mBay: he’s after your money

In Transformers, Michael Bay’s touching comedy about masturbation and the adolescent, a soldier trying to phone the Pentagon is intercepted by an Indian call center agent. ‘I need your credit card number,’ says the overeducated, underpaid billing droid, picking his nose with disdain. Meanwhile, an equally lethal battlebot shivers into the sand across the Arabian Sea.

Out of the darkness comes a voice that is deeper still. It makes Barry White sound like a countertenor… the only way to match its median sound level would be to blow up a trombone factory…

In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art…

… a passerby exclaims in the midst of the film, “This is easily a hundred times cooler than Armageddon!” To be proud of your achievement is one thing, but to plant film critics inside your movie and review it favorably as you go along: that takes genius…

… if you really want to know what Transformers feels like, think of a hundred-and-thirty-five-minute, hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar retread of Herbie Goes Bananas. [Link]

The movie is big, dumb and buckets of fun. Bay, the patron saint of blowing shit up, is better at it than Al Qaeda. Keep your eyes peeled for visual references to Gremlins, Armageddon and King Kong.

In Pixar’s visually lavish Ratatouille, an evil successor is out to undo the work of famed Parisian chef Auguste Gusteau. He brings in a marketer who wants to plaster Gusteau’s name across cheap frozen burritos. The marketer, François, is a parody of a desi wheeler-dealer, perhaps with an eye towards distributing the merchandise at Kwik-E-Marts.

Anton Ego, the food critic with a skull-shaped typewriter and coffin-shaped office, gets his comeuppance. It’s kinder than the fate of the film critic in Lady in the Water. Bizarrely, unlike every other character, the good guys have American accents.

I’m not sure who they’re casting in these movies (second genners? non-desi voice actors?), but their Indian English is completely wonky.