Transformers 3

It's a perverse pleasure to watch an atrocious blockbuster. Sadly, Dark Side of the Moon, the third Transformers travesty from producer-director Michael Bay, is not bad enough to be a cult hoot. It's merely a compendium of many of the worst features of Hollywood commercialism, of which Bay is a shining example of wanton wastefulness of massive funds and mighty technical skills.

Stephen Spielberg's association with the Hasbro toymaker's mindless franchise, as its lead producer (through Dreamworks), demeans a director who used to have creative skills and artistry as well as money-making ambitions.

Any franchise that features an actor as stunted in physique and talent as Shia LaBeouf to portray its lead human character is obviously designed to be a live-action cartoon. LaBeouf, who once again shouts, screeches and kvetches tediously, has the charisma of a half-defrosted chicken corpse.

His adolescent unattractiveness was partly excusable the first time round (in 2007) when his parents were introduced. They are a stereotypical pair of hicks presumably intended to appeal to male movie-going US teenagers' hatred of loud-mouthed, pushy and stupid parents. The third time round, when they and LaBeouf are still pretending that he's teen-aged, their fake affability and crude jokes are as funny as suppurating warts. It is not surprising that LaBeouf never thinks about them after shooing them out of Chicago before the bad machine aliens invade it.

Bay has never treated women characters with delicacy either. Megan Fox's derriere and luscious lips have been replaced by an English model's ultra-long legs and lips that may be puff pieces for Botox. She is an inadequate actress, starring (like a plastic lamp might) in her first movie because she'd previously worked with Bay on his advertising films for Victoria's Secret, which employed her as its lead model. Other models have made acceptable transitions to film sets, but this woman's facial resemblance to Cameron Diaz was no guarantee that she could match that super-model's acting ability and charisma. She can't even disguise her English accent.

It's amazing that Sino-Americans have not yet mounted street demos protesting the portrayal of a bespectacled, nerdish, cliche-ridden Chinese rocket scientist as a despicably risible lavatorial idiot. There is also a ludicrous Germanic character, with a lousy accent, camp gestures and vacant expression.

A handful of normally good actors must have been paid good money to squander their talents as other cardboard figures propping up pathetic storylines. John Malkovich, John Turturro (masochistically returning to the franchise) and Frances McDormand might have provided light comic relief if they had been given dialogue and antics worthy of raising a smile, even a simper.

Which leads us to the principal cause of the movie's awfulness: the one credited writer, Ehren Kruger. He shared a Razzie for Worst Writing with the two co-contributors of the second (2009) Transformers screenplay, and can look forward to winning it all by himself for his latest effort. His movie career began in 1999 with the screenplay for Arlington Road, and has gone downhill ever since (most disappointingly for what he single-handedly wrote for Terry Gilliam's dire The Brothers Grimm).

It's troubling to ponder how talents as mediocre as his and Bay's get employed by Hollywood power-brokers. Bay made his mark as a director of fast-paced commercials and music videos, learned some dark arts of Hollywood with mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and is clearly now an experienced impresario of sound and visual effects. Some critics claim that his usage of 3D cameras for this film is as skilled as James Cameron's pioneering work with them on Avatar. That's a small justification for churning out clunking cinematic garbage in which automotive monsters are indistinguishable CGI cartoon figures, humans are characterless caricatures, and overloud surroundsound comprises grossly irrelevant song tracks, funereal choruses, mechanical drumming and mind-numbing explosions.

Bad enough to despise, not good enough to guffaw at, it's a movie that insults its audiences and helps to perpetuate their belief that Hollywood is sick at heart and in its communal brain.

Cars that ate Paris

Peter Weir's first feature film, as for other young Australasian directors of his generation, was a comedy horror. The Cars That Ate Paris, severely cut and given a narrative, was eventually screened in the US as The Cars That Eat People.

Weir co-wrote the screenplay about an isolated rural Australian town, Paris, whose inhabitants survive on the loot of automobile wrecks they engineer. Any crash survivors are lobotomised into "veggies" of specified degrees of incapacity, and hospitalised or adopted by the community. It was divided into two factions: the town's pious elders, led by their autocratic pipe-smoking Mayor (John Crocodile Dundee Meillon), versus anarchic youths who re-jig wrecked cars as hot-rod stunt cars adorned with snarling shark features or porcupine quills.

When a simple-minded visitor, the surviving brother in an auto accident, stays in town, his recollection of flashing lights on the lane approaching the town worries the Mayor. Rather than have the young man lobotomised by the local hospital's eager experimental surgeon, he adopts the lad and appoints him as the town's Parking Officer. This would be credible if the anti-heroic character were played by a young actor, but the production chose an old-faced balding Maltese-Australian newcomer. He detracts from Meillon's finely-balanced portrayal of well-intentioned menace and paternalism.

Meanwhile, the town's semi-zombie scavengers are looking forward to their fancy-dress Pioneers Ball. The auto-racers plan their Car Gymkhana, but the ritual burning of one of their leader's car provokes an assault on the Ball-goers. In the resulting fracas, the simpleton regains his ability to drive, slams a car repeatedly into the young hooligan leader, and drives off into the night sky. The mayor stands alone, his townsfolk fleeing on foot.

In history as in mythology, coastal communities did lure passing ships to destruction or desert bands and village inns pillaged travellers: Weir's storyline adapted the idea as a light satire of contemporary Australian mores. It was the first Aussie movie invited to the Cannes film festival, and Weir's career later blossomed in more admirable directions.

The movie was a debut too for twin producers Hal and Jim McElroy (Hal working alone since 1992, creating, writing and producing many long-running Australian TV series). They also produced Weir's next three features (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously). Weir's occasional artfully framed shots, wry humour, concentration on actors' features and teasingly slow editing were signs of cinematic talents that developed well; the movie itself is a slight period piece.

Last days of disco

Whatever happened to Kate Beckinsale? The simplest answer is that she met and married (in 2004) Len Wiseman, an American arts department props assistant who wrote and directed the vampired melodrama Underworld (2003), in which she starred.

That profitable franchise is her main claim to fame and fortunes. They'd seemed unlikely goals after her 2001 starring role, alongside Ben Affleck, in Michael Bay's lambasted Pearl Harbor. She found her niche though, following Underworld with a similar horror fantasy, Van Helsing. Back in 1998, though, the former Oxford University student's Hollywood future looked bright after she gained a lead role in The Last Days of Disco, a satirical review of the disco era's Studio 54 heydays.

It was the third movie in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by Harvard graduate writer-director Whit Stillman, following Metropolitan (1990; Oscar-nominated screenplay) and Barcelona (1994). Fin de siecle comedies of manners about the "upper haute bourgeoisie", they told tales of WASP Harvard sons and Hampshire daughters experiencing life at the rich end, courtesy of parental grants and posh college degrees.

The Disco episode focuses on two young women working as a book publisher's readers, seeking success (associate editorship, to start) and suitable love (or acceptable sex) in New York in the early 80s, when gaining entry to fashionable disco-dancing nightclubs was the social be-all and end-all. Beckinsale plays the viciously bitchy, and socially needy, aggressive brunette, an unlikely room-mate for a more intellectual novice man-chasing blond (Chloe Sevigny).

Despite a shared behavioural trait of being unpleasantly honest (ie gauche and rude) about other people's foibles and inadequacies, the pair of brittle quasi-feminists meet, romance, swap and lose Harvard graduates of varying intelligence and desirability, including a disco assistant manager who dispenses with unwanted girlfriends by claiming sudden self-awareness of latent homosexuality. There's also an assistant district attorney with a history of mental problems, a publishing workmate with attitude problems, a third beautiful room-mate, bouncers and a nightclub operator with attitude problems, and an advertising agency man whose middle-aged clients want to go night-clubbing.

Stillman probably derived his acerbic dialogue from observation at Studio 54 and similar '80s social institutions (where Beckinsale's character enthuses about social grouping well before Facebook was a sexual glimmer in a later generation of Harvard men's minds). This was the era of Yuppies.

Their disco scene seems too well-dressed, body languages too well-groomed, the dance music too decorous, compared to the West Coast's disco scene of harder drugs and profuse sweat. The disco world of NY Yuppies showcased self-centred social poise, with a restrained volume of the music enabling conversation and snidery, enunciated with a self-conscious preciousness that looks and sounds silly and dated in Stillman's dialogue (cringefully in an attempt to deconstruct the Lady and the Tramp socio-economically).

*****

After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman has a fourth feature in post-production. Beckinsale is at work on another Underworld, while her husband's directing her in an adaptation of a Philip Dick short story (starring Colin Farrell).

Sunset limited

If he lives long enough, American novelist Cormac McCarthy may win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Movie audiences first heard his scathing comments on US society and human evil in 1977, when his screenplay, The Gardener's Son, was part of a PBS TV docu-drama series. Since then, three of his novels have been adapted for the cinema. All the Pretty Horses (2000) starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, was directed by actor Billy Bob Thornton. No Country for Old Men (2007), adapted by the Coen Brothers, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, won Best Picture and three other Oscars; and The Road (2009), starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by John Hillcoat.

McCarthy doesn't create easy reading, and the second of his two stage plays, The Sunset Limited, was an intensely disturbing discussion of life, faith, humanity and death by two contrasting middle-aged male characters, a Born-again killer (Mr Black) and a suicidal university professor (Mr White). The latter jumped in front of the Sunset Limited express train and fell into the arms of Mr Black, who took him back to his slumland rooms in order to lead him to God. Inevitably, in such a fable, Mr White undermines Mr Black's faith in himself and his religion, leaving the African-American with the thought that Mr White is a Professor of Darkness.

Tommy Lee Jones chose to star in and direct its TV presentation for HBO, joining macho acting forces with Samuel L Jackson. Theirs is a bravado partnership, their conversation well paced and neatly spliced.

Male two-handers can be fine star vehicles, and there have been smarter efforts, such as those presented by Robbins and Freeman (much of Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption), Fassbender and Cunningham (central part of The Hunger) and Polanski and Depardieu (much of Tornatore's A Pure Formality). Total two-handers work best on stage or TV, and this is a worthwhile showcase for the talents of two mesmerising actors and a provocative author.

Barney's version

Hungarian-born Uruguay-raised Canadian producer Robert Lantos boasts a fascinating track record of more than 30 movies since 1977. His second feature was an adaptation of the best-selling Hungarian novel In Praise of Older Women, filmed in Quebec. Canada's most successful indie producer, Lantos took 12 years to get his latest literary endeavour onto the screen: Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version.

Published in 1997, it was the Montrealer's final novel. He died in 2001, after a busy life crafting books, newspaper columns and socio-political controversies. Some critics saw his Barney, a larger-than-life Montreal Jew coping with untimely passion, irksome relatives and ageing, as a self-portrait. Much of Richler's writing was inspired by his upbringing, and debutant screenplaywright Michael Konyves captures the bitter-sweet community spirit of Anglophone Jewish Montrealers, a minority within a minority in the province.

Barney belongs to a further minority, of working-class Jews scorned by the city's upper class of Jewish "old money". His father is a lovably gauche cop (Dustin Hoffman contributing a delicately rowdy cameo that doesn't chew Giamatti's scenery), while the uncle who employs him is an embarrassingly abrupt Zionist squeezing funds for Israel. Barney runs the uncle's TV production company ("Totally Unnecessary Productions"), churning out soap operas, and one wonders why rich snobs allow their Master's Degree-holding daughter to marry Barney, and why she chose him in the first place.

Minnie Driver provides grotesquely convincing images of a bossy Jewish princess, and it's easy to imagine why Barney falls hopelessly in love with beautifully clever Miriam Grant at his painfully funny wedding party. It's never stated that she is also Jewish, and the role of perfect womanhood is a gift for English actress Rosamund Pike, whose shimmering eyes express a thousand words her dialogue doesn't include. Why she chooses babyish Barney is also a mystery to behold. He has neither the wit or charm of Woody Allen's equally egocentric characters.

It's easier to see why Jews would scorn Richler's writings and shun the movie. No anti-Semite would be allowed to create such enchantingly despicable, stereotypically Jewish personalities. To some, this movie may be hurtful satire that could only have been produced by Canadians. Barney is a much cruder and crueller version of Portnoy, and Irish-Italian Giamatti looks and acts the part of Barney well, winning the 2011 Best Comedy Actor Golden Globe (yes, the competition was slim that year).

Producer Lantos (and co-producers including his son Ari) have so far earned only a teeny fraction of the movie's $30 million budget at the North American box office. He does have the respect of his adopted homeland's top film directors: five of them took bit parts, and another Canadian talent, Richard C. Lewis (a CSI writer-director for seven years) directed the movie with stylish pace.

Admirably, the production left Barney in his native Montreal and made no attempt to Americanise the plot or its characters in order to satisfy audiences south of the Canadian border. Other members of the cast are also home-produced Canadian talents: UK-born Scott (Underworld) Speedman, German-born Saul Rubinek, and Quebecers Bruce Greenwood and Anna Hopkins. Although Jake Hoffman (son of Dustin) takes the role of Barney's son (very ably), this movie is mostly a very likeable advert for Canadian cinema.

Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms, a member of America's Office TV comedy series, moved into feature films as a member of the Hangover team of comic buffoons. That led to leading co-stardom in Cedar Rapids. He's followed a path trod by other bumbling, physically unattractive TV funny faces, such as Ferrell and Carrell, appealing to audiences that enjoy laughing at middle-aged male bumpkins thrown out of their depth to land on happy endings.

Apple Pie for retarded adolescents, this strange American genre of comic male bonding can be simple, mildly-foul-mouthed entertainment, and Cedar Rapids starts out as a cut above the mindless norm. There are some witty almost Wilder-esque one-liners, amusing female characters, and an ensemble of good lead actors clearly having fun as stereotypical small-town insurance salesmen.

Writer Phil Johnston had previously created two short comedy films (2004-5) and a TV comedy (Ghosts/Aliens, 2010). He had good fortune (or an excellent agent) for his first movie feature, gaining experienced production duo Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. The proven masters of commercial light satire (Citizen Ruth, Sideways, Election, About Schmidt) pooled production funds with Helms himself, and hired experienced comedy director Miguel Arteta (Star Maps, Chuck and Buck, Good Girl, Youth in Revolt) to get comic flow.

Audiences in America's Mid-Western states may find the script an insult to their intelligences. Helms is a gullible naif who's never flown in an aeroplane or stayed in a hotel, and has a weekly sexual encounter with his former primary school teacher and dominatrix (Sigourney Weaver, wearing bossy facial lines with comic pride). Suddenly ordered to attend a regional convention by his domineering boss, Helms must share a hotel room with a responsible straight-laced black delegate (Isiah The Wire Whitlock Jr), who quotes from The Wire. The third room-mate thrust on them is outrageously foul-mouthed extrovert non-conformist John C Reilly, a cad with a heart of gold.

The trio interact well, as roles and actors, and the meeting between Helms and his first "African-American" is a non-pc minefield the screenplay pirouettes through delicately. The obligatory introduction of a female partner for their inevitable mayhem is made dramatically convincing by Anne Heche as a married delegate who lets her down once a year in Cedar Rapids.

Satirical moments, pillorying fake corporate bonhomie, social hypocrisy, insurance company ethics and sanctimonious crooks, decorate the first hour, while a Jill-in-the-Box local prostitute keeps popping up with a promise of a comic plot development. Amazing Race corporate-bonding set-pieces are handled neatly, to create the plausible setting for Helms to find love and passion with Heche, and the evil regional overlord is set up well for a fall from grace.

Then the storyboard went flabby, or the movie's producers insisted on inserting gratuitous violence, dirty jokes and language, racial and sexual slights, silly episodes of incompetent corruption, and a bunch of scripted end-credit "out-takes". The last of them suggests that a sequel might feature the lead foursome as a comic insurance office. Only by an act of gods.

True grit

The Coen brothers, renowned for offbeat indie movies, are not averse to working on mainstream remakes of classic period pieces. They and Tom Hanks clearly had fun reworking (and failing to outshine) the British comedy thriller, The Ladykillers, and the brothers' latest commercial gig is True Grit.

The new version of John Wayne's Oscar-winner should have been a smooth-riding vehicle for Jeff Bridges, a natural casting choice for Wayne's role as garrulous, one-eyed, drunkard Marshall Rooster Cogburn. Instead, the Coens focused on newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, playing self-assertive Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl determined to avenge the shooting death of her father by a bandit.

Josh Brolin is wasted in that role, seen in a few scenes at the end. The story's only other key role is the Texas Ranger who joins the girl and her marshal. Matt Damon seems not so much out of his depth as pushed into the shallows by the production; his role's personality should be a stronger contrast to that of the marshal. Instead, Damon dead-pans, downplays his character's territorial arrogance, and shows little body language. There's more panache in Roger Deakins' long-distance landscape cinematography.

The Coens may have wanted to let the story speak for itself, but the interactions between the characters seem dreadfully, non-dramatically, tediously under-stated. Apart from them, though, the Coens' usual ability to elicit forceful supporting cameos is delightfully clear.

The original novel by Charles Portis was a teasing portrayal of Wild West conventions, simultaneously glorifying and satirising them. It was an incredible tale of an insufferably pious girl learning the facts of adulthood, not Life. She naively pursues her father's killer into Indian territory, accompanied unwillingly by a pair of contrasting old-style lawmen, gains retribution and falls into a life-threatening snake pit. With the book, readers are left to wonder whether adult Mattie, rich and religious and lonely, has invented much of her wild western story.

The Coens toned down the girl's self-righteous arrogance, but they rightly kept the book's display of artfully well-mannered and long-winded 19th-Century English-language usage. That helps, as in the book, to portray all the characters as belonging to an era that looked and sounded very different to modern America. Portis mocked and admired his characters; the Coens seem tired and not amused by them, making this audience member tire of the poorly-paced movie well before it ended.

Steinfeld, a Californian of Filipino descent, was the same age as Mattie when she made the movie (her first feature after a few shorts and TV appearances). Her reported fee of US$100,000 was a bargain for a leading role in a low-budget ($38 million) movie that grossed a quarter of a billion (and still counting) for producers Rudin, Spielberg and the Coens. The young actress surely boosted word-of-mouth recommendations, and she gained a slew of deserved nominations and awards. Her next role is supposedly stellar: she's been signed for a re-make of Romeo and Juliet rewritten by the UK's prolific peer of upper-class sitcoms, Julian Fellowes. Her co-star is not yet cast, making the project a doubly iffy choice for the budding star.

X-men: first class

It will be no tragedy if X-Men: First Class doesn't make enough bucks to spawn the expected next two parts of a second trilogy. The major plus factor for failure would be the release from multi-year franchise servitude of four good actors and a director with great potential.

If a franchise extension does occur, it will in large part be the result of their efforts. When a block-buster action-adventure fantasy employs such top talents, it does improve its chances. The original trilogy gained much from using a pair of top-rank English thespians as its father-figure-superpower lead actors, Patrick Stewart (wheelchair-bound smiling goody Professor Xavier) and Ian McKellen (evil-minded metallic Magneto); former mutant buddies who were leaders of opposing mutant forces.

They've been replaced in the prequel by two younger British star talents, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Their major breakthrough roles were, respectively, the fawn in the first Narnia movie, and an Irish revolutionary in Hunger. Since then, both have been busy at home and in Hollywood, McAvoy as a thinking man's Hugh Grant and Fassbender as a likely candidate to be the next James Bond. If they aren't stuck with spells in X-Men biannualquels, they could be making a few more films that better utilise their strong talents. They may need to grow into their roles. McAvoy, looking too youthful to be an alpha leader, channels Stewart's supercilious smile (without the repressed menace); Fassbender looks too much older and doesn't yet have McKellen's tone of impish nastiness.

It's also regrettable to foresee constraints on movie-making time for another fast-developing English actor, Nicholas Hoult. Outstanding as a child actor (About the Boy), teenage TV star (Skins) and Hollywood import (A Single Man), he'll be trapped for a few years in the guise of hairy Beast, just as Hugh Jackman lost time (and gained big money) as Wolverine. Sadly for the American film industry, one star talent who'll also lose chances to be cast in meatier roles is Jennifer Lawrence. Her lead role in Winter's Bone brought her more than 30 award nominations (including Oscar and Golden Globe); she's now wasted as the blue-toned Raven (aka Mystique) on Magneto's team.

Developing a well-known brand-name with an above-average track record at the box-office, the producers could afford to take risks by using such actors little-known in the US market. They saved money too by employing Michael Vaughan, a British director whose only previous major feature was Kick-Ass, a comic fantasy featuring super-powered kids. He maintains a steady pace while assembling and balancing plot contrivances that introduce the many characters, through flashbacks recording how and why the opposing forces gathered (side-stepping to eliminate uncredited Jackman's Wolverine pseudo-comically). The stage has been set, competently, for the next franchise instalments.

The sole major American player is Kevin Bacon, happily emoting as the Nazi medical experimentalist who engineered the young Magneto's inborn mutant flair for controlling metal masses. Bacon's good, but this franchise has never rivalled the ability of others to create joyfully complex villains that are Hollywood gifts to actors like Dafoe and Molina (in Spiderman) and Hackman (Superman).

Disappointingly, the movie's special effects were not too special, particularly a laughable levitated submarine and a final beach scene that looked like a flimsy tribute to Lost. There are better curtsies to cinematic cliches from Cold War and Holocaust genres to Star Trek and James Bond.

After watching the clumsy inter-mingling of X-Men fiction and actual newsreel from the Cuba missile crisis, many younger viewers may believe that mutants did save the world from nuclear disaster then.