on hold until next month some time she marched into the bank with her giant dog and demanded answers. The concept, if you can follow it, gentle reader:

Reverse the deposit!
Wire the money instead of a check!
Save the princess from the castle!
Easy enough!

But, alas, it was not easy. When I got the money wired I noticed a peculiarity with my account. There was still a hold against it even though the original deposit had been cancelled. I called the Customer Service line to ask that the hold be released. The nice man from the far away land assured me that the money would be released automatically at 9pm. Too late for the day's activities, but all would be right in the morning. I should point out here that the guy didn't really put up much of a front of helpfulness. He was actually kind of a dick. But I selected no when I was asked about the survey. Too bad, he would have gotten all "very dissatisfied", especially if I had known then that he was just making shit up.

My momz told me to go ahead and deposit the check she sent me on top of the money that was wired and the kingdom cheered. A second trip to the bank was a small price to pay for a lot of moneys. I paid that ultimate price! And I got a receipt, which I never do, because I assumed something was still fucked up. And I'm a psychic! It was still fucked up! The first deposit was still on hold even though the second deposit was for the same check. I had holds bigger than my total deposits and the customer service people helped as much as this:

They Said It
Aaron (Chicago): What's your take on Nate Schierholtz? Expectations the rest of the way?

AJ Mass: Well, they're both mighty valuable. If this is a keeper league for just one year, it's closer; if it's a keeper league for multiple years, I'm easily saying Upton. The difference between them, obviously, is speed, which makes me answer Upton anyway. But Bay is going to make himself a whole lot of money this winter, and he'll deserve it.
-- Full chat transcript