Do you enjoy being taken for an idiot? No, of course not. Michael Bay seems to think the opposite. He thinks that not only do we enjoy being taken for idiots, we actively want him to push it as far as we allow and construct films with as little craft and imagination involved as possible.
After seeing Transformers 3: The Dark of the Moon I felt as if someone had spat in my mind. I wonder am I alone in thinking the title has no rhythm to it? The saying ‘dark side of the moon’ is so entrenched in our language that to omit ‘side’ from the equation kicks it right out of balance and makes it sound devoid of intelligence.
There is so much wrong with this film, it isn’t possible to catalogue all the faults. Whenever I try and clarify them as individual details my mind starts to blur, presumably from the tears that well up in inside it.
To accurately convey the style with which the content is delivered I can only think of one thing. The bombastic, overblown void that is Sky Sports. This is a company that categorise two football matches on a Sunday between well known rivals that take place one after another as ‘Grand Slam Sunday’.
A grand slam is when a competitor or team makes a clean sweep of all available prizes. This has no bearing at all to what occurs on these particular Sundays. One gets the feeling it was driven by the two third alliteration available to them. Is this not akin to calling a cricket event ‘Kickflip Monday’ or ‘Chokehold Tuesday’. Moronic, and what’s worse is we accept this clumsy lazy marketing as par for the course.
Bay and Sky both rely on farcically advanced technology to act as coherent pieces of entertainment. In the film, previously respected actors pit their wits against clunking charisma-free 3D renderings that double as pornographically portrayed product placement. On Sky, the punditry is interspersed with snippets of statistics showed with the same fanfare a robotic Jesus would garner if he returned from space with a cure for aids and the corpses of all Al Qaedas members pritt sticked to the hull of the Millenium Falcon to form the words ‘May the Farce be with you’.
What grates most is I can picture the people coming up with this stuff. All sat round a table ‘brainstorming’, pushing their flakes of imagination together into a pitiful pile to comfort themselves that they may have at least one between them, all the while expelling turgid ideas from the mudslides in their heads. The standard of the output screams their opinion of the expected audience.
They picture us sitting at home with our jaws resting sideways in a glistening pool of drool on the carpet beside our comfy chairs as our dead eyes seek out movements on the picture talky box. When that Grand Slam Sunday intro starts, our simple 16bit minds flicker into unrestrained ecstasy at the colour and flashy noises. Tears of joy seep from our dulled eyes as their wonderfully simplistic show begins. We are idiots. Our lives are complete.
Ariggo Sacchi said he ‘didn’t know you had to have been a racehorse to be a jockey’ when asked if he thought he didn’t have the necessary experience to step into management after being a shoe salesman. It was a wonderfully delivered riposte to sneering journalists as well as a great example of the intelligence of the man. If Sky would take the meaning behind this quote into consideration they might actually employ people who know what they are talking about. At the moment it is the equivalent of the Grand National being covered by actual horses who account for all disection and analysis by means of enthusiastic whinnys and snorts. Inspirational patio chair, Ed Chamerlain, scratches them behind the ear when they make a point and then nuzzles an apple into their whinnying delighted mouths.
We’re better than this tripe. And they know it.
No comments:
Post a Comment