This week in local theaters
TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
On a high-definition TV, reduced by the miracle of chapter-skipping to a tooth-rattling 25 minutes of hot 'bot-on-'bot action, this might be my inner 5-year-old's favorite movie of all time. In a theater, taken as one long war of attrition on your nerves, cornea and fanny, it's like being waterboarded with images. (And product placement—let me breathe, Mountain Dew!) It takes two and a half hours for Michael Bay, destroyer of worlds, to tell a story two second-graders could concoct and finish in 30 seconds: Toys have a big fight. The toys have a little more personality than they had in Bay's first
Transformers movie, and the special effects get a significant upgrade, with astonishing new digital clarity—but what passes for a story consists of endless gobbledygook about power sources and hieroglyphics and Egyptology, the sort of bilge for which Wiimotes come equipped with a skip function. Worse, it's been outfitted with smutty gags, graphic violence and foul language that will keep it off-base for young kids who revere the cartoons and action figures. What's genuinely offensive is Bay's indiscriminate appetite for destruction, which salivates without distinction whether the targets are overgrown Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots or hundreds of drowned officers in a way-cool shipwreck. The movie's menageries of sheet-metal panthers and razor-thin searchbots are indeed remarkable applications of artistry, if to no other purpose than to fly off the shelves at Target. But for all the state-of-the-art hardware on display, only one piece of technology could transform this into a good movie: a fast-forward button. (Now playing) JIM RIDLEY
AWAY WE GO
The first original screenplay by hipster lit-world phenom Dave Eggers is, much like his 2001 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a lot of long-winded talk about not very much. The black hole that is Eggers' navel here takes the form of Burt (John Krasinski), a 33-year-old salesman with a pregnant girlfriend, Verona (Maya Rudolph), and a lot of uncertainty about his station in life. As Away We Go opens, Burt and Verona have put down tenuous roots in Colorado to be close to his parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara). Then the folks announce that—surprise!—they're moving to Europe, and our young parents-to-be take to the highway in turn, searching for a more meaningful existence, visiting friends and relatives in far-flung locales, and vicariously trying their lives on for size. Sam Mendes directed Away We Go during a post-production furlough from Revolutionary Road, and like that film, this one offers a portrait of a (generally happier) young couple trying to find their place in the world. But whereas the Wheelers of Revolutionary Road had grand designs for themselves, the road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever—which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. (Opens Friday) SCOTT FOUNDAS
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