Actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley attends the "Transformers 3" European premiere on June 25, 2011 in Berlin, Germany.
Grab some popcorn! NewsFeed’s Glen Levy brings you the movies you should check out (or avoid) this weekend.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
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The third movie in the franchise based on action figures by Hasbro has a title that sounds like something Pink Floyd would release. Does this mean that director Michael Bay is getting all prog-rock on us? And what happens if you play The Wizard of Oz at the same time as this week’s blockbuster? Granted, that’s an inside joke only the over-35’s are going to appreciate, but the question still needs to be asked. The short answer is: don’t hold your breath.
The kindest remark that critics seem to be coming up with in regard to Transformers: Dark of the Moon is that it’s not as bad as the previous effort, 2009’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. But that’s hardly a startling claim when Bay himself has essentially disowned it (“The real fault with [Transformers 2] is that it ran into a mystical world. When I look back at it, that was crap,” he told Empire magazine).
The plot is history once again repeating as Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) gets caught up in one of those unseemly spats between the Autobots (the good guys) and the Decepticons (not so much). Hilariously, we discover that Buzz Aldrin brought back a Transformer weapon from the Moon – well, why not? – which those Decepticons intend to use, not just to colonize this planet but revitalize their own (ah, that old double whammy). Sam and his new girlfriend (the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who, quite possibly without irony, gets around the thorny issue of what happened to Megan Fox by stating, “She was a bitch. We didn’t like her”) aren’t going to take that lying down and team up with the Autobots.
Somehow, the likes of John Turturro, Frances McDormand, Patrick Dempsey, Josh Duhamel and John Malkovich have been roped in (hey, those houses don’t pay for themselves) and all that’s left to reflect on is the ridiculous running time of 154 minutes. Because when you think about it, if Stanley Kubrick can move us from the dawn of civilization to man going into space 12 minutes quicker in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there really is no justification for what’s going on here. And the only way you suspect that a fourth film won’t be in the offing is if you don’t see this one. Never mind the Autobots vs. the Decepticons: the future of humanity actually rests in your hands.
(LIST: Transformers in the Top 100 Toys of All-TIME)
Larry Crowne
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Losing one’s job seems to be all the (relative) rage at the movies right now. Ben Affleck and Tommy Lee Jones suffered the ignominy in the (much overlooked) The Company Men, Will Ferrell “does” semi-serious when it happens to him in Everything Must Go and now even Tom Hanks is suffering those slings and arrows in Larry Crowne. And while he might not be quite as bankable a star as he once was, this still seems rather harsh.
Of course it’s not real. Hanks is, as they say, acting. And he’s also directing, as Larry Crowne finds him in front of and behind the camera for the first time in 15 years, since the bright and breezy That Thing You Do! (a film so enthusiastic it was born with the exclamation point). His latest eponymous lead character, a former Navy cook turned big box retailer’s serial employee of the month, deals with being canned – or to put it another way, no longer doing the thing he did – by taking to a scooter and signing up for community college. And wouldn’t you know it, he then meets and develops a crush on his teacher, Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts, who was a similarly dominant presence as Hanks’s co-star in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War).
But Hanks also co-wrote Larry Crowne (with My Big Fat Greek Wedding‘s Nia Vardalos) and it’s clearly personal: he based the story on his own experiences at Chabot College in California, where he mixed with housewives, Vietnam vets and retirees. He’ll be hoping that all three of those demographics – and plenty more besides – turn out, all still with a hankering for Hanks.
NewsFeed’s Flicks Pick: We’ll root for Larry Crowne over Transformers, but is Tom Hanks still the King of the movies? Let’s see if the Crowne still fits.
(PHOTOS: Tom Hanks: America’s Chronicler-in-Chief)