As in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor and the other Transformers, Bay once again shoots the works and tries to blow the house down, and he often does. But there‘s a change. The first two Transformers were, for me, too heavily weighted toward the action scenes, with the all-out carnage laced all the way through and consuming them from the start. Those movies, especially Revenge of the Fallen, didn’t spend much time on character or dialogue, even on bad character and dialogue, and they relied on LaBeouf’s boyish looks of distracted concern to try to pump in some humanity.
　
Transformers: Dark of the Moon was written by Ehren Kruger, who was also one of the culprits responsible for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — but who has ably scripted other action moves from John Frankenheimer’s late-career thriller Reindeer Games on. (Yes, I’ve heard the story about the Frankenheimer-Bay connection.)
 
As written by Kruger, the new show has a fairly simple obvious story. But at least it’s a story. And it has mostly caricatures instead of characters. But we spend more time with them, and they’re sometimes engaging or lively, and there are a lot of them, often played by very good actors, like the Coen Brothers-ish ensemble of Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and John Turturro. Most of those actors seem to be enjoying themselves, maybe only in contemplation of the huge compensation waiting for them, but also perhaps because it’s fun to tear a big important city apart in a movie.
 
Bay’s Dark is hipped on destruction and sometimes madly irreverent: At one point, Bay and Kruger have bad robot Megatron blow up the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial and then clamber up on Lincoln‘s chair, in a scene that actually made me queasy. Throughout Dark of the Moon, mostly in its third act, people fall out of skyscraper windows, trigger mass explosions, and otherwise behave as if the world were some kind of mad playground for pathological toys and children.
 
The surprise is that Bay and Kruger have actually, this time out, taken so much more time and effort with the non-action sequences. I‘m not saying these are great (or even, most of the time, good) comic and dramatic scenes. But they help the movie strike more of a balance, with Bay downloading most of the slambang stuff to that last near-hour of nonstop Chicago havoc.
 
Dark of the Moon is loaded with backstory too, even if you haven’t seen the other movies. Bay and Kruger add a cameo for JFK, suggesting that the robot wars have part of their roots in a covered-up incident back in the ‘60s involving mysterious doings on the dark side of the moon, with the whole space program actually (it says here) instigated by JFK to discover what was up over there.
 
And the new movie reintroduces us to a lot of old characters: La Beouf as our hero Sam Witwicky (who has helped save the world twice and still can’t get a job better than the mail room), Sam’s new girlfriend Carly (played by British supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, apparently after the series’ original hottie, Megan Fox, got too candid about the series), those ever-ready soldiers Lt Col. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson), and the electric FBI guy Seymour Simmons (Turturro, doing a Nic Cage-ish turn).
 
New ones too. Malkovich sneering it up as Sam‘s snobby employer Bruce Brazos; Ken Jeong doing another politically incorrect gig as Brazos’ toilet-obsessed director of research and development Jerry Wang (old wine in an old bottle for Jeong by now, but at least they didn’t call him Jerry Schlong), Patrick Dempsey as Sam’s smug romantic rival Dylan Gould, and McDormand as national intelligence chief Charlotte Mearing — an utterly thankless role. There are also walk-ons by astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Fox News tantrum-tosser Bill O‘Relly as themselves. Aldrin is there to lend credibility to the conspiracy theory and O’Reilly is there to blow his top about the autobots. Less convincing are the computer recreations of JFK and Tricky Dick Nixon, who are there for exposition.
 
You’ll notice that there are a lot of characters; the cast list has a lot more. And I haven‘t even started naming the robots: a heavy metal Hasbro gang that includes Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, Leonard Nimoy (no less) as Sentinel Prime, Hugo Weaving as the villainous Megatron, James Remar as Sideswipe, Frank Welker as Shockwave, Keith Szrarbajka as Laserbreak, and Timothy Spall as Oilchange. (No, just kidding.)
 
Not usually singled out, but certainly deserving of it here, are the artists and technicians who made this movie pop: special effects supervisor John Frazier, visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar, production designer Nigel Phelps, animation supervisor Scott Benza and stunt co-odinator Ken Bates. The 3D, touted as an improvement, is a little brighter than usual, and the depth of field a little better used. (Stuff keeps flying at the cameras, including, as many critics have noted, Ms. Huntington-Whiteley’s derriere.)
 
All this is just to suggest that the new Transformers, while definitely flawed (it’s too loud, too frantically edited) doesn’t necessarily signal the End of Cinema as We Know It, or a Horrible New Trend Which, If Left Unchecked, will Turn All Our Minds into Mush.
 
In fact, Bay by now has such a highly recognizable and distinct visual and editing style — and even a kind of catalogue of themes (catastrophe, friendship, romantic rivalry, imprisonment, technology and its dangers) — that you might justly describe him as more than a high tech expert: maybe a pop auteur without honor. That’s obviously part of the way he sees himself; he’s helped put two of his movies, The Rock and Armageddon, out in classy Criterion editions.
 
Bay’s movies tend to blend annoying excess with extraordinary technical skill, and that may be a big part of what annoys the people who treat him as a cinematic Antichrist: the contrast between his obvious talent and the obnoxious uses (and scripts) to which he often applies it. Some day in the future, I suspect, Bay may win over at least some of the buffs ad movie pundits who keep relentlessly bashing him now. But it won’t be for a movie like this. More likely, it’ll be for something smaller, less effects-heavy, more intimate (that wouldn’t be hard) — and not in 3D.
　

Dark of the Moon, alienating as it may be to some, is still an impressive pieces of movie technology, and easily the best of the three Transformers movies. Admittedly, that’s not saying all that much. But I’d be lying if I said that a lot of it didn’t entertain me. I’d also be lying if I said that, even after three movies, I could keep all those robots straight all the time.
 
A lot of the movie was obnoxious, too loud and incoherent. But so is the evening news. Maybe you can defend this movie, and Bay movies in general, sort of, by saying that they reflect our obnoxious, overloud, incoherent times — and the obnoxious, overloud, incoherent people who often, annoyingly enough, run them and comment on them. Admittedly, that way lies madness. And, as Sentinel Prime/Spock observes: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” (True, I guess, sometimes….at least when you’re compiling box office reports.)

Bad Teacher (One and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Jake Kasdan, 2011 

Seen any good movies lately?

Good movies? Not really. But I saw a bad movie last Wednesday. I mean, a really bad movie. This movie was sooooo bad….

How bad was it?…

So bad that they put “bad” in the actual title! Like they were proud of it. Bad Teacher!

Oh yeah? What’s it about?

Well, it’s hard to say. It’s about the teaching profession, I guess. And it’s about….about deviant behavior. It’s about getting high and screwing everybody’s brains out and screwing up on your job, and lying and cheating and treating people like shit…It’s about being reaalllly bad.

A message movie, huh?

Not exactly. Unless the message of the movie was “Fuck you.” You see, these two guys from “The Office” – Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg — decided they wanted to make this show, their first feature movie, and they got….

Two guys from the office? Which office? The one down the hall? The guy that’s always playing AC/DC?

No, not the office, our office. Two guys from “The Office“: the TV show “The Office.” You know, that TV series we stole from Ricky Gervais and the Brits, with Steve Carell as the schnook boss Michael, and John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer and Rainn Wilson. That Office…

Don’t yell. I know. Funny show.

Stupnitsky and Eisenberg: They’re like executive producers, and they’re also a writing team, they wrote about 15 Offices, and, for their first feature movie as co-screenwriters they got his idea: Put Cameron Diaz in another version of Bad Santa…

Cameron Diaz? Bad Santa? Cameron Diaz plays Santa Claus? Christ, what a lousy idea! Who wants to see Cameron Diaz in a Santa Claus suit, for God’s sake? An elf suit maybe. A very small elf suit. Or maybe a sprig of mistletoe.

No, not Cameron Diaz as Bad Santa. Cameron Diaz as “Elizabeth Halsey” in a Bad Santa kind of movie. Actually it’s called Bad Teacher, like I told you — if you were listening, you schmuck. And she plays this blonde English teacher with a face like a depraved angel and a body that could burn down the school, and she lies and swears and steals and gets drunk and smokes pot and screws guys’ brains out and makes her students cheat on tests. She does every awful thing you can possibly think of (not that I think smoking pot or screwing is awful) except volunteer for the Newt Gingrich campaign.

Why?

Why what?

Why is she so bad? Lousy childhood? Abuse? Too much booze and weed? Revenge against some principal that screwed her over? Rebelling against the whole fucked-up educational administration?

No. No reason, nothing particular. She’s just bad. She‘s a total bitch who does awful things. And always gets away with it.

Who’ll want to watch that?

What do you mean, who wants to watch it? Because it’s Cameron Diaz, for Christ’s sake, you moron. Haven’t you ever heard of femme fatales? I bet you want to watch it already, you banana-brain. I bet that, after I leave, you run right out and try to catch an afternoon show, just so you can see the scene where Cameron wears short shorts at a car wash and rubs down the windshield.

It’s a comedy, so she does all these bad things and we laugh just like we laughed at Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa and Jack Black in The School of Rock. Or anyway, we’re supposed to laugh. They’ve got screwing scenes and humongous titties at the tit doctor’s office and she dry-humps this one wishy-washy candy ass teacher named Scott Delacorte played by Justin Timberlake and another doofus, Russell the gym teacher (but he’s less of a putz), played by Jason Segel, the I Love You, Man guy.

And there’s this other jealous teacher who hates Elizabeth, Amy Squirrel, played by that actress who was the hooker in that Woody Allen movie, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. You know….

Lucy Punch.

Yeah, Lucy Punch. And Phyllis Smith, from The Office; she‘s in it. And John Michael Higgins plays this idiot achool superintendent, Wally Snur, who has this thing about dolphins….

Does she screw him? The superintendent I mean: Snur.

You know, I don’t remember! It all begins to run together in my mind after a while, like goulash. I don’t know, maybe she does, and maybe he starts crying about dolphins and can’t do it…

Who directed it?

Jake Kasdan. You know: Lawrence Kasdan’s son.

Did he do a good job?

I guess so. I mean it was bad. So maybe it was good.

Ed Wood Jr. bad or Richard Pryor bad?

Both. Either. Hell, I don’t know.

Well I gotta admit, that sounds like pretty hot movie. How did they get it past the MPAA? Somebody there love dolphins? Cameron doesn’t do any hanky-panky with her students, does she?

No, but they have this one Tea and Sympathy kind of scene where she whips off her black bra and gives it to this one loser kid so he can run around waving it front of all his friends and he won’t be a loser any more. But that’s the good side of Elizabeth Halsey, the sympathetic side that wants to help. You know: “Years from now, when you’re talking about this, and you will, be kind.”

Deborah Kerr. Hot stuff. Great redhead.  So, Cameron has her good side. In the end, she’s really a good teacher?

No, she‘s a terrible teacher. She comes into class hung over, insults her students, throws on a DVD of Stand and Deliver, and takes a snooze..

So what are you telling me? You mean she just sleeps through the entire movie, or the entire class, and we get to watch Stand and Deliver again?

Actually, at one point, she decides to help her students raise money having car washes (you remember?) and by helping them study “To Kill a Mockingbird” — the book, not the movie — and win a state achievement test contest…

Ah! So she does turn into a good teacher at the end….

No. She’s just doing it so she can steal the money and use it for a boob-enhancement operation.

Hmmmm. And this is funny? You laughed at this when you saw it?

Well, not exactly. I mean I didn’t exactly laugh. But I knew when I was supposed to laugh. I could see where the laughs might come; I could see what was supposed to be funny. ..

And what about the audience you were with? Did they laugh? I mean, did they genuinely, honestly laugh?

Well, quietly maybe. Every once in a while. And one time, there was one guy that cheered.

Which scene?

The bra scene.

I bet that was you.

(Brief silence.) Nah. You know something? I think maybe the problem with this movie was that there was this awful lead character, and she was surrounded by awful or stupid people, and they didn’t develop the kids any, so there was nobody who wasn‘t a sort of a slime or a schnook or an idiot or a kind of bad person too, except for Phyllis Smith as Elizabeth’s pal, and she doesn’t do a lot. Nobody else to suggest the world isn’t a pile of crap. So the movie becomes almost like right wing propaganda. You can’t criticize crap, or even make funny jokes about it very well if you don’t have a reference point. You just begin to drown in it.

So you’re saying watching this movie was like drowning in crap? I know some critics who would say that means it’s maybe a masterpiece.

What can you say? What’s bad is good, and what’s good is bad, I guess. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Hmm. Deep, deep. Yeah. Well, you told me it was bad. What can you do? You know I hate to say it. But this sounds like one of those movies the Brits can do better. They’re good at this kind of thing. They write this good-bad stuff better. Even though we did Bad Santa. But that was Terry Zwigoff. Outsider.

You’re right. I mean: You’re bad.

Richard Pryor bad? Or Ed Wood, Jr. bad? Or The Producers bad?

Richard Pryor bad.

I’m bad. I’m bad. Anyway, I heard about this other comedy idea that’s making the rounds. Bad Congressman. For Ben Stiller. They even got cameos written for Weiner and Newt.

Is it good? I mean, is it bad?

Is it bad? It’s a catastrophe.

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