A Q&A with Conan O’Brien: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
About writing for The Simpsons.10 July 2007
09 July 2007
Transformers
Transformers is a straight action movie, and in being an action movie it succeeds wonderfully. Certainly the script could have benefited from some more work. Hot computer hacker girl and her wise-cracking black friend eat up too much screen time while not advancing the story whatsoever. John Turturro’s government agent character is simply lame. There are too many cheesy lines. They say “more than meets the eye” twice. But robots blow each other up. The action is just perfect. Big, loud, exciting.
It isn’t the cartoon you watched as a kid. It’s just not, and don’t expect it to be. A few of the robots have enough of a resemblance to the original that it’s still Transformers, but it is an action movie version of that cartoon, not an adaptation of it. In this regard I think Michael Bay was right in making the robots look more alien and less like the original characters. It removes them a bit from needing to be what they were in the cartoon.
There’s a cliché in monster movies where Godzilla shows up, the army comes in and fires its useless weapons, and then the scientists find a way to stop him. Transformers, not terribly subtly, turns this around. The film opens in Iraq with a Decepticon blowing away an army base. Josh Duhamel and his squad escape and, by the climax, get to blow up their own Decepticon. It’s like Michael Bay is saying, “Hey America, I know it’s depressing that we can’t win in Iraq, but our military still kicks ass! They can blow up Transformers!” In fact, one of the key climactic Transformer-on-Transformer battles happens off-screen while Josh Duhamel and his squad get to do the ass-kicking.
In the hands of a better director the movie could have been a deconstruction of monster movies and 80s nostalgia. Instead Bay blows shit up, and does it spectacularly. I’d have loved it to have been smarter, but wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice any of the wall-to-wall carnage for it.
Tags:
film,
transformers
08 July 2007
Kotaku Design
Pardon me for a moment of design criticism. Kotaku, along with the rest of the Gawker webring, redesigned its website recently, and it’s pretty messy. Footer information now sits to the right of the main article, but it’s not lined up in any way with the other column. Headlines extend past the main content article, hanging off to the right awkwardly over the new column. If a post has a picture to go with it, the picture floats to the left of the headline, pushing it even further to the side. There are also some new mini-posts that are appear to be just links, but they’re de-emphasized so much in the design that my eyes skipped over them for the first few days. I didn’t let that kind of sloppy layout go to print in my high school newspaper. Gawker’s sites get millions of views a month.
Charlie's Diary: Unpacking the Zeitgeist
Great stuff. How would you explain gold farming spamming in World of Warcraft to someone thirty years ago? Really does sound like a lame science fiction novel.
Tags:
culture,
games,
internet,
scifi,
technology,
worldofwarcraft
07 July 2007
06 July 2007
Cable companies blame CableCARD for coming rate hike
This kind of crap makes me want to just start using iTunes for all my TV and avoid the cable companies.
05 July 2007
Kitchen Confidential
Part of the great tradition of great shows that Fox canceled, Kitchen Confidential is now out on DVD. Here’s a link to its page in Netflix for easy queueing. I’ve watched disc one over the last few days, and it really was a funny show that just didn’t get a shot. It got hit with the Arrested Development reverse halo effect. Both were broadcast on the same night, in an hour-long block of under-appreciated shows that no one watched and Fox inexplicably hated.
Tags:
kitchenconfidential,
tv
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