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Last night was Action Movie Night at the Braeburn Condos theater. We had nine in attendance: Tony, Jake, Ryan, Chris B, Derek, Andy, Daniel, Shobhit, and myself.
It was Andy's choice for the movie this week. I almost always check
the complete movie list to see what the current chooser's past choices have been—to say Andy's history has been hit and miss would be an understatement, from great movies (
Super;
1917) to truly terrible ones (such as his last choice,
Orgazmo). And this week's choice fell squarely into the latter category: the 1986 animated film
The Transformers: The Movie.
This movie was even worse than
Orgazmo. And I certainly didn't expect anything like it, based on the clues we all had been given: the decade in which it was released (1980s), and the fact that
Orson Welles had a part in it. Granted, had I been more proficient at movie history, I'd have known the wild factoid that
The Transformers: The Movie was Welles's final film role, which he finished working on only five days before he died in 1985. But, if you
don't know that, hearding that Orson Welles was in it does not immediately make you think of an animated kids' movie. This is the guy who made
Citizen Kane, regarded by critics for decades as the greatest film ever made. It would seem this guy's prestige wanted by the end of his life.
Neither Shobhit or I liked this movie at all. He straight up slept through at least half of it. I nodded off more than once myself, and I spent a fair amount of time looking at the IMDb trivial page for this movie just to keep myself engaged (this was how I learned the aforementioned fact about it being Welles's final role). I've seen some genuinely terrible movies at Action Movie Night, and while I'm not sure I could say this was the worst, I think it would be in serious contention for the bottom five. It's just overstuffed with action, an incomprehensible plot, and an animation style that has never done it for me. Nothing about it whatsoever compelled me, and it's so busy that my eyes basically glazed over within five minutes.
It was fascinating to hear Andy talk about it before we started it, though, while we were all still eating out in the kitchen—and we still didn't know what it was going to be. The rule at Action Movie Night has always been that we don't know the movie until it starts playing, but one allowance the group allows is the revelation of the decade in which it was released, and sometimes the genre. The genre was never mentioned before the movie last night, but instead, Andy revealed that Orson Welles was in it.
He also said that he last watched it about 15 years ago, and at the time, he watched it
three times in a row. I made the mistake of thinking that must mean it's a pretty compelling movie, whatever it was. He said that as soon as he finished it the first time, he immediately went back and watched it with the director and voice actor commentaries. And after that he watched it without the commentaries once again. This film is 84 minutes long, so that means he spent four hours and 12 minutes solid with
The Transformers: The Movie. I don't even know what to make of that. It's just . . . wild.
He even told us that after seeing it the first time, he thought:
That was . . . something. But then he watched it two more times. I would not have made that choice.
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Now, I know there are many people, particularly adult men, with a special nostalgia for The Transformers, having watched the cartoons religiously as boys. I am in the exact same age bracket as these guys, and I even watched some of those cartoons, but they were never especially important to me. I never saw the animated motion picture when it came out in the eighties.
I do understand that a lot of these guys love the Michael Bay live-action films, their wild stupidity and egregious lack of continuity notwithstanding, for the very same reason. When the original live-action
Transformers came out in 2007, I
truly hated it. I gave that movie a D+, and rated it
the worst I saw that year. Even now I would say this awful animated film was still better, albeit not by a wide margin: I have Michael Bay's
Transformers a single star on Letterboxd, and gave this animated film—which was clearly a massive influence on the Michael Bay films—one and a half stars.
The next person who gets to choose is Chris B, and his history is much better. Some haven't been great, but none have been terrible, and some
have been great. I missed his last choice because it was on my birthday, but it was a truly great one:
Children of Men. The next one is scheduled for November 26, though, which is the day before Thanksgiving. I imagine it will still happen, but probably very sparsely attended. I see no reason why Shobhit and I wouldn't go, though.
Anyway, Shobhit and I brought spring rolls from Costco. These always go over well. There's enough left that I'll also have them for dinner tonight, before I go to a movie with Laney. Two medium pizzas were also brought, one of them vegetarian—but covered in brussells sprouts and artichokes, neither of which are my favorite. I took one bite of the slice Shobhit took and couldn't take any more. I did go an unusual route and just took a can of Zevia soda as my drink rather than my usual cocktail, as we made chai before going downstairs. This was in a futile attempt at mitigating having already eaten too much: I had a veggie burrito from the Merchandising pantry fridge for lunch yesterday
before leftovers from the quarterly Board meeting were set out, and how could I resist margherita focaccia pizza? Get real! And there were also raspberry cobbler bars.
Shobhit loves to blame my weight gain on alcohol when it happens after I've been drinking, but I had no alcohol yesterday. I was still up 2.3 lbs this morning. Having a cocktail would have hardly made a difference, but whatever. The chai was delicious and probably enjoyed more than a cocktail would have been anyway.
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[posted 12:31pm]
