Transformers: Age of Extinction

(Michael Bay, 2014, USA)

At first, it seems like Michael Bay might have grown up – or, at least, grown more self-conscious. Barely ten minutes into the fourth entry in the much-reviled director’s Transformers franchise, a background character (specifically, the owner of a old rundown movie house) waxes nostalgically on the state of contemporary cinema. “Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap,” he states deridingly, before referring to a worn poster of Howard Hawks’ 1966 Western El Dorado, starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and asserting, “I liked this one.” It’s ironic for a few reasons; the most obscure of which is that El Dorado is essentially a remake of Hawks’ earlier Rio Bravo, and the most obvious, of course, being that Bay is one of the prime facilitators of modern movies’ crappiness. This brief moment of self-reflexive filmmaking engenders an entire array of questions. After the vicious satire of last year’s Pain & Gain, has Bay finally embraced his inner Jean-Luc Godard and begun openly mocking himself? Is Transformers: Age of Extinction poised to become a classic of meta-cinema, alongside Man with a Movie Camera, Persona, and Funny Games? Has the director’s entire oeuvre been one, elongated joke?

Top Ten Tuesday: Comedy Sequels

In our era of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings, the franchise sequel still reigns supreme. For all the hype surrounding the redos of Godzilla or RoboCop, it pales it comparison to the excitement generated by the latest installment in an established sci-fi, fantasy, or comic-book series. But sequels are not limited to just B-movie genres; indeed, this weekend, follow-ups to two of the most popular comedies of the decade are scheduled for release: the animated adventure How to Train You Dragon 2 and the cop actioner 22 Jump Street. Though it may seem strange for two high-profile sequels of this nature to come out the same day, the audience overlap between them is likely to be minimal; the former will attract children and families, while the latter will draw in young adults and some sneaking-in teens. Comedy sequels, for both animated and non-animated movies alike, are something of a mixed bag commercially – for every The Hangover Part II there’s a Happy Feet Two – and critically they almost never seem to live up to the hilarity of the first one. Nonetheless, for this Top Ten Tuesday, I decide to try and assemble a list of my favourite comedic follow-ups, as daunting a task as that turned out to be (there’s really not a lot of good ones). On that ominous note, I present my ten favourite comedy sequels:

Top Ten Tuesday: Disaster Flicks

With the upcoming release of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii (in 3D!) this weekend, I decided to take this opportunity to discuss some of my favourite disaster flicks. This genre has proved very popular over cinema’s history, peaking in the 1970s with the commercial success of films such as Airport, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno; this latter movie was especially well-received, as it was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. After a brief lull throughout the 1980s, brought on by the success of genre spoof Airplane!, the disaster film returned with a vengeance in the ’90s, climaxing with the incredible box office returns and eleven Oscar wins of James Cameron’s Titanic. The genre has since remained fairly popular, with costly flops balanced out by enormous hits, but seems to be entering another waning period, with only a handful of high-grossing success stories; in fact, most disaster flicks these days are relegated to specialty TV channels, with increasingly ridiculous titles like Birdemic, Sharknado and the upcoming Airplane vs. Volcano. Whatever the pedigree, though, the template has always stayed relatively the same: large ensemble casts, high-concept catastrophes, and life-or-death stakes.

One final note before I reveal my top ten: I decided to focus only on natural disasters and not those of the man-made or extra-terrestrial variety. While some of the disasters in these movies are eventually revealed to be caused by human actions or interference, they all manifest in nature to begin with.