"NOTHING'S GONNA STAND IN OUR WAY!!! NOT TONIGHT!!"

I haven't posted in awhile.  So here we go...

HOLY SHIT!!!  NEW TRAILER OUT IN ASS-KICKING QUICKTIME!!!  CLICK HERE FOR NEW "TRANSFORMERS" TRAILER!!!!

This is pretty cool.  Again, I am not expecting an eye-opening, introspective, wonderfully well-written movie here.  But I was at the very least expecting a decent action flick. 

This trailer looks like the movie's going to give me just that.

This trailer comes after months of listening to all these "holier than thou" Transformers gurus plaguing the net with any and every kind of hubris one can spout with regards to a geek-fetish.

Again, I've been a Transformers fan since I was three, but I'm not going to start ranting about oh Michael Bay fucked with a legacy!  Oh the designs for Jazz are totally not in-character!

Give me a fucking break.

I have made peace with this fact eons ago; adaptation is the sincerest form of treachery.  The moment someone takes the product of ONE medium, and transfigures it for ANOTHER medium you're going to lose a lot of ground and gain a lot of expectations.

Examples, you ask?  I've got plenty...

- I loved Jurassic Park the movie (in my defense, I was a ten-year-old dinosaur expert), the book...not so much.  But I still liked the book.

- I liked the Casshern anime, the movie...sucked.
- I liked V: For Vendetta the movie, the comic...I liked just as much.

The thing is, adapting is never going to be the same thing as translating.  People expect too much from entertainment sometimes. 

The book is the book. 
The movie is the movie.
The board game is the board game.
And so forth...

Respect the entities for whatever medium they reside in.  DO NOT expect the two to intermingle in the way you expect them to.

If Jurassic Park was the same as the book...we'd have a pretty shitty movie about DNA with some dinosaurs showing up from time to time.  But the filmmakers were smart enough to boil down the essence of that story to the exact core and present it as such.  We end up with an entertaining movie--the lawyer gets eaten off the toilet!--and an entertaining book.

Casshern was a VERY silly anime from the 70's.  If the producers fo the movie followed the anime directly, I'm quite sure no one would be talking about the movie now, would they?  The movie kept a few essentials from the series (namely robots) and upped it for a more modern outlook--I'm quite sure retro Casshern would understand that no one would want to see a laser-bending pajama-wearing superhero in this new millenium.

V: For Vendetta cut out all the fat of the graphic novel and kept the soul of the story.  Again, if it was exactly like the Alan Moore graphic novel, we'd have a movie that went on...and on...and on...and then when it was done, we'd have to go back and watch it three more times just to understand what the fuck it all just meant.  I wound up liking both, and I saw the movie after I read the book.

I was going somewhere with this...........ah...right.  The point is, when a producer/editor/studio throws something at you that is based off of something you already know, don't be abrasive.  Check it out.

Who knows?  Maybe the adaptation will see eye-to-eye with what you pictured in your head.  Hell, maybe Michael Bay has something in this flick that I was probably thinking about.

I'm gonna go see this when it comes out.  What do all of you folks think?

-JE