August

This &$#! Just Got Real

With the summer blockbusters overtaking the theater, August's $2 Monthly Special is our "Michael Bay-watch" section. The director of Bad Boys and Pearl Harbor has a couple distinctive traits that make his action movies stand out from the rest.

The plot has to be... how to put this mildly?... kind of dumb. This is the section that includes the movie about transforming robots from outer space that locate antique glasses on eBay, because the glasses show the location of... well, you get the idea. The race and gender relations have to be pretty backward, and nobody has a bigger crush on the military (especially special ops) than Bay. Rewriting history is another specialty: remember that a character in December of '41gets to say "I think World War II just started!"

A game could probably be made from these movies pretty easily... you could count the stripper characters, or the slow motion circle pans, or the explosions (well, maybe that's a little too easy). Catchphrases are plentiful, too, as is hardware (guns! cars!). And though it's a Bad Boys line, one of the prevalent traits of many of these movies is a dramatic shot of the main character(s) as they realize that Things Have Just Gotten Real.