Official Poster for Michael Bay Hate-fest 2009, aka ZOMG OPTIMUS PRIME

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has arrived in theaters, and to no one’s surprise, Michael Bay has stayed true to form and given us a loud, action-packed summer blockbuster. Also to no one’s surprise, critics have savaged his latest work: the Rotten Tomatoes aggregated review score comes in at a meager 20%. And again, to no one’s surprise, the idiot savants of the blogosphere have, as if by reflex, piled on the Bay hate and lampooned his heavy handed filmmaking techniques and lack of sophistication.

The Overthinkers are by and large of the same opinion: we see Michael Bay movies as the epitome of style over substance, cleavage over character development, and explosions over elegance. He does make a convenient whipping boy for the shortcomings of mainstream commercial cinema these days, and as such he’s been the butt of jokes on several occasions on this site.

That being said, I’d like to use this occation, the release of Bay’s latest fil…er, movie, to take a step back and examine his body of work more objectively. How bad is Michael Bay, really? And how does he compare to some of the greatest directors of our time?

As you’re probably aware, almost any effort to objectively analyze the inherently subjective nature of movie quality involves turning to the vast database of user ratings on IMDb. It’s an imperfect methodology, I know, but it’s better than nothing. This is not the time to argue the merits and meanings of the IMDb user ratings (if you’re interested in such things, you should probably check out this earlier piece of analysis on the topic). This is time to take the data we do have, fire up the Excel, and get to work.

[Note: all IMDb ratings used in this article are current as of June 29, 2009]

[This week’s edition of Overthinking Lost covers all of season one and nothing else.]

I once read that every genre of literature has, at its core, a question.  In a romance novel, for instance, the question is, “Will the protagonist find her happiness with her true love?”  It doesn’t matter that we know going into it that the answer is, and always will be, “yes.”  More important is how the question is answered.  Other genres have other overarching questions.  A mystery, at its core, will always ask, “Why did this murder occur?”  A fantasy novel will often (but not always) ask, “Will good triumph against evil?”  A children’s book will tend to ask something along the lines of, “How will this child grow up?”  These questions will not always be asked explicitly, nor will the answers always be pat and obvious.  But they are there.

Lost does not fall under any of these genres.  So, then, what genre is it?  I think we have two options.  Option one is: Lost is a postmodern ontological mystery (much like, say, Sartre’s No Exit).  Option two is: Lost is a work of science-fiction.  Or, I suppose there’s always option three: Lost is both.

So far, we have more proof that Lost is an ontological mystery.  An ontological mystery is a mystery that asks not, “Why was this person murdered?” but, “Where the hell are we?  What is this place the author set up?”  This question came up explicitly in Lost’s pilot.  Charlie said, “Guys.  Where are we?”  That is the main question of season one.  I will get to the answer, or lack thereof, to that question in a moment.

The other option, which some of you suggested in your comments on my earlier entries of this series, is that Lost is a work of science-fiction.  The strange metallic sounds mixed in with the roars coming from the island’s Monster in the season finale strongly suggests there’s sci-fi afoot.  (Yes, I’m crossing my fingers for robots.  Didn’t you read that comment I made on ShadowBanker’s zombie article?)  The major question a work of science-fiction tends to ask is, “Based on where we are now, where are we, as a species, going?”

Let’s consider the “where are we?” question first.  So, where are we?  What is the island?  Why are the characters there?  What’s the point?

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Shana Mlawski (girl!), and John Perich to overthink celebrity deaths (tastefully), celebrity deathmatches (not tastefully), Transformers and the movie critics who love to hate them, favorite Michael Bay movies, and irony (those last two are not related). They take time to mock one listener voicemail and offer a variety of thoughtful perspectives on another.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!

Download Episode 52 (MP3)

The King of Pop is dead at 50. The media circus has already started. The national crisis has assumed such dire proportions that MTV briefly reverted to showing music videos last night. Many are still in a state of shock.

How are you holding up? What are your thoughts about the man, his music, and his decisive influence on the course of global popular culture? And what’s your reaction to the full-court press in the television, internet, radio, and print media?

We had something else on deck for Think Tank today—something to do with Bon Jovi’s lyrics, as I recall. But we couldn’t let Michael Jackson’s passing go unremarked. Here, the Overthinkers share memories, favorite songs, and a sense of Michael Jackson’s cultural impact.

Belinkie

When I was six, I was obsessed with Thriller. I used to put it on my Fisher Price record player and breakdance through the entire thing. Even the slow songs. Especially the slow songs.

I don’t have anything brilliant and new to say here. Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he never had a childhood, and he spent his whole life trying to compensate for that. Yes, I’m surprised at how sad I am.

I mainly just wanted to share a video. It’s from the Free to Be television special in 1974. That would make Michael 16. The song’s called “When We Grow Up,” and the refrain is “We don’t have to change at all.” Yes, the irony is crushing, but that’s not why I’m sharing it. I just like the song.

(The girl, by the way, is Roberta Flack. This is the year after she won three Grammy’s for “Killing Me Softly.”)

Shechner

A few years back, I used to front “The Max Fünk Institut,” a funk band made up of five biology graduate students and a dude we found on Craigslist. I like to think that we were about as funky as a bunch of white Ph.D. students could possibly be, which (all of us combined) is about as funky as some of MJ’s nail clippings.

One of the highlights of our brief career as working musicians came during the gig that ultimately proved to be our last.  We were brought up to Waterville Valley, NH, to provide the evening’s entertainment for the annual retreat of the group then-called The MIT Center for Cancer Research.  An outsider might assume that this’d be about as exciting as playing for a filing cabinet, but he’d be deeply mistaken.  Remember, scientists are good at distilling, synthesizing, or growing things.  All sorts of interesting things.

But I digress.  The members of MFI suspected that this might be our last gig together, and we wanted to pull out all the stops.  Closing our first set, we’d finally tear out a cover for a song all of us had loved as kids, and only much later realized was the funkiest goddamn piece of music not to have droppoed out of P-Funk or Mr. J.B.  I’m talking, of course, about Billie Jean.

The greatest recording artist of all time and the dominant fantasy woman of two decades of American life died today, Thursday, June 25, 2009. On the way to their rest, they followed not too far behind the hero of Kung Fu, a man who himself had become enough of a mystery that a great film was built around metacasting him.

I would wish none of their three deaths on my worst enemy. These were not people who died “ripe” in the way of pre-Shakespearean Lear, surrounded by family and friends and comforted that their lives were taken neither cruelly nor too soon. For their reasons, these were ugly deaths. I will not go into further detail on them, but it bears note, because in our day of media saturation, this is a big part of their stories and what these lives, looking back, mean to all of us.

When Bea Arthur passed, I felt I lost someone I knew. As a performer, she connected with people on the level of a cogent internal and external identity. She crafted human characters in a way that reinforced our mutual humility and dignity. Performers often comfort us by shedding light on the mysteries of identity and stitching together the broken parts of our common experience. Watching Bea Arthur act, and hearing she died, made it easy to be human.

Losing Michael Jackson like this, Farrah Fawcett like this, and David Carradine like this does no such thing.

Burn Notice, for those of you without cable, follows the weekly adventures of Michael Westen, a former U.S. intelligence agent. Put on a blacklist (i.e., “burned”) by his employers, Michael got stuck in Miami with very little cash, no job history he can bank on and a globe full of enemies. To make ends meet while figuring out who burned him, and why, Michael helps people whose enemies live above the law. Think A-Team meets Miami Vice with some Bourne Identity thrown in.

Michael relies on the help of two of his most colorful friends – Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar), the ex-IRA assassin whose fondness for Michael matches her love for C-4; and Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), a retired FBI agent who prefers socializing with beach bunnies to shooting it out with drug dealers. His mother provides him with equal measures of support and stress, offering him a place to crash but also questioning him about his shady dealings. And Michael leverages favors from law enforcement, the criminal underworld or any of his “clients” to learn more about the show’s overarching mystery: who burned him and why.

This article will cover Lost season 1, episodes 0-15, focusing on episodes 8-15.  Please limit your comments to those episodes.  Thanks.

Previously.  On Overthinking Lost.

I do remember thinking a little about Lord of the Flies but more particularly that they seemed to be doing a heavy-handed “Redemption” theme. The island gave every character, in some way, what they wanted.  (Tom P.)

“No, Tom P!” I said.  “I don’t believe you.  I’m ‘not quite prepared’ to make that claim, Tom P!  I’ll wait until there’s texual evidence, Tom P.”

Ask the Lost writers and ye shall receive.  Thus:

Everyone gets a new life on this island.  (John Locke)

I just want to go back to the beginning.  (Sun)

I just wish I could start over.  (Jin)

Everyone gets a new life on this island.  I’d like to start now.  (Shannon)

Curse you, Tom P!    Fine, I give.  Maybe… you were right.  The characters on Lost seem to be begging for redemption.  While they may not be true Lockean blank slates (a.k.a. tabula rasa), they sure want to get clean slates.  Yes, “Adam and Eve” are dead on this island, but maybe, just maybe, the once-sinful Lost characters can redeem themselves and reclaim this place as a new paradise.  A Total Redemption Island, if you will, where everybody gets a happy ending and learns a good lesson along the way.  And I’m sure that’s what’s going to happen in the show.  I’m right, aren’t I?   …Guys?

I started writing this as a rebuttal of Fenzel’s “Paradise Lost at Paradise Falls.”  In the process of writing it, my thoughts have gotten a little more organized, and I’ve realized that (as usual) I don’t actually disagree with what he wrote as such.  I just have a much more cynical spin on it.  You’ll see where our readings overlap… and where they conflict. I encourage you to help us fight it out in the comments!

I do still have one major bone to pick with Fenzel, and since this is an argument on the internet, there are certain protocols that must be observed. Therefore, I will start by rephrasing his argument in the most overstated and reductive way that I possibly can, to that it’s easier for me to find fault with it.   As I understand it, Fenzel’s post boils down to this:  Up is valuable because it addresses a central part of our life experience that is largely ignored by Hollywood:  the question of how we should live once we’ve moved past the teleological process of “growing up.” He adds almost as an afterthought that in some cases people simply graft themselves onto the narrative of their children’s adolescence…   but this, to me, is strange, because it’s a rather crucial detail.  The question is not really “how should I live,” but rather “how should I live in the absence of children?” Now, maybe this is still one of the hard questions, but the film provides the easiest possible answer:   it simply rejects the questions premises, claiming that any life without children is hollow.

Bold claims!  Can I back this up?  I dunno, but I sure did spend about a thousand words trying.  And if you’re interested, you can read them!  It’s like we were made for eachother.  You complete me, internet.  You.. complete… me.

Today, we present a guest post from ShadowBanker of the excellent blog Ecocomics. As I mentioned in last week’s open thread, we’re big fans here. Along the lines of a couple of our podcast episodes, it presents simple, rational tools for understanding the hordes of undead ravaging the post-apocalyptic world looking for delicious, delicious brains. Enjoy!

Suppose that in 2010 there is a major zombie apocalypse.  Inexplicably, corpses all over the world reanimate and hunt the human race in search of fresh brains.  Now, assume that after years of struggle, the human race prevails and the zombies have been contained on the island formerly known as New Zealand.  What now?  What happens after the great zombie wars?