I do care about a pattern of racist behavior that has continued from the first Transformers film. Now the racism, and sexism, is back.
Dr Boyce: Yes, The Transformers Movie Was Quite Racist, by Dr. Boyce Watkins, PhD, BV Black Spin.
Harry says TRANSFORMERS 2 is foul mouthed, racist & misogynistic! It also runs an hour too long!, Ain't It Cool News.
Jive-talking twin Transformers raise race issues, AP.
Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They're forced to acknowledge that they can't read. One has a gold tooth.
How does a car have a gold tooth? And why does reading come up in a film about cars?
Actor Reno Wilson, who is black, voices Mudflap. Tom Kenny, the white actor behind SpongeBob SquarePants, voices Skids.Wilson said Wednesday that he never imagined viewers might consider the twins to be racial caricatures. When he took the role, he was told that the alien robots learned about human culture through the Web and that the twins were "wannabe gangster types."
Gangster types like
Michael Corleone or
Tony Montana? No?
"It's an alien who uploaded information from the Internet and put together the conglomeration and formed this cadence, way of speaking and body language that was accumulated over X amount of years of information and that's what came out," the 40-year-old actor said. "If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that."
It's not fair to assume the characters are black, he said.
"It could easily be a Transformer that uploaded Kevin Federline data," Wilson said. "They were just like posers to me."
Kenny did not respond to an interview request Wednesday.
Way to cash that check, Mr. Wilson.
[Director Michael Bay] brushes off any whiff of controversy.
"Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything," he said. "It's like is everything going to be melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes."
If the racism wasn't bad enough, the sexism makes me physically ill:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review, by Tara Meacham, Associated Content. Emphases mine.
You might have noticed that this Transformers film not only contains some poignant stereotypes of black people, but also that the movie is loaded with women. Most of them have fake boobs, push-up bras, and exist solely for the purpose of being sexualized in one way or another on a college campus. If they're not such women, they might be one of a few others—like the protagonist's mom, a typical empty nest middle-aged white woman ridiculed for wanting to have sex with her husband and stupid enough to purchase pot brownies without knowing what they are.
[ . . . ]
There is also Fox's character, Mikaela Banes, a female capable of fixing bikes and hot-wiring cars. She chooses not to go to college because she isn't a bimbo like all of the women that go there (because obviously college is not for smart people or women who think education might help them in life). She stays home to take care of her dad and mind the bike shop while Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) goes off to school on the East Coast.
She does other useful things, such as: run around in slow motion for a full five minutes at the end of the movie after taking off a protective layer of clothing in the desert, land her face on another male character's crotch, open her mouth a lot, appear with inconsistent amounts of collagen in her lips, flash her underwear while getting changed in the front yard, and attempt to be compared to Xena. Her secondary objective seems to be tagging along to help her boyfriend save the world; her primary objective involves getting him to say the L word and keep him away from fem-bots with anal probes.
Fox has a few key scenes in the film. In Egypt, she randomly dons a scarf over her mouth for a moment, because clearly the stereotypically fundamentalist Muslims all around would have been horrified at the sight of her uncovered mouth when her boobs could hardly be contained.
However, Fox does not play the most interesting female character in the film. That task falls to an unnamed female student in an astronomy class. Her job is to pick up a discarded, half-eaten, tossed-on-the-floor apple upon the command of the professor, who tells her to eat it. This degrading display is so horrific that I can't even be sarcastic about it.
Kudos to all involved. The
Transformers franchise is now the front runner for the newly coined
Rogen/
Apatow Award for Excellence in Perpetuating White Male Privilege.
.
