More than meets the eye

The biggest surprise about Michael Bay's Transformers is how consistently funny the movie is. I don't mean funny in an unintentional, Pearl Harbor kind of way, either: For more than two-thirds of its 144-minute running time, this much-anticipated, blockbuster-bound movie is a bonafide comedy, something neither the film's trailers, nor Bay's track record, promised.

The emphasis on humor was a smart move, since for uninitiated viewers (like me) who never played with the Hasbro toys or watched the TV cartoons, there's a truckload of guff to wade through before you get to the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robot action you came to see.

But considering we're talking about a movie  in which talking robots named Devastator, Bumblebee, Megatron and Optimus Prime are fighting over a giant cube that contains some kind of all-powerful energy, there wasn't a single moment in Transformers where I felt my eyes starting to roll, which says a lot.

Even Bay is on his best behavior, actually holding shots for - prepare yourself - longer than 30 seconds at a time. In its climactic half-hour, Transformers finally becomes an all-out Michael Bay movie, although by then the picture had won me over, and the end credits rolled just as exhaustion was starting to creep in. Maybe he really isn't the devil after all.

A side note: Whoever the executive at General Motors who secured the deal to exclusively feature GM cars in the movie was is going to get a huge year-end bonus, because I suspect the movie is going to make Camaros insanely popular again. For example, I suddenly want one.

Viewing log

Thursday June 28

Transformers (2007)

Wednesday June 27

* The Third Man (1949): Has any actor ever had a bigger impact on a movie with just one scene than Orson Welles does here?

Live Free or Die Hard (2007): Review here.

Tuesday June 26

Flatliners (1990): Is it just me, or does everyone in this movie (Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon) come off as really, really unlikable?

Monday June 25

Ratatouille (2007): Review here.

What about Southland?

Variety reports that Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly has signed on to direct Cameron Diaz in The Box, a thriller based on a Richard Matheson short story about a couple who find a mysterious box with a button that, if pressed, will make them rich. The only catch is that someone they know will die.

That's all fine and good, but I'm more eager to see Southland Tales, the futuristic sci-fi musical starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson that Kelly unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival last year to wildly mixed reactions. The film is tentatively set for release in March 2008. We'll have to wait and see whether or not Kelly recut the film from the 160-minute version shown at Cannes.

Sicko al fresco

There are no scenes in Sicko in which Michael Moore ambushes the CEO of an HMO with a camera in tow. But as a way of promoting the film's release, Lionsgate Films and The Weinstein Company are going to project the movie's trailer beginning at sundown today until 1 a.m. on the side of buildings located near the headquarters of various insurance companies in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Chicago.

In the Sicko trailer, you can see the sequence I referred to in my story that ran Saturday about the film's depiction of Cuba's health care. Although the movie claims the U.S. should use the island's medical system as a model to aspire to, there is another scene earlier in the film that succinctly contradicts that argument. These two frames are pretty self-explanatory:

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I really enjoyed Sicko overall, though. My review won't run until Friday, but here's my interview with Moore, which ran in yesterday's paper.