Was the Censorship of ‘The French Connection’ Inevitable?

Welcome back to across a movie. I’ll present it by Bulwark Plus. I’m your host Sunny Vonge, culture editor of

the Bulwark and joined as always by Alyssa Rosen the Washington Post and Peter Soudarin of Reason Magazine. Melissa, Peter, how are you today?

I’m Swell.

I am so happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up, in controversies and controversies. The French connection has been censored, and film fans are none too pleased. William Friedkin’s nineteen seventy one class which won best picture and four other trophies at the nineteen seventy two Oscars, has had a few seconds snipped from it in which Popeye Doyle, the Policeman played by Jean Hackman drops the n word in discussion with a fellow cop. The nine seconds or so of dialogue is snipped in the least artful way possible, they they basically just skip ahead in the movie. It’s like the cinematic equivalent of cutting a paragraph out of a book and just leaving the rest of the book.

Intact. There’s some question as to which corporate entity exactly cut the footage. Most have blamed Disney for the edits as Disney acquired the film and it purchased twentieth Century Fox. Though some online people have suggested that the version that is causing so much trouble now has been in circulation for a few years, meaning the trim could have come while the film was owned by twentieth Century Fox. Regardless, there are a couple of interesting things here.

Alright. Interesting thing the first. Essentially all digital copies in the United States have been edited. And I I don’t just mean those that are streaming like on the criterion channel, which I think is where this was first noticed. Drew McQueeney reported that the digital copy he purchased years ago has also been censored.

Meanwhile, a commenter at Hollywood Elsewhere noted that the version showing on turn movies has also been trimmed, while another noted that the version of the film shown at the Repertory House American Cinem Attack also had been edited, which is important. Because they were showing a DCP, a digital cinema package. All of this suggests to me it’s a licensing thing, the digital license is now officially this edited version. That’s the only one you can get in the United States digitally. And this is where I would normally tell you, to buy physical media and I would rant for for minutes on end about that, but you all know where I stand so I’ll spare you.

Interesting thing the second. Internationally, where there is presumably a different right steal for digital distribution, the uncensored version is in circulation. Which means this has only been censored for American audiences. This is obviously insane, except not not really. Let’s hike back up the slippery slope here for a second.

Alright? Because as part of the Cultural Revolution we’ve gone through these last few years, lots of well meaning people, including, I think all three of us on this show, at one point, have argued that trigger warnings, context labels, etcetera on historical pieces of art are good because they give people context for things that they find offensive. I’ve never loved this idea, but I’ve always just kind of accepted it as a compromise folks could live with. But the harshest critics of these labels on films like gone with the wind say, have I think more or less turned out to be correct. Right?

Here’s the thing. Fear an adult, you should be able to handle seeing things you find offensive and understand that different times mean different contexts, which allow for different things, and they have again, different meanings. If you need a trigger warning or a context label or whatever, to allow something like that to exist, you do not an adults’ understanding of the world. You have an a child’s understanding of the world. You see the world as a child.

You don’t understand it. And we treat children differently than we treat adults we withhold certain works from them, that they simply won’t be able to process. This is fundamentally what the fight over school libraries in Florida, and other places is about Right? What you make available to children and at what age? And obviously, lots of this goes overboard.

Some of the things that are withheld are wrong. The fighting over that line is the issue. The end result of these warnings was always going to be removal. I frankly regret giving an inch now. I regret giving that inch when I should have seen the mile that was gonna be grabbed.

Alyssa, again, I I I feel like you you have really argued strongly for labels like this for things like Here’s why what Popeye Doyle says is bad and why cops in this era are portrayed this way. Am I being overly dramatic here? Or are we seeing the first movement and a slow motion erasure of historically troubling art.

Oh, man. Okay. So this is tricky in part because I think we are it’s possible that this conversation is clumping together a diff a number of things that would be useful to separate out. A little bit. And I think what we’re seeing and again, you know, there are some details that we don’t know about the censorship of the French connection.

Is I don’t know that we were seeing like a widespread call for like popeye doyle to be censored. You know, it’s not clear that this is done sort of at the behest of a specific group or organization. It’s much more likely to be a case of sort of corporate ass covering. That is my guess. Is that your sense as well?

I mean, it’s it appears to have been a decision sort of made at the corporate level none of us know of a specific sort of pressure campaign here.

Similar to what we saw in the case of Roald Dahl, right, where the company preemptively decided we’re gonna bring in sensitivity readers and they’re gonna make the books better or, you know, some of the agatha Reirsty books, etcetera.

Right. And so I think it’s worth making the point that, you know, I don’t think there is an active community of people asking for trigger warnings who also asked for this. Right? You know, I think it’s I mean, I think it’s worth separating at this out as sort of a corporate response to broader, but more free floating public sentiment. Because I activists overreach, but it’s worth being clear about why something is happening.

Second is look, I think that broadly I am someone who is temperament, mentally inclined towards compromises in the culture wars that give people more choices and more information and let them make their own decisions. And I think I have probably been overly optimistic about the extent to which that would be satisfying to individual partisans in the culture war the extent to which corporations and even sort of private organizations are willing to do the work of tabulating and making that information available. And, you know, honestly, the extent to which individual people are willing to do that work as opposed to, you know, calling for broader censorship, regimes. And so, I don’t know that I think it’s wrong to say, you know, like, if there is a world where there is ample, incredibly detailed content labeling, and people like responsible consumers according to their own needs and preferences, that is still the world I would prefer to live in. I don’t think this is the world that we’ve got.

Right? I mean, obviously, as I’ve written, you know, we have situations where parents would rather librarians, censor libraries than like accompany their own kids to pick out books. You know, we we have situations where, you know, corporations would rather posthumously edit great works of art, then defend them, or provide people more information about which to make decisions. We obviously have a world in which people who claim to be incredibly offended about things, don’t go, for example, and like Google amply available scripts for a lot of these movies, if they’re that sensitive about stuff. So we don’t we don’t live in the world that I wish we lived in.

Instead, we live in one that is full of both a lot of outrage and laziness and, you know, sort of damaging corporate ass covering. And in this case, you know, I I don’t know that it’s fair to go out and blame activists, but it’s not good. Oh, sure.

It’s not it’s not so much that I’m blaming activists specifically, so much as the mindset that accompanies the urge to slap warnings and labels on everything and say, well, we need to have a discussion about gone with the wind and how its confederate apology. Like, I’m sorry. If you can’t if you can’t figure that out, if you can’t do the research on your own, like, you’re not a person who it is worth catering to in my opinion.

Yeah. And look, I mean, I think it’s I think it’s good that there are people who are putting together sort of independent databases or recommendation guides. I mean, look, I think we’d all rather have, you know, the common sense media, parents’ guides. To media than a much more sort of sensorius access regime for TVs and movies. You know, I follow an Instagram account that’s run by a couple of conservative homeschool moms that, you know, is about which books to recommend and which books to avoid based on their values.

And I often, like, I radically disagree with a lot of their recommendations about what to avoid, But I think it’s, you know, it’s a good thing that they’re doing the work for like minded parents, and that like minded parents can find resources like that. And so, And the idea that there would be a universally satisfactory, universally applicable, implementable, labeling regimen is a fantasy, but I think that more information provided by more venues is a good thing. But, like, we have we have a free media republic if you can keep it. And, you know, I think both some people who are rage addicts and some really cowardly corporations are not that interested in keeping

Peter, one thing that always happens when I bring this up on social media and elsewhere is that somebody will say, well, I mean, this is really capitalism’s fault. If you think about it, because capitalism has made it so that the corporations only wanna make these things that they could sell to people And, you know, if they if they can’t sell it because it’s offensive, well, then that’s that’s capitalism. And that response drives me nuts for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest of them is that it just kicks the can down the road. I mean it’s not like capitalism is doing this in a vacuum. They’re responding to a sentiment in the public that has been created and fostered and nurtured in ways that I think are really destructive to the general appreciation of art.

Yeah. I think that’s right in a lot of ways. I mean, you know, we should say though all the rights owners to this Film have the right to to eliminate whatever they want from the movie and to change whatever’s in circulation. That’s how IP Bulwark Ron DeSantis, you love intellectual property, You’ll love it when corporations and artists and people and private entities own art, and this is this is what happens. When when private entities own have that right.

They can change it. On the other hand, you also love owning your own copy of things that can’t be changed because you already own it. That’s also good. So ownership both makes it possible for you to have your old DVD of this and it also makes possible the whatever the weird licensing issue is here, and I do agree that it is it’s not totally clear which entity caused this to happen and it’s also notable that it’s only in the United States and not even in the UK or Canada. Right?

So even in closely linked English speaking markets. It has not been censored and you can still get the original cut. So it’s a little little bit of an odd thing here, but It’s fairly obvious that it was censored for offensiveness and that it’s really kind of bizarre, and that’s what strikes me about this particular edit. Because the bit that was censored was put into the film explicitly to show that Jean Hackman’s character was an awful racist cop. And it was not there to, like, say, and that’s fine.

It was the opposite. It was really the it was very much the opposite. It was intentionally put there to show that he was emblematic not just that he was racist but that he was emblematic of a racist policing system. So there’s a bitch in a documentary that about the making of the movie that Thomas Shatterton Williams of the Atlantic wrote up in which Roy Shider, who’s also in this movie, recalls seeing this movie with a black audience in Harlem at the time, and how satisfied they were to finally see the reality that they knew to be real. Right?

That the their experience of policing in New York, in Harlem, and, you know, and and some of the neighborhoods with it they would oh, yes. This is actually reflecting my experience of the world. And eliminate it is such a bizarre choice that just fundamentally misunderstands what that was about because it’s it wasn’t to to hold it up as great. It was to say this is the real ugly reality of policing in New York and the fact that it’s just It’s not just kind of implicitly low level sort of secretly racist. Some of these cops are just out and out racists.

And again, this just wasn’t even like a weird idea. At the time, something I distinctly remember from being a kid is finding one of my my father’s stash of mad magazines. And Mad Magazine was a big deal because they had movie parodies in Mad Magazine. And this was how in fact in fact how I learned about a lot of movies that I was not allowed to see. And I found my dad’s stashed from the nineteen seventies of Mad magazines, one of which contained Mad’s parody of the French Connection, and the whole gag about Jean Hackman’s character in the mad magazine parody was just about how how ridiculously blatantly racist he was.

And it was like because it was so under it was understood that that was the point of the movie in some ways, they they almost felt like mad, which was famously sort of left leaning, like, you know, sort of anti racist publication. Like, was making fun of how how out front this movie was in in sort of portraying that. And so it’s like, again, it’s just a total misreading of the art and the history, and it’s It’s sanitizing the past in a way that doesn’t do anyone any favors. If you are an anti racist activist, which first of all, great. Second of all, we should want depictions of this in the world especially historical depictions that let people know how it is and remind them how it was seen at the time.

Like that is valuable to have because otherwise people won’t know and there won’t be a a way of understanding our past and what we’ve come from.

So what do we what do we think? Is it a controversy or an controversy that the French connection has been censored to keep people safe, I guess, I don’t I don’t even know why, Peter.

It’s some sort of controversy and it’s even more than that it’s a controversy that this sort of thing keeps happening. Alyssa.

It’s a controversy and it’s catastrophically dumb on behalf of whatever entity did this. You’re an idiot. Stop censoring historically important movies.

It’s obviously a controversy. And the thing that I I find most grating about it is just how ugly and clumsy it is. On top of everything else, on top of the attitude that it betrays and the cowardice or whatever was behind it, just like if you’re gonna do this sort of thing, try and at least make it like like dub in a different word or something. I don’t know. But don’t just don’t just cut it and stitch it back together and be like, alright, that’s fine.

That’s that’s fine.

This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps.

Exactly. Something like that. Something anyway. Alright. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode.

When we’ll be discussing the toys from our childhood. We hope to see in movies or maybe fear will be made into movies. I don’t know. One one and the same, I think. Real monkey’s paw thing going on.

Alright. And now on to the main event. Transformers, Rise of The Beast. It’s Second prequel to the Transformers series. It comes on the heels of Bumblebee, which was generally liked by critics and audiences, but a bit of a financial miss Fire.

Here are the action to set in New York City in nineteen ninety four and where the transformers are hanging out as refugees from their home world of Cybertron. After Elena Wallace who’s played by a Dominique Fishback, accidentally uncovers and activates a thingamajig that will help optimus prime, It was voiced as always by Peter Collin and his team of robots slash cars slash airplanes slash other conveyances escape the earth. To make the thingamajig Bulwark, they’ll have to find a Doohickey in South America with the aid of Noah Diaz, who’s played by Anthony Ramos, The Doohickey is being guarded by the maximals, which are like robot animals. It’s like optimus prime and his autobots, except, you know, monkeys and ravens. And they they also have been hanging out on earth weirdly.

There and these two groups of giant robots that change into other things, are totally oblivious to each other. They’ve they’ve been sharing this of all the worlds and all the universe. They both came here and didn’t know about it. That’s weird. Anyway, the heralds of Galactus, I’m sorry, unicron, are trying to get the thingamajig and the doohickey so they can bring Galactus.

Sorry. It’s unicron. Why do I keep saying Galactus Peter? I don’t understand. To Earth, so, you know, so he’s so galactus.

Oh god. I’m sorry. I keep doing it. I can eat earth. And then Cybertron and then a bunch of other planets.

So the robots punch each other for a while and they shoot some missiles. And everyone calls it a day, only for the movie to end on the most grown inducing tease you’ll see until you see Flash next weekend. Alright. So here’s the thing. This is this is far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

Not the worst movie I’ve ever I’ve seen more incompetent films, and I’ve seen films that bored me more than this kind of like, this week. Right? Well, I will get to that. But but it is this is among the most pointless movies I’ve ever seen. I it really is so blandly competent and completely impersonal in a way that, like, perpetuates the brand of the movie and toys without doing anything interesting or daring, my main thought while watching.

And again, aside from a general sense of boredom was to just I was like sitting there begging for the visual insanity and manic Boyish Glee of Michael Bay. And that’s wild I don’t even actually like the Michael Bay transformers movies. I actually resented them. I resented the existence of the Michael Bay transformers movies for taking him away from more interesting stuff for us. Like I want I want ten painting games, not ten transformers movies.

I want five ambulances, not the one with the drunk Merlin. And half the time, when I was sitting there watching it, I actually felt like I was gonna throw up. Just I oftentimes felt like I was about to vomit from watching things on the screen that Michael Bay had put there. But at least I felt something. At least I felt a thing And I felt nothing at all while watching this.

Just absolute annoyance that it exists and is stripped of all personality. I don’t know. I don’t know, Peter, you seem to like this movie more than I did, judging by your view, but didn’t you miss the Bayham? Didn’t don’t you miss the Bayham?

Didn’t I miss it? I missed bits of it. So I I think Michael Bay put together a couple of good action sequences throughout his five movies, his five transformers films. Right? So there’s the the first the first Transformers movie is just a legit, great, crazy blockbuster.

I don’t think it’s the grade is maybe a little bit too strong. But it’s it really works on its own terms. It delivers on the promise of a transformers cinematic experience, right, in a way none of the other films have managed to live up to. And then after that, he just kinda went nuts and and allowed him like, in the studio allowed him to just make movies that were increasingly more coherent. And that created certain interesting opportunities.

The second one, for example, has a sequence set at the pyramids in Egypt and I can I can never find the website that did this? But there was a website that published an FAQ that tried to explain the plot and the movie’s existence was worth it just for this because you could see sort of in their explanation how absolutely little sense it made at how, like, even trying to put it into words just made you feel like your your brain was made of cotton candy, And he’s just like it’s just like being reduced into into kind of blithering nothingness. And then the third film has a has a couple of great bits in Chicago. Where, like, there’s a a transformer bad guy that splits buildings in half, and that’s pretty cool. I forget what happened in the fourth oh, the fourth one has the gravity stuff.

The gravity stuff’s pretty good. Although Michael Bay recycled it in his Netflix movie, six underground. It’s, like, the same thing. But the gravity stuff at the end in China is pretty good. And then the fifth one, The fifth one starts with Stanley Tuchi, who was in the series previously as a different character, but now he’s playing drunk Merlin And he’s riding a horse to a cave so that he could argue with a three headed robot dragon.

And that’s, like, drunkenly as Merlin and let it flashes forward to the, I don’t know, the future or something. And it’s but, like, there’s a whole prologue set in Merlin times. And I will defend those movies as as Like, do I miss them? I miss some of the the craziness of them. But what I I didn’t miss what I didn’t miss was the total, like, kind of almost painful incoherence of them where especially between the standout signature bits, Michael Bay just let his actors, his sort of the, like, the sort of the story stuff.

Go nuts in a way that I found frequently kind of grading, especially the first three films with Shailabuff, who is just as like, kind of painful to to watch. And this movie actually tries to tell a story about characters that you can understand. And I won’t say it’s a great story, but I will say it’s a story about characters that you can understand and that’s something that Michael Bay never bothered to do. And I think it’s actually worth pointing out that this is a movie about characters and you can understand the characters, who they are, what they want, and what they’re doing at all times. And that’s that’s something.

And this is this is I’d understand slander. I understand slander. It’s not slander. Also, Like, you you messed up your plot description because you said that this they had they found a a whatchamacjigur and then had to go find a doohickey, And it’s actually just the second half of the what’s in a jigger that they found that had to go find, not a completely dip second thing.

It’s an entirely different second thing because it’s a discrete second thing that they have a five.

It’s got other

half of the transwarp key. You’re you were I’m sorry. I have to push back against your description of the Michael Bay transform movies. I for one always identified strongly with Cade Jaeger

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Yeah.

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which is a real thing. You know, he had he had a lot of things he had a lot of things that he he had goals, I re I seemed to remember him having goals that he wanted to accomplish and the transformers helped him get that. I remember there’s a scene. Sam witwicky — Yeah. — wanted to have a car so girls would be attracted to him.

And that’s that’s a good that’s as much motivation as anybody needs in any of these movies. That is that is all you need from the giant robots punching each other movies. I’m sorry.

So there’s a scene in one of the Michael Bay transformers from movies. I don’t remember which one in which a transformer kind of pees or let let some liquid out from a

Right on John Churturro’s head.

Area onto John Churturro’s head, and you definitely don’t get a robot peeing on John Churturro’s head. In this movie. On the other hand, you get characters who have clear motivations at a story that you can basically summarize and basically understand and action sequences that aren’t exceptional, but are reasonably clear. And what I appreciated about this was that it wasn’t grading. Ever.

At no point was I like, I can’t stand to watch this. It’s not all that artful. It’s not all that great a movie. It doesn’t have any standout bits. But it tries to just sort of like it tries to bring you in, make you care about the characters a little bit.

And then it does some some robot fighting stuff, and it’s two hours and seven minutes, and and that’s fine. And I’m like, it didn’t overstate its welcome. And I guess partly also because of some other things I’ve seen recently, which we haven’t talked about yet, but we will the flash. Like, it it The fact that The

flash is a million times better than that.

That’s wrong. And the fact that it didn’t grate on me and didn’t make me wanna stand up and leave, I felt like I can just watch these robots punch each other for a couple more minutes and wait till the credits roll, I was I was I won’t say, like, thrilled but I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind this movie. That’s my recommendation.

Rise rises to the beasts. I didn’t mind it. Peter should have been reason. Alright. Alyssa, I wanna ask you a very specific question.

And and it’s this. Does this movie under stand how prequels work and how dramatic stakes work? Because it doesn’t seem to me that it does because there are several moments where they’re like, oh no, this transformers is dead, except we know that he’s in five more transformers movies after this. They’re like, oh no, Optimus prime is gonna sacrifice himself and the other characters are literally They’re paying tribute to him. They’re like, your sacrifice is our oath.

And then it’s like, wait, but we know he’s not gonna die. He’s he can’t die. He’s got he’s got a billion more of these movies to make in the future. We’ve seen them. We’ve seen the movie Alyssa, does this movie understand dramatic stakes go?

I sort of thought you were gonna ask me if this movie passes the Bechdel test, which is a far funnier question to consider.

Do robot women count as women?

Do robot ravens voiced by Michelle Yoe, count as women’s business. Yeah.

That was great. That’s she was awesome.

I mean, she’s incredible. I hope, like, I I really hope that she took the money that she was paid for this movie. I was just, like, I’m gonna buy jewels. I’m gonna buy a lot of jewels, and I’m just gonna, like, sit in my house and wear them tastefully and glamorously because I’m Michelle Yo. And I have an Academy Award and also now more money that I can use to buy jewels.

No. Of course, this movie doesn’t understand dramatic irony or prequels or foreshadowing or any of this stuff. I mean, I will be honest, my brain is broken because the minute Peter mentioned that insane previous transformers review, started looking for it and I also can’t find it. I think it must have been on either Deadspin or Grantland.

No. It was it was on a it was on a site called Giant freaking robot or something like or topless robot, something like that. Robot was definitely in the name.

Okay.

All the

Listeners, we’re gonna have to give you a bounty if you can find us this review, because it was so funny. And it was definitely funnier and more entertaining than anything that happen in any of the transformers franchises except for Drunkmoreland. Look, this is not a particularly good movie, and it’s also I I fear that it is going to end up being sort of a case study in the way sort of look, let me back up a second. It’s not gonna be a case study in anything, because nobody will be thinking about this movie in two weeks, but it is an interesting example of the ways in which talented, interesting performers get kind of swept up into this sort of blockbuster nonsense. Right?

Like, I’d like Anthony Ramos junior quite a bit. You know, he sorry, Anthony Ramos. He’s not actually a junior as far as I can tell. You know, he was lovely and in the heights. You know, he is really quite nice in this in the early scenes where Noah was struggling at a job, trying to help his brother.

Sunny, the fact that you feel nothing suggests to me that you just hate ten year olds with sickle cell anemia. Because, you know, he’s he’s actively human in the movie in the scenes where he gets like be a human being and have human feelings and do human things. Similarly, I love Dominique Fishback. I think she is great she actually has been a, you know, sort of a part of the David Simon stable for a while. Her work in Show Me Hero is really lovely.

Ditto in the deuce. She said, really good, and she does in the Bulwark Messiah. And here she’s in this just like completely stupid, thankless girl Friday scientist role, where she has to, like, run around and not lose her backpack and, like, write things on her arm in Sharpie. And, you know, it is just it is such a bummer to see talented interesting people get used this way. Right?

And look, like, Steven Capole is not a terrible director. Like, I mean, I think we all liked creed too, and she directed quite a bit. You know, he has some, you know, faculty with actors. You know, I don’t know if you if either of you saw this sort of pre roll when you saw this movie. But when I saw it at the Alamo on Friday, there was actually like a little pre roll about him talking about like how much they enjoyed shooting in Peru and how sort of eager he was for people to see that.

It is a little interesting to have one of these movies that instead of going to, like, forty seven different locations, goes to one place. I mean, the message with these movies that, like, they’re indigenous people in Peru, and they will keep your secrets, and and, like, you will tear up all of their, you know, like, terrorist agriculture at historical sites with giant robots, but it’s still, you know, there’s some There is an intelligence lurking somewhere deep under the sedimentary layers of this film, and it is a bummer that the nature of blockbuster making in Hollywood seems to be to pile on those layers of sediment as quickly as possible.

And like the Peru stuff is like so much of the rest of this movie where you have essentially table dressing diversity. Like, that that doesn’t that doesn’t really serve that much purpose, except to be like, Look, here we are in Peru with the natives. Like, the whole sequence with Dominique Fishbach’s character and her boss who’s like taking all her credit and, you know, being like the just I don’t know. The all that stuff was was again, like, vaguely annoying because I don’t I don’t come to the giant robots punching each other movie for the people, not interested in that. I I totally uninterested in that.

Just wanna watch the robots punch each other in vaguely incoherent ways. I don’t know.

I was hoping for vaguely coherent ways.

Coherent I don’t think coherence does this series any favors, frankly. I mean, I I think it I think you need the the whirligig nonsense camera moves other I mean, and that’s just the thing about this movie is like everything is shot so like, confidently, but blandly. There’s There there was never like a big soaring heroic moment where I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting and exciting. It was just like, okay, it’s all here. It’s here’s the cutscene that you’re watching now.

I don’t know, man. I like, this movie just annoyed me.

I I guess I would say that it never fully lives up to that. It tries though. And there’s moments when especially in the second half of the film, the movie really does try to deliver some big hero shot. I don’t think that any of them ever quite deliver, but there’s that bit, you know, with Optimus Prime, like, standing on the mountain in the background. And instead again, it’s like, this is almost what I really want from a transformers movie, the the this is almost the, you know, Moore Spielbergian classical you know, blockbuster that I I like imagine being made out of this franchise.

It’s not it. Like I said, it’s it’s not a great movie. I don’t want to defend this too much. But I really it was sort of sweet at times and goofy, and it never it just it didn’t bother me. And that’s actually That’s weirdly a compliment in today’s blockbuster environment.

I’ve seen so many of these big effects heavy franchise films over the past year or so where I’ve just been like, what are you doing? This is annoying. This movie never rises the level of wow, that’s really good, but it also never annoyed me and that’s genuinely, genuinely a compliment.

Again, I we’re you’re talk the phrase I have used to describe this movie to everyone I meet I just walk up to people on the streets. And I’m like, you know what, Transformers Rise is? It’s a blandly competent. Do you want bland competence in your movies? I got a movie for you.

Stranger. And and like whatever, like again, it’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it it just also like it just exists. It just lays there. And I’m just like, go do something interesting on the screen. Do something interesting with the thingamajigs and the the Whozits.

And Galactus. We haven’t even really talked about unicron at all. Terrible terrible character design there. It’s just a big big ball crashing into another big ball.

But that’s stupid. That’s just stupid. Unicron, that’s the character from the source material, the incredibly, richly imagined and serious source material that they couldn’t possibly depart from. You know, because it was a nineteen eighties cartoon meant to sell toys. And Orson Wells played Utacron in the nineteen eighties movie.

I’m gonna say,

why not? What we have all this AI technology now. Why can’t we have AI orson Wells saying the lines?

I suspect for the same reason.

That’s

to create his course. If they desecrated his corpse, at least that would be interesting instead of what we got.

Nothing. I suspect that the reason that we can’t have that is the same reason that you can’t see the full French connection in the United States. There’s licensing issues. Orson Wells is an IP at this point. And, like, probably someone would have to sign off on that.

A Watson Wells would come back and haunt you.

Yeah. Once you die, does your voice go into the the I guess I guess your voice probably would go into the public domain, but like the actual things would not. But if you just use the AI to train your Orson welles voice I don’t

know the legal issues, but I expect that if you made an AI voice of Orson Wells and put it into a very big budget studio film, that the estate of Orson Wells would sue you if you didn’t have the rights to do so.

Yeah. That’s probably that’s probably not allowed. Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Rise rise of the Beast, Peter.

Didn’t mind it. Thumbs up. Alyssa.

Thumbs down. Just go see across the spider verse again, which I did on Saturday, and which I highly recommend to everyone.

Thumbs down. I I don’t think I’ve liked to single one of these movies And I may I may have actually disliked most of the Michael Bay movies more than this one. But I still at least like I was at least there’s something there. There’s some like spark of personality that exists in those movies that is totally absent here. Just it’s just just nothing.

This movie didn’t even give me a headache. Is your point.

This move no. This movie, I want it I when I go see a Transformers movie, I wanna see it in the biggest eye screen possible and I want to come out of it with my ears bleeding and thinking that I’ve just been in like a hurricane simulator. That’s what I want. And this gave me none of that. The last one I saw, the last one I saw the drunk Merlin one, I literally like was woozy getting up out of my trip.

My legs were rubbery. Because it was so much. And like, again, it’s not a good movie exactly, but at least at least I felt something. Least I felt something like that.

You just wanna be dominated by Optimus Prime for two hours.

Well, that is and that’s alright. My one serious about this movie is that the only reason the only time any of these movies work really is when Peter Cohen is like delivering optimist prime zen battle cones. Just like when he’s when he’s just like proclaiming things in front of and it’s on this day that we Like I That’s that’s what I want from a transformers movie. I want Optimus Prime saying things. That’s it.

That’s all I want. Alright. That’s it for this week’s show. Make sure to make sure to head over to Bullworth Plus for our bonus episode on Friday. It’s not your friends.

Strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences if we don’t grow, we’ll die. If you did not love this episode and you you might not have, you might be very mad at me because I’ve a lot of things on this show that are gonna get a rise out of people. Feel free to complain to me on Twitter at Sunnybunch. I’ll commend you is in fact best show in your podcast feed or maybe not. I don’t know.

I I’ve not been doing a very good job of that recently. See you guys next week.