Miscellaneous, etc.

Since the theme of my reviews seems to be my admission of a personal flaw or bias, followed by a lengthy justification of my character, I might as well tell you up front that I really enjoy hype. I actually enjoy it. I get excited about getting excited; I watch movie previews with almost the same eagerness as the actual films they’re promoting. I can’t help it — in some way or another, I actually feel like I’m getting more out of something if I enjoy it before I’ve actually come into any kind of contact with it at all.

Of course, as we all know very, bitterly well, this can backfire. People don’t like to think that they’ve been lied to, even when the liar is their own brains. They like to blame things, by labelling them for all time as pariahs that are totally without even the slightest merit that might redeem their hateful existences. Witness Pearl Harbor. I don’t think I need to say any more, do I?

But I think you can see where this is going — Max Payne is one of the most hyped game titles in recent memory, with about seventy-five thousand anticipated release dates, lots of interviews and previews and screenshots all over the place, and all kinds of questions about whether this was going to be the next great single-player title. Christ, there was even controversy about whether it was even worth buying because it so totally fixated on the “single-player experience,” instead of offering up a half-assed multiplayer mode that everyone could play when they were momentarily bored with Counterstrike or Tribes 2.

All of this discussion can be of great benefit to a PC title, considering that the market is glutted with lots of half-finished crap that validates the very existence (not to mention the occasional snobbery) of console gamers. The right kind of promotion can propel a game into the spotlight that so many other titles would love dearly; the danger only really comes in when the audience starts determining whether any of this attention is actually deserved. People, you might remember, hate thinking that they’ve been lied to.

When I popped Max Payne into the drive and booted up the game for the first time, I felt like I’d been lied to. More specifically, I felt that I’d been lied to, and then hit on the back of the head and robbed of sixty-four of my hard-earned Canadian dollars. I hadn’t really gotten all that excited about Max Payne until I’d actually seen the box sitting on the shelf at the Electronics Boutique, but then I started thinking to myself that it really was about time that I stopped playing the Baldur’s Gate expansion since I wasn’t really getting anywhere with it, and that a nice shooting game might be a good distraction, and that everyone said that Max Payne is supposed to be a pretty good one. So it really wasn’t long at all before I had managed to build up enough internal hype to be very excited indeed when I fired up the game for the first time ever.

And naturally, pretty fucking disappointed when it crashed on me, right after the install. And really, truly disappointed when all the textures were screwed up in the opening level, so that it sort of looked like the Matrix did when Neo discovered his powers. I wouldn’t have minded this so much if it meant that I suddenly knew kung fu, or was able to come back to life whenever I get shot in the chest, but after extensive trial-and-error and a great deal of personal anguish, I have discovered that neither of these are true.

Above: Here I am pulling off a daring bank heist, as I tried out the new powers that I thought were granted to me by Max Payne. I was gunned down in a hail of police gunfire moments after this photo was taken. Fortunately, thanks to my dark sunglasses and black trenchcoat, I was able to safely blame the computer game for my actions, and was released on my own recognisance.

My disappointment began to deepen into outrage when the game would play perfectly well for ten minutes at a time, only to freeze, lock up my entire machine, and force me to turn off the power in order to restart. Not that I don’t like watching the Windows disk checker perform its duties, but after four or five times it becomes just a little tedious. Max Payne suggested that I remedy this by turning down all the features on the game until it looked like I was playing a Gameboy, or else download the latest hog-large drivers for my video card. And if that wasn’t the problem, then, well, tough shit for me.

Fortunately, one of those two fixes worked. I’m not sure which one, because I’ve completely stopped adjusting things on my system for fear of starting up the crash-and-burn cycle again. But — much to everyone’s surprise, I’m sure — I found the game much more enjoyable when I could play it for longer than a few minutes at a time, and pretty soon I was just as excited about playing it as I was about buying it in the first place.

That’s because it’s really, really fun. It’s fun in a straightfoward, gun-violence kind of way, and while the almost orgasmically enthusiastic quotes on the box (courtesy of PC Gamer) highlight the game’s emphasis on story, you’ll find yourself returning to the game just to recreate some of the ridiculously fun gunfights you’ll find yourself in. Max Payne is sort of like a film-noir Tomb Raider, with less of a focus on puzzles and breasts, and more attention paid to “gritty” dialogue and Hong-Kong gunplay. Most interesting and creative of all, Max Payne incorporates a feature called Bullet Time, allowing you to grind the game down to a slow-motion pace and take careful aim at your opponents, even as you watch their rounds gradually sail through the air towards you. Often, invoking Bullet Time is the only way to survive some of the tougher encounters in the game, but it’s so much fun that you’ll end up using to make a slo-mo dive backwards through a skylight, just to see how cool that might look.

There is a plot, about how Max Payne is an undercover cop with a terrible past, doing battle against warring factions in the city who are pushing a new, dangerous drug out on the streets. The story is delivered through cutscenes that are staged like they’re out of a gritty, DC Comics prestige-style graphic novel, accompanied by voice acting that seems cheesy and yet totally appropriate at the same time. The writing is always trying its hardest to be hard-bitten, so much so that you can’t help but smile at how overwrought it really is, and yet it still manages to evoke just the right atmosphere for the game — and there are moments when the mood is genuinely tense, or just plain creepy. As strangely imbalanced as it is, the story carries the game forward through a number of twists and turns, always giving a relatively plausible reason for the shifts in action, the aquisition of new weapons, or the development of enemy tactics.

The game isn’t long, and there are those out there who might say that’s reason enough to give this game a miss, but honestly, after slogging my way through some games these days that would have benefitted from being so much shorter, I can’t complain about this. Max Payne’s design is all about quick, sharp action — whatever other pretensions it might have, it certainly doesn’t present itself as being an epic. Those of you concerned with replayability can avail themselves of the map editor provided with the game, or move up in difficulty levels once you pass through the game the first time. Those who aren’t will have the chance to work your way through one of the most entertaining titles of the year, a shooter that — gasp! — doesn’t desperately want to be the next Quake or Tribes.

Just make sure your drivers are up-to-date, first.

I admit, I’ve fallen a bit behind on my movie reviews. In part, I blame the perhaps overly-ambitious choice to attempt to review all of this summer’s major blockbusters, since I rarely have enough spare time to even see the movies, let alone try to figure out what’s interesting enough about them to write a review. But, since I can’t be totally at fault for anything I do in my life — Heaven itself forfend — I’m also forced to blame the movies themselves, which have so far been only middling in the inspiration department. So far no single movie has really stood out to me as being daringly amazing, such that I flew out of the theatre with an immediate desire to tell the world about its many wonders; and likewise, none have been so abominable that they left me burning with a desire to archive in great and passionate detail my contempt for them.

Tom wants to fly, but Gooseman crushes his own head. Who will kill Commies?

Well, Pearl Harbor, okay. But aside from that, I mean.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to mellow things out a little, and take a more tranquil approach to reviewing some of the movies that you might’ve thought I’d missed along the way. Rather than feel all hectic and stressed, scrambling madly to find something slightly perceptive to say about movies like Moulin Rouge or Tomb Raider or Atlantis, I’ve decided to surrender myself to simplicity. I’m going to let the ancient Japanese art of haiku carry me onto a higher plane of existence, where the positive and negative aspects of film can be only be summarized in exactly seventeen syllables.

Look below for haiku reviews of three of our biggest summer movies, each poem floating gently through the breezes of contemplation before stopping lightly, like the retiring and bashful butterfly, on one particular theme of the films. Because, like the hippopotamus that lurks at the bottom of the river, his feet heavy with mud and his skin cold under the water, I am lazy, and because, like the slightly disproportionate kid that you knew in the second grade who still hadn’t mastered verbs and liked to glue things together with the matter she picked out of her nose, summer movies are more than a bit retarded, those themes will be exceedingly simple, like the capsule reviews given to you by a broken soul slaving in a busy video store:

“What, Top Gun? Yeah, strong on action, not much of a plot. Good special effects. Bad acting. Overall, I’d say it’s pretty good. Can I go now?”

Now you are prepared. Your mind is in a state of readiness. Read on, and know true peace.

Whoa.

Deep.

I admit, I’m totally a hit-whore. I’m not ashamed at all to say that I check to see how many people have visited the site every morning, to see what they read and what they didn’t read, to see whether I’m ever going to come even close to surpassing my host’s bandwidth limit. I don’t see any problem with it at all, and I feel that it’s actually not that bad a thing with which I can be preoccupied — after all, in a certain kind of way, it tells me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong, which then allows me to make the site better.

For example, for each of you that managed to make it through the first page of a RAWcap, there was another one of you who just couldn’t do it; and, logically enough, for each of you brave souls who made it through the first page, there were two others that just didn’t have what it took to survive reading the second. And Christ, I don’t even want to share with you the attrition rate by page three.

My point being, aside from drawing attention to my spectacularly unsuccessful RAW is War recaps, that I can use my web logs and access records to quickly and effectively diagnose a trend — and then use that diagnosis to determine whether I’m going to continue spending three or four hours writing articles that only one person in fifteen is going to read all the way through. It’s the kind of work that handy-dandy logs like this were designed for, and I for one love the shit out of them.

So imagine my surprise when I found out that there was an even greater use to which these logs could be put: determining just how screwed up my audience is. Take a look below, won’t you?

Click above for a fully interactive version of your seriously demented brains.

What the hell is wrong with you people? To quote Seanbaby quoting Mike Haggar, “HAVE MY EARS GONE INSANE?” I can’t even begin to imagine how searches like these ended up at my site, nor particularly do I want to imagine how the people who ran those searches reacted when they got here. How am I suppose to know that there isn’t some unhinged lunatic out there who, upon discovering that I lack the “testicle bashing” pictures that Google promised her, has decided to take some of her own, with my testicles as the star?

This week on Friends: Chandler (Matthew Perry) accidentally walks in on Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and her nipples (Jennifer Aniston’s nipples) in the shower, but mistakes them for Monica’s (Skeletor) and her ribs (Skeletor’s ribs). Above: Jennifer Aniston (not pictured: Jennifer Aniston’s nipples); below: Skeletor as Courtney Cox as Monica.

That’s right — I can’t. Because as we’re all well aware, the Internet is full of crazy people, and I’m not sure I really want to mess with someone who visited my site during four separate searches for pictures of Jennifer Aniston’s nipples. Especially when those selfsame nipples are so readily available for viewing each and every week on NBC. Quite honestly, how difficult are pictures of those particular nipples to find? They’re everywhere, for God’s sake. I think I saw them in my coffee this morning.

To be honest, it’s no real surprise to me that there are bizarre searches, motivated by bizarre people, coming to this site, and probably my fascination with them is more or less the mark of a completely amateur web-based writer. When it comes down to crassness, this is probably one step below getting together with other writers and talking about how much fan mail you get, in that it has all the chintzy self-importance of discussing one’s audience, while subtracting the validation that accompanies them wanting to get in touch with you. But if the worst thing I’m accused of is being crass, then I don’t see how it could hurt. In the glory days, crassness alone was almost enough to land you with a cherry spot on UGO.

So I guess the next logical question that arises when looking at results like these becomes, “Who in the hell is my audience?” And that’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time. I’ve been tempted more than once to start characterizing this site as some sort of experiment in readership and writing, because the only possible explanation for the way I’ve shotgunned all over the place with writing, design and content styles (not to mention updating schedules — and believe me, I don’t intend to mention them at all) is that I’m testing and re-testing the people who come here. I’ve always been curious about how websites build up an audience and what it takes to do that, based on two particular facts:

Naturally, that makes this whole enquiry all about me, which is only as it should be. And yet I have to wonder why I decide to go back to certain sites long after I really have any reason to do so, and why others choose to return and dwell on sites to which they have become hostile, or with whom they have engaged in open war. Why bother lurking on the message boards of an enemy, if only to read what people say and seethe and their evil/goodness/ignorance/arrogance? Why go back to an online comic that you condemn on a daily basis for being an unfunny ripoff? Why return to a page that doesn’t update for months at a time? Or, alternately, why not?

Probably one of the most interesting things that I’ve noticed about the Internet, now that I’ve been here for a while and been able to witness pages as they move through a life cycle, is that sites which gather a large audience quickly are almost always the sites that end up catering specifically to their audience — and in return, their audience seems more than happy to come back over and over and over and over. This is particularly true of pages that feature message boards, which allow visitors to feel as though they are not only important to the site, but actually somehow integral to it, as if the site will somehow dry up and blow away if they don’t openly discuss their sex lives, instigate blistering flame wars, or make one-line posts that say something like or Word!

So that’s when you have to start wondering how much a visible and easily-trackable audience not only influences a site’s content, but actually imprints upon the site itself. Not to try to sound too much like Marshall McLuhan, but if the content is the audience, then what does that make the message? And does that make web surfing to smaller, self-edited sites that tend to be more aware and adaptive to their audiences an exercise in narcissism? Or solipsism?

And if that is the case, if people are (consciously or otherwise) viewing the internet as one giant reflection of themselves, then what in the hell am I supposed to make of this:

Clearly, there’s only one logical conclusion to make: You people are messed up. Seriously, you’re messed up. I don’t want to offend whatever regular readers I have by calling them messed up, except that… you’re messed up. When I’m faced with the possibility that someone out there is looking deep, deep into the limpid pools that are the Internet’s eyes and seeing a reflection of famous womens’ breasts and pus leakage from genitals staring back at them, I just don’t know what else to think.

Welcome to the site, you sickos.

Swordfish begins with a close-up of John Travolta’s face discussing why a lack of realism is the fundamental reason that today’s Hollywood movies are sucking the big fat one. He postulates a hypothetical situation to his audience — both those in the theatre and those in the film — in which Hollywood logic would totally fail, and as he talks, the camera draws back to reveal that the hypothetical hostage crisis to which he is referring is actually the one that he has created. His logic, that in the real world such situations could never happen because the good-guys-bad-guys logic of movies is simply untenable, is meant to be a wry commentary on the scenario at which he is the center, and is simultaneously designed to diffuse any criticism of the events that ensue.

This is one of many moments that are supposed to make Swordfish clever.

“You know what the problem with movies today is? The funamental problem is one of realism. Too many films of lesser quality fall back on gimmicks or trickery, and so sacrifice any credibility they might have had. Take Face/off, for exam– Hey, what the fuck?” – excerpted from Swordfish: The Outtake Reel

The audience of Swordfish is delivered probably the most violent and visually impressive scene of the movie in the first twenty minutes for exactly the same reason that John Travolta’s character is granted a kind of meta-understanding of the situation that he’s in — both are meant to involve the audience on a visceral level and totally disengage them on a cerebral one. The effect is more than a little disorienting, and very often I found myself wondering why it was happening at all. Swordfish, like so many other movies this summer, is trying its very best to be everything but the movie that it’s built to be, and in doing so ends up penalizing itself.

I think that must be the reason that Halle Berry even appears in this movie at all, as the alternately hard-nosed, smooth, brash, cool, panicked, vulnerable, wide-eyed femme fatale/babe in the woods Ginger Knowles. Her character runs the gamut of just about every single kind of action-movie heroine that there ever has been, to the point of offering up a totally, pointlessly gratuitous tit shot that manages to even surprise the hell out of Hugh Jackman, who accidentally comes across it when he wakes up one morning.

There are all kinds of rumors flying around — which have since been denied, denied — by Halle Berry and everyone else involved in the making of Swordfish that Berry was offered a half-million-dollar bonus to bare her breasts in the movie, and if that truly is the case then I can see why everyone is denying it so vehemently. I mean, I understand that it’s not the eighties any more, and that you can’t just write in a boob shot whenever you want to any more. I understand that titty-flashers like Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie and Kate Winslet are a rare commodity these days (which must be why those particular actresses have bras that must be fastened like velcro, they fly off so easily), so it’s not impossible for me to acknowledge that the screen value of boobies has increased by a fairly significant advantage.

But half a million dollars is, alas, too unacceptable a sum to spend satiating even my breast-appetite, and so I feel utterly and totally compelled to spoil Halle Berry’s boob-flashery for anyone who hasn’t already paid the money to see it. For the sake of those who, at the mention of this subject, have contracted boob-tunnel vision, I shall describe the critical moments in large print:

Hugh Jackman’s character, Stanley, wakes up after a bit of a wild night and wanders out onto the patio of the condominium in which he spent the previous evening partying. There he comes across Halle Berry’s character, Ginger, who’s lying on a deck chair in a bikini and reading a book. Stanley asks Ginger a question to get her attention.

Ginger responds by lowering her book, looking Stanley in the eye with a bright smile and revealing that she isn’t wearing a top.

She then speaks a line of dialogue that is probably going to be inaudible to you until Swordfish comes out on video, because inevitably there’s going to be some sad soul in the theatre for whom the sight of Halle Berry’s breasts is so overwhelming that he simply must emit some kind of noise. Such might also be true in your own home when you rent the film, but it’s your own fault then. The shot cuts back to Stanley, looking startled, and then back to Ginger.

Ginger then lifts her book back up and continues reading. Total Breast Exposure Time: 7-10 seconds.

That’s it. That’s what the half-million-dollar hooplah is all about. And the more I think about it, the more I can only think that this is yet another way in which Swordfish is trying very hard to be clever, wrapping itself up in the clothes of a standard stupid summer action movie and doing everything it can to be subversive. Was it free publicity for the movie? You betcha. Did it pack dozens of X-Men enthusiasts into the theatre, who had been hoping and praying for far too much of their lives to someday see the breasts of the girl who played Storm? I believe that it did. Did it take the movie’s lead female character and momentarily turn her into the typical leading lady of summer action movies of Ages Past? Well, yeah. That too.

And so I’m forced to wonder whether or not Swordfish isn’t making fun of itself while it tries to make fun of its genre. Is there a reason that Stanley’s ex-wife, who won custody of their daughter when Stanley was sent up the river, has to be an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a porn star? Could she not have been just one? Is this some sort of all-accepting New Millennial thing, in which any of these individual vices might not be enough to qualify someone as a bad parent, so all three have to get thrown together? Or is Stanley’s ex carried to a comical extreme on purpose?

For examples of other unintentionally self-parodying films, please refer to anything that has ever come into contact with Michael “Pearl Harbor is my magnum opus” Bay.

Which makes me then want to ask all kinds of questions about the themes of patriotism and heroism that emerge later in the movie, as the plot becomes all convoluted and suddenly Sam Shephard is involved and then not involved any more, and the good guys seem to all get what they deserve and the bad guys don’t. Is this all because the writers just really needed some kind of motivation for characters that otherwise seem to have no reason to be in this movie, doing what they’re doing? Or is it because all the way through the eighties and nineties, action movie heros were all patriots, just like female characters were all taking their shirts off?

I think it all boils down to that first framing moment in the film, when Travolta discusses the stupidity and falsehood of Hollywood action movies, and whether you take this as a guiding principle for the ensuing two hours, or just as a cheap excuse for everything that follows. After having seen it, I feel sure that I could make a pretty solid argument for one or the other interpretation — but I’m confident that it’s more a matter of both.

Swordfish wants to be an ironic movie, but it keeps giving in to its own nature. A pointless boobie-blast like Halle Berry’s in a film that announces its own hostility towards dumb Hollywood movies simply can’t be without some sense of itself, and yet there are plenty of other scenes that seem to have come out of the director’s “Would It Be Cool If This Were In A Movie” file. If Swordfish was attempting to satirize the roots of American action movies, it needed to look much more carefully at itself; if it wasn’t, then it needed to stop making excuses.

All of this now said, should you actually go out and see Swordfish? I think so. I know it probably doesn’t sound like it here, but I liked the movie, and I enjoyed watching it. If I really thought it was beyond all redemption, I wouldn’t recommend it at all, and I certainly wouldn’t try to figure it out.

Some movies, like Swordfish, are are ambitious, if not entirely successful — and others… well, others are just Pearl Harbor.

I’ve started this review five times now, trying to find just the right words to explain to you, reasonably and rationally, why I didn’t like Pearl Harbor.

On this, my sixth attempt, I have decided to admit to you that I just can’t do it. I can’t think really hard and summon up the airy-fairy tree-huggyness that allowed me to forgive The Mummy Returns for all its many, many sins. I can’t reach back into my university days to conjure up a thesis to explain away even the slightest weaknesses of Pearl Harbor, the way I managed to do for A Knight’s Tale. I can’t even rely on my own brain to shut down when I’m exposed to such unrepentantly stupid film making as Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay have managed to create in their long, spotty careers.

“Hi, I’m Tom Sizemore. Sure, I may be laughing now, but that’s because I’m guaranteed a role in every Hollywood WWII movie from now until my death. And why? Because you’ll never find another man more qualified to shout things like ‘Clear those murder holes!‘ and ‘Grab the .50!‘ anywhere. Shit, I sometimes I scream things like that at my wife, just to stay in practice.”

Scott and I went to see Pearl Harbor together, thinking that we might be able to somehow diffuse any pain that it would inflict upon us individually by presenting a united front; little did we realize that Michael Bay had somehow managed to prepare for any such tactics by doubling the length of the film before he even made it. Pearl Harbor was, at the very best, a seventy-five to ninety-minute movie. The only possible explanation for its bloating out to something in excess of three hours is that Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer realized that, properly edited, Pearl Harbor might only inflict as much psychic harm upon the audience as a full punch to the face from the Incredible Hulk. At full-length, it’s more like a flying, atomic repeating double-axe-handle from the Incredible Hulk, right after Wolverine pulls your underwear up over your head while he talks about his personal problems.

I suspect very truly that the film is so long because it really wants to be several films, and spends a great deal of time making up its mind on exactly which movie it wants to be. During one of the nearly endless scenes between Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale, in which Ben Affleck discusses at great lengths how good it feels to be in love with Kate Beckinsale, and Kate Beckinsale reciprocates her feelings at even greater lengths, setting up Ben Affleck to summarize their passion at the greatest length of all, I began to imagine what could possibly be worse than being in the audience at that moment.

Amazingly, right up there with being dropped into a nuclear reactor and (rather than being mutated into a powerful force for Justice) being mutated into a pile of cinders or having my skull forcibly removed from my head while I’m alive, was being the screenwriter for Pearl Harbor. Because every now and again, there are quick little moments that betray how this movie might have been meant as something altogether different, before it had four or five other movies grafted over it.

Michael Bay: We’ve invited you here today to speak with you about your script for Pearl Harbor.

Jerry Bruckheimer: We’ve decided to do it.

Writer: That’s great! You won’t regret it! This is going to be great — I’m really excited about it. You know, now that Saving Private Ryan has kind of opened the door for Second World War movies again, I think we could do a lot to commemorate our role in the war. You know, I spent over one hundred thousand hours in research to perfect every aspect of this first draft.

Jerry Bruckheimer: Yeah, that’s great. Because the audience wants to pay ten bucks to see research.

Writer: Yeah, I think they’ll really appreciate the– wait, what?

Michael Bay: I think what Jerry’s trying to say here is that, while we like the general idea of a movie about Pearl Harbor, we feel there are some weak points in the script. We’ve both read it over and we don’t feel like there’s really enough to feel good about.

Writer: But… it’s Pearl Harbor. It’s one of the darkest chapters in twentieth-century American history.

Jerry Bruckheimer: Exactly our point. Who wants to pay a bunch of money just to get all depressed? Bad enough we’ve had to sit through all these movies how badly we fucked up Vietnam. We hardly need movies about how we fucked up World War II on top of them.

Writer: But we did fuck up–

Michael Bay: Now, let’s not get into a big hooplah about who fucked up where. All we’re saying is that we feel as though the script could use a little… punching up.

Jerry Bruckheimer: And tits.

Writer: Huh?

Jerry Bruckheimer: Listen, egghead — if James Cameron can get away with putting Kate Winslet’s tits up there on the screen and calling it “history,” then I sure as hell can.

Writer: How am I supposed to write breasts into the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor? What do they have to do with anything?

Michael Bay: All right, maybe the breasts are a stretch–

Jerry Bruckheimer: Goddamn it.

Michael Bay: –but we’ll at least need some attractive women. Men like to see women in action movies. It reminds them what they’d be fighting for, if somehow they were up there on the screen.

Writer: But I thought this’d be more of a war movie than an action movie…

Jerry Bruckheimer: And I thought of killing you, sawing you into seventeen pieces and feeding you to my dobermans after I steal your script, egghead, but we don’t all get what we wish for.

Michael Bay: In other words, we’re looking to appeal to a broader demographic than a war movie might attract. But don’t worry, we’re not thinking of an action movie, so much as a romantic-action-war thriller.

Writer: Is this a joke?

Michael Bay: We’re thinking Titanic meets Tora! Tora! Tora! meets Top Gun.

Jerry Bruckheimer: There are going to be plenty of action movies out this summer, but we want to be the one that’s different. We want women to see it, too.

Writer: Oh, no.

Michael Bay: That’s why we’re hoping to see the love story in your script become a little more developed.

Writer: But there isn’t a love story in my script. The closest thing to a love story is when the main character walks past someone writing letters home to his girlfriend.

Jerry Bruckheimer: And that’s when every bitch in the audience thinks, That guy is soooooo romantic! I wish the movie was about him! And when dating couples go to the movies, it’s usually the bitch who gets to choose what they see.

Writer: I try to avoid referring to my wife as a bitch.

Michael Bay: Now, let’s try to avoid splitting hairs, here. The point is–

Writer: I hardly think I’m splitting hairs.

“Hi, I’m Alec Baldwin. I’ve got a real fondness for the 1940’s in general, because that’s when many of the moons that’ve been pulled into orbit around my gigantic pot belly were first discovered.”

Michael Bay: The point is that we’re looking to develop that character of the pilot writing home to his girlfriend and explore him a little more. Who’s he writing to? Why is he so much in love with her? Does he have a friend back home who’s waiting to have sex with this woman, if he’s ever shot down and presumed dead? Surely there’s no harm in expanding this subplot a little.

Writer: I… guess.

Jerry Bruckheimer: And, say, if we were to expand it out so that basically the entire movie is occupied by that subplot, then so much the better.

Michael Bay: Exactly! It’s win-win-win! The guys get an exciting movie about one of America’s finest moments, the ladies get a thrilling romance, and we’ve got a blockbuster on our hands!

Writer: What about the actual battle of Pearl Harbor?

Michael Bay: Oh, we had the special effects guys do that whole sequence about a month ago.

Jerry Bruckheimer: Which reminds me — you’d better find a way to write a black guy into the movie somewhere, okay? We couldn’t find Ben Affleck anywhere so we had to get Cuba Gooding Jr. to stand in.

Writer: I might as well burn my draft of the script right now, hadn’t I?

Michael Bay: We’re way ahead of you on that one, too.

Pearl Harbor, now showing at a theatre near you. Don’t even approach this movie with the expectation that your sense of irony is going to protect you, because it isn’t — the sheer, buffeting force of its stupidity is going to wash that cynical smile right off of your face and leave you scrambling to watch as many episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as you can to restore your sarcasm. You might start out by laughing at it, but by the second hour you’re going to find yourself laughing at everything, and by the time any actual bombs fall on Pearl Harbor, you’ll be curled up in a little ball on the floor, permanently adhered there by the spilled cola of a thousand traumatized movie watchers.

Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer hate you, and Pearl Harbor is their revenge.