Field Trip City

I watched Michael Bay's Transformers today for the first time, and was a little non-plussed about it until the last 20 minutes or so. Bay's movies are so easy to spot, containing, as they do: shallow characters, soundtracks packed with infinite trumpets, and of course, people running in slow motion toward the camera. I was watching the film and said to Jay: "you can tell this is a Michael Bay film. All it needs is people running in slow motion." And sure enough, ten minutes later, the last piece of the formula was in place.

Now, I wasn't the biggest fan of Transformers when I was a kid (I actually found the cartoon rather dull). But it was still really cool that they tapped Peter Cullen for the voice of Optimus Prime, and there were some equally cool throwbacks to the era. That said, for the love of god, I want to see transforming robots beating the hell out of each other, not endless scenes cushioned with lame dialogue attempting to bring humanity to characters in a movie about transforming robots. You know what they should have done? They should have done the first half of the movie on Cybertron, and the second half on Earth, dropping all of the inane human backstories. Maybe they'll smarten up for the inevitable sequel.

I also watched Dr. Strangelove with Jay, and worked a bit on my Opera presentation using Google Docs. My group has been using the document manager to hash out a script that we can table-read on Wednesday. So far it's coming together fairly well.

Updated To-Do List:

Friday, November 30th: Bibliographical description exercise - Bibliography
Monday, December 3rd: Presentation on Death in Venice - Opera
Tuesday, December 4th: Presentation on final project - Touch of Evil
Monday, December 10th: Final research paper (max. 15 pages) - Opera
Monday, December 10th: Editorial exercise - Bibliography
Monday, December 10th: Critical reflection paper - Bibliography
Friday, December 14th: Final project - Touch of Evil
Monday, January 7th: Final research paper (max. 14 pages) - African-Canadian Lit