With the royal wedding, the release of “Fast Five” and the debut of another trailer for the strangely titled, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the arts and life world nearly collapsed into total crapdom this weekend.
Let’s first look at the royal wedding. I’ll qualify my argument by saying that I do understand why the British lose their minds over this. The monarchy probably accounts for nearly all of Great Britain’s gross domestic product. Think about it: What do tourists do when they go to England? They stand outside Buckingham Palace and stare at it all day; that’s what they do. But why do Americans care? What’s so great about waking up at 6 a.m. to watch foreign people get married? And it’s not like the ceremony was exciting, either.
I watched highlights the next day. It was unbearable. It was 10 minutes of a wedding and more than an hour of singing. If it weren’t for the hotness of Kate Middleton, it would have been as bad as sitting through the stuffy, British adaptation of “Glee.”
I’ve heard the argument that Americans were enamored by the royal wedding simply because royalty is something we don’t have. Is that really true, though? Technically, yes, it obviously is, but in America, celebrities are virtually royalty. As much as it pains me to say, Lindsay Lohan is the American Princess Diana in terms of media frenzy. We can only hope for a better outcome for Lohan, though at this point, that’s far from guaranteed.
In other news this weekend, “Fast Five,” the fifth installment in the critically-acclaimed, artistic masterpiece of film franchise “The Fast and the Furious,” was released. The fact that this franchise has produced the profitability needed to survive its way to five films is a sad reflection of today’s society.
Before you call me pretentious, let me say I’m all for fun action flicks. I profess to enjoying films that critics have dumped on such as “Tron: Legacy,” but these car-racing films irritate me to no end. Car racing is only cool if you’re James Bond. Car racing is not cool when the cast is made up of mostly crappy action “stars.”
“Fast Five” is estimated to have made $83.6 million at the box office this weekend, according to boxofficemojo.com. Good job, America. Instead of giving $83.6 million to starving children in Africa, you gave it to a movie studio and encouraged it to continue crapping out sequels of this horrible franchise.
Another critically-lauded film franchise made news this weekend when the trailer for the third “Transformers” film was released. Now I will say I didn’t hate the first film, and I own both of the first two because they look and sound awesome on my Blu-ray setup. However, the second film met government requirements for being clinically brain-dead.
I will admit that the trailer looks cool, but we’re talking about the product of Michael Bay, a former commercial director, who has made all of his trailers look cool. The film touches on the space race of the 1960s … and then Chicago explodes. It has the potential to be harmless summer fun, but it also has the potential to send anyone that sees it back to their intelligence level at conception.
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” (again, what the hell does that even mean?) is also going to be released in 3-D. Even though Bay says this is his last “Transformers” film, this one has the chance to make $1 billion in box office because of the 3-D surcharge and will likely make the suits at the studio push for more.
Regardless of your thoughts on 3-D, we should all be happy the second “Transformers” film was not released in 3-D. Not because it would have made it a sh– ton more money than it did, but because it saved us the experience of having robot testicles swung in our face in three dimensions.
With summer on the horizon, there’s going to be a lot of this type of stuff going on. Thankfully, there will be no more royal weddings, though I wouldn’t complain if they took out that girl that isn’t as hot as Megan Fox in the new “Transformers” and replaced her with Kate Middleton. But with films like “Thor,” which currently has a 94 percent on review aggregator rottentomatoes.com, set to come out, maybe the arts and life world won’t fall into the abyss of crap after all.
