Monday, July 13, 2009

More Than Meets the Eye.

Transformers went from bad to worse with the latest installment of the films that continue to ruin my fond memories of Saturday morning cartoons.

I thought part one was awful, mainly because the fight scenes looked like close ups of shopping carts being slammed together (if you can't clearly see the robots kicking each other's asses, what's the point?) but luckily they addressed those issues in Transformers 2; the fight scenes are incredible. They're shot wide enough and high enough to clearly see all the action, without looking like you're in the bad seats at a ball game. Megan Fox is still hot as fish grease, but I have no idea why she's in the film other than to run around in slow motion.



In fact, I could lose all the humans and just keep some generic army guys to fight the Decepticons. Although Julie White, as Mrs. Witwicky, did steal every scene she was in despite her character's absurdity. Oh, and Tyrese had about 8 lines with some eye rolling thrown in for good measure. Despite those shortcomings, the scenes I wish could be extracted from my brain hole featured twin robots named Mudflap and Skids.

They should have named them Mantan and Sleep n' Eat, because they were definitely coonin'. These two fools make Jar Jar Binks look like Farrakhan in comparison. They were the most blatantly racist stereotypes of Negroes I have seen in a major motion picture in my short life.

I take great offense to the fact that these characters are being used to market and promote candy, (M&Ms) toys, and who knows what else- to children. Mudflap and Skids bicker and fight with each other throughout the film and speak broken, slang riddled (I dare not say ebonics) English.

Oh yeah, and Skids has a gold tooth.

Yes, a robot with a gold tooth! In a scene where our hero needs to decipher some Autobot writing, he turns to these two clowns for assistance. Not only do they identify that they can't read, but they have no interest in learning how. Huh? In response to criticism of the characters, director, Michael Bay contends that "it's good clean fun" and he wanted to add some "personality" to the movie.

He further mentions that the characters were to represent whites trying to be black. Huh? I considered walking out of the film, but I had already given these fools my money and I wanted to see how much further this nonsense would go. I'm not at all surprised that these characters made it to film or that there has been little to no protest. Black folks still have no real control over how we're represented on screen. I don't count the Wayans brothers or Tyler Perry because they perpetuate many of these inane stereotypes themselves.

Black men are emasculated by wearing dresses and being hollow caricatures of thugs, promiscuous players, and buppies; while our women are unhappy, ungrateful, and constantly in search of validation through terrible relationships. Of course there are folks that exhibit some of these traits and are the source material for these ugly stereotypes; however, Black folks do not own the patent to foolishness.

As a byproduct of the slave economy and the racism it beget, we have never been able to truly identify ourselves, for ourselves, in a tangible way in America. The racism we indure is reflected even more by virtue of having to expose and rebut this sort of nonsense in the first place. White folks don't have to defend themselves against "trailer trash" stereotypes because those ideas are dismissed as anomalies and personal poor behavior; whereas, Black folks are identified as a whole with that nonsense.

Based on Michael Bay's comments he doesn't see anything wrong with his characters because as far as he's concerned, that's how Black people behave. I'm off my soapbox now. I had considered boycotting this film, but then I would have to boycott Medea and Meet the Browns too.

Exeunt!

7 comments:

  1. I was amazed by how much profanity the bots used lol It was horrible to actually see parents walkout of the film with their children. Megan fox was extremely hot though.

    This is D.Russian btw
    ;) Oh yeah I wanted to let you know that I ran into a random friend and she actually looks at your blog daily..It was odd because I was talking about random blogsites that I figured nobody ever heard about. So that makes you sorta famous. ;)

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  2. yeah, the profanity got on my nerves too. there was too much sex in it too.

    like the people who made this forgot that this movie was based on a cartoon that was a little bit more than a 24 minute commercial for the toys. shout out to your friend.

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  3. I thought the movie was really good with the exception of that coonery with those two robots. I felt that they should've put some more of the robots from the cartoon in there, instead of creating robots that no one has seen before. The storyline was way better than the first movie and it was a lot funnier....

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  4. I haven't seen it because....I'm a chick *blank stare*, but this was really well written...especially the part about how we're portrayed in movies.

    I kinda-sorta wanna see these gold tooth wearing bots though. I'll buy it from the mail delivery guy at work who hustles bootleg dvds, church dinners, body oils and hand bags.

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  5. I also didn't like that Devastator was a giant dog, or monkey or whatever he was.

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  6. The twins made me cringe with every word they spoke. I was so surprised that more African Americans did not have an issue with that nonsense. I will definitely use them as points of reference in discussions with my students when we talk about stereotypes of African American males.

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  7. I thank Reese @ "Sweet Insanity & Sarcasm" for directing me to your blog....

    Your review was well put.....

    Personally, I had no intention of seeing the movie myself. I haven't seen a remake of anything from my childhood yet....just don't want to spoil the memories:)

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