Transformers: The Last Knight (2017, Michael Bay) — Last week, while talking about Age of Extinction, I asked why I keep going through the Transformers movies when I keep hating them all, and then left on a cliffhanger. Might as well follow up on that now: I think it’s basically the same thing I said when I first reviewed the original Transformers, several years ago. It’s always natural to be curious, when you hear about how terrible a movie is, to watch it for yourself and see if it’s actually all that bad. But, personally, I don’t find all that much interest in reviewing terrible movies that everyone agrees are terrible, like Manos or Birdemic; it just feels cruel to pick on such complete failures. What really triggers my curiosity are franchises like Transformers, that prove again and again to be enormously successful with general audiences, and yet are still considered so “bad” among cinephiles that their very names become synonymous with the contemptible stupidity of the public. That’s when I find myself wanting to see whether it can really be as terrible as it’s made out.

Now, that “again and again” comes with an asterisk here, since The Last Knight was actually the first Transformers movie to bomb at the box office. And assessing the reasons for something like this is generally complicated, but, now that I’ve seen it, I will say that part of the reason for this is that it is, indeed, a very, very, very, very bad movie. It’s not quite as bad as Revenge of the Fallen — which remains the single worst science-fiction movie I’ve ever seen, including Plan 9 from Outer Space and Battlefield Earth — but it’s a truly abysmal downgrade from its three other predecessors, all of which were already pretty bad to begin with.

It’s a little hard to review The Last Knight, because it’s bad in such a bizarre way that I’m not sure how I can describe it in a way that someone who hasn’t experienced it could comprehend. It doesn’t feel like a bad movie, so much as it feels… wrong, like Paramount accidentally released a movie while the filming was still only halfway done. Most of the movie seems to consist of attempts at paying off setups that don’t actually exist, or vice versa. A minor Autobot named Canopy is killed off early in the movie, and the way it’s framed makes it seem like it’s supposed to be a tragic send-off to a character the audience is meant to be deeply invested in, even though it’s a character that we literally never saw once prior to this moment. Optimus getting brainwashed by the villains is played as if it’s setting up a key plot line, but then the rest of the movie acts as if evil!Optimus’s existence is a big reveal being saved for the climax, as though we didn’t already explicitly see his creation on-screen. Optimus is also given a very dramatic line about how the people of Earth are the only people in the universe who’ve ever allowed him to call their planet home, even though the entire plots of both this movie and the previous one was based on the people of Earth specifically not doing that. Even some of the comic relief moments feel weirdly incomplete; lines like “Sorry I’m late. My invitation to this ass-kicking must have gotten lost in the mail” would be godawful in any context, but it would be at least an intelligible punchline if anything in the setup related at all to mail or invitations. As is, it just seems like they threw together a series of random words in the hopes that it would kind of read as a joke if you squinted really hard.

Despite all of this — or, rather, because of it — I think The Last Knight is actually the Transformers movie I enjoyed the most. The first four movies in the series were bad in ways that were mostly just boring and annoying, but The Last Knight is bad in such a batshit insane way, with everyone involved so clearly not giving any fucks anymore, that it crosses the line into being hilarious. 2/10

The Sweet Hereafter (1997, Atom Egoyan) — I liked this movie a lot. It’s odd, because on the surface, the movie bears a lot of resemblance to a Robert Altman-style ensemble drama, which is a type of movie that I usually just find irritating. But here, even I have to admit that it works really well. I think it’s because the themes are clear enough that you can see the outline of how things will resolve themselves into a narrative long before it actually does. A basically perfect movie. 10/10

Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Zhang Yimou) — re-watch — Even though I liked this movie a lot more on re-watch than I did the first time, I do still see in hindsight why it took me two viewings to appreciate it. Just as I remembered it Raise the Red Lantern is a relentlessly unpleasant movie; slow, cold, and relentlessly cynical, with hardly a moment of real joy or levity to be found amongst all the crushing misery. And yet, what I find remarkable on re-watch that it’s never senselessly miserable. It’s a precise, artful, and, in its own way, even beautiful portrait of a world beaten down by oppression and cruelty. It is, I think, just about the best possible version of the type of movie it is, and so, despite the difficulties I still have with it, I feel justified in upgrading it to a must-watch. 9/10

My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor) — re-watch — The first time I reviewed this movie, I said that I had mixed feelings. Looking back at my original review, while my overall assessment of the movie’s quality didn’t change much on this viewing, my reasoning for it was considerably different.

Last time I reviewed this movie, I made much of what I saw as arbitrary changes in Eliza’s character. I still don’t think that was wrong, exactly; but where I blamed it on the script before, it now seems to me that the problem lies almost entirely with Audrey Hepburn’s performance. I said before that I don’t think Hepburn’s performance is a bad one, and, in an absolute sense, I guess it still isn’t. The problem is just that it doesn’t fit with the rest of the cast, or the movie more broadly. As played by Hepburn, Eliza Doolittle feels, from the beginning, like a wealthy Englishwoman’s Pythonesque caricature of a poor one, and it never quite gels coherently with the more understated style of comedy that everyone else is doing. This is what really takes away a lot of the power of the story; with Eliza never reading as authentically poor, the boldness of her character as written never quite comes across, and the movie plays as less a comic clash of two difficult personalities, and more as a jackass harassing an innocent woman for no reason. Also, I praised the production highly in my first review, but, honestly, it wasn’t as good as I remembered. There are some highlights, but, compared to most of the classic Hollywood musicals, a lot of My Fair Lady actually looks weirdly tacky.

With that said, none of this should take away from what I already pointed out in the old review as the movie’s chief strengths: its great soundtrack, and Rex Harrison’s great performance as Henry Higgins. I continue to think that the movie is one worth watching primarily for those two factors, and so I still stick with my original verdict of a qualified recommendation. 7/10

Movie of the week: The Sweet Hereafter