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“Transformers: Dark of the Moon”: An American summer-movie masterwork

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:01:00 +0000

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is too much in every direction -- too much action, too much plot, too much noise, too much destruction -- which is exactly what makes it the Wagnerian fulfillment of the American summer-movie tradition. It's a great and terrible film, in identical proportions and in all possible meanings of those words. It's got battling giant robots and hidden secrets of the American and Soviet space programs and feeble domestic comedy and random scenery-chewing shtick from an A-list supporting cast and an extreme close-up of a hot chick's bikini-clad bottom as she climbs the stairs. In 3-D! It's so massively and excessively vulgar that it doesn't just flirt with self-parody, but chews it up and spits it out, and I'm not even sure that's unintentional. In food terms, "Dark of the Moon" is like going to TGI Friday's and ordering everything on the menu and then going to Krispy Kreme and doing it again. It's not worth doing, it'll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad, but as a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

Pop Torn: 10 pieces of culture we’re feeling iffy about

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:01:00 +0000

Another week over, and we're this much closer to spring. What a joyous time of floods, tsunamis and 24/7 Charlie Sheen coverage. Amid all this chaos, we found the 10 pieces of news that struck both a good and bad chord in our pop culture psyche.

1. Johnny Knoxville up for the role of Moe in a "Three Stooges" remake: We're sure some people are going to scream sacrilege, but honestly that man has put his body through so much trauma that a couple of fingers in the eye would be a cake (in the face) walk.

2. "Robocop" gets a reboot: Is this our consolation prize for not being given a Robocop statue?

3. Jon Cryer's "It gets better" video for trolls: Way to be up on the LOLZ, Jon, but we still don't forgive you for turning Ducky into a sidekick for Charlie Sheen.

Megan Fox sexes up domestic violence in Eminem’s video

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:20:00 +0000

It's here. The music video for Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie" featuring Rihanna has arrived, which means I can stop speculating about the potential impact of using a sex symbol like Megan Fox to act out a narrative about domestic violence and actually watch the damn thing (and then resume speculation).

The video, which premiered last night on MTV, stars Fox and Dominic Monaghan (of Hobbit fame) as her tortured, tattooed lover. She's the first one to get violent, after he comes home late at night with a girl's number scrawled on his hand. (Shades here of the rumors that just such an encounter was what "set off" poor Chris Brown.) She hits and screams and clocks him real good. He explodes, slams her against a wall and punches right next to her head. Then they begin furiously making out. It's hot, hot, hot. The intensity! The push-pull! Fox's pillowy lips!

But then, in another vignette, he goes up to a dude she's talking to in a bar and decks him with a beer bottle and pounds his face in. There are more make-outs, screaming, crying, an apology teddy bear, a mirror is punched in. Throughout, there are clips of Fox playing with fire, literally, and the video climaxes with the both of them, and their home, bursting into flames. Get it, kids? Play with fire and you'll get burned.

Hottie Megan Fox and ex-”90210″ star Brian Austin Green get hitched

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Considering how quickly celeb-watchers and gossip-mongers jump on every word that comes out of Megan Fox's mouth (whether it's slamming her director or talking about her bisexuality) it's a stunner that she managed to marry her longtime boyfriend Brian Austin Green without anyone catching on for, like, 4 days. The couple just announced their re-engagement earlier this month, promptly lost the ring on the beach, and it looks like they just decided to pull the trigger while on vacation in Hawaii, screw the planning and prepping and stress. Some would say Green was finally locking that s*#t down.

“Jonah Hex”: Hard-boiled heavy-metal idiocy

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:01:00 +0000

It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. "Jonah Hex" is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness. As the eponymous undead ex-Confederate drifter, Brolin has a grotesquely scarred face that makes him dribble whiskey like a toddler drinking cranapple juice, a hooker girlfriend (Fox) with a spray-on tan and an impressively corseted wasp waist, and an ability to reanimate the dead temporarily, mostly just to torture them.

Don't get me wrong; those are the good-silly things about "Jonah Hex." Director Jimmy Hayward, whose only previous film was the bastardized Hollywood version of Dr. Seuss' "Horton Hears a Who," turns the long-running DC Comics saga -- which began as the story of an Eastwood-esque Western loner, before venturing into quasi-spiritual weirdness -- into a complete stereotype of what movies made for the ADHD/gamer-addict population are like. (The screenplay was written by a two-man team that calls itself simply "Neveldine & Taylor," perhaps hoping that the next time they go up for a big movie gig they can claim to be the other guys named Neveldine and Taylor.)

Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green engaged again

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:46:00 +0000

Megan Fox is engaged to longtime boyfriend Brian Austin Green again, People, E! and MTV report. The "Transformers" and "Jonah Hex" star has been dating the former "Beverly Hills, 90210" actor on-and-off since 2004. They were previously betrothed in 2006 but broke it off in early 2009.

Green proposed to Fox on June 1 in Hawaii with a 2-carat rock from Excalibur in Beverly Hills. In the flurry of excitement and déjà vu, they dropped the ring in the sand and lost it. D'oh. Lesson for all couples: Hang onto the ring after a broken engagement, because if you get re-engaged in the future, you may need it as a backup.

Fox, 24, is 12 years younger than the 36-year-old Green and has spoken in the past about her preference for older men. "Boys in their 20s are a waste of time," she once told Elle. "They have nothing to offer conversationally. They're immature. I feel like I have a better shot with someone in his 30s."

Best of luck to the couple, and to the treasure hunters with metal detectors scanning Hawaii beaches.

The naked opportunism of “Jennifer’s Body”

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:18:00 +0000

If "Jennifer's Body" were either entertaining or ultimately had a point, it would have a good enough reason for existing. Even if its star, the bodaciously built Megan Fox, were sexy in anything but a plastic way, you could make an argument for it as gore-fest eye candy. But "Jennifer's Body" -- directed by Karyn Kusama, from a script by Diablo Cody -- is so contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice. I can't remember the last time I saw such a naked display of opportunism and exploitation at the movies -- and when I use the word "exploitation," I don't mean the good, old-fashioned grindhouse kind, but the "Let's make a buck by pretending to be transgressive" kind, the kind that really makes you feel dirty.

Diablo Cody, overexposed

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:13:00 +0000

“Jennifer’s Body” hasn’t even opened yet, but the chick filmmaker fatigue has already set in. And no one bears the brunt of our collective fascination and disdain more than Diablo Cody.

Cody, the “Candy Girl” memoirist, EW columnist, Oscar-winning “Juno” screenwriter, “United States of Tara” co-creator, and most famous ex-stripper in America, is inescapable lately – especially if you read "The New York Times."

Perhaps you read about her in last week’s story on women and horror movies. Or how she and her fellow lady writers roll – and just as significantly, what they wear – in last spring’s Styles section. Or maybe you saw her mentioned in today’s story on the prominence of women at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. To illustrate how far the fair sex has progressed, “Times” writer Michael Cieply started the story noting Cody’s bikini girl tattoo.

“I don’t kill people. I kill boys“

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Twentieth-Century Fox

Megan Fox in "Jennifer's Body."

During my largely vain efforts to escape the totalitarian cultural hegemony of That Lady and That Dead Guy -- I haven't yet seen a video of Sarah Palin moonwalking or the "Thriller" video mashed up with her campaign appearances, but that's only because I haven't looked -- I have found the perfect antidote, a long, cool drink of Stygian pop-culture brew that will drive Jacko and Hockey Mom from your consciousness. Admittedly, the name Diablo Cody fills me with a mixture of admiration, exasperation and terror, and the only thing I know about Megan Fox is that she represents the hot apogee of hottie hotness in a movie I will never see. Yet their potent and perverse union in the upcoming teen-horror vehicle "Jennifer's Body" (set for September release) fills me with enormous yearning.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:20:00 +0000

"He's here -- I smell him." That's a line from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," but funnily enough, it's also what I think every time I sit down to watch a Michael Bay movie. As you can probably guess from the title, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is the sequel to Bay's hugely successful 2007 "Transformers," and it's roughly more of the same -- and yet less. "Revenge of the Fallen" picks up two years after Sam Witwicky (the perpetually clueless-looking Shia LaBeouf) and the Autobots have saved the human race from the Decepticons. Don't clutter your head with worrying about exactly what this means: Bay and his screenwriters, Ehren Kruger and Roberto Orci, sure didn't. All you need to know is that the Autobots are good and the Decepticons are bad; both are humanoid robots that can fold themselves up into various vehicles and other mechanical objects. (This is a movie franchise based on a toy, after all -- a credit line at the beginning tells us it's being presented in association with Hasbro.)