Remember when I posted a buncha gibberish about the most awesome looking trailer ever in the history of the world that was in front of Transformers? I think I said something like:
Anyway, this is five minutes of the movie. Ignore that gibberish about contests and stuff, I don’t play no contest game.
Yo.
I’ve been watching quite of bit of Flight of the Conchords.
Its like a Tenacious D thats actually funny, instead of loud and irritating. A New Zealand, lower key, talented, hilarious, horribly booked music duo.
You’d figure I have more to say about it.
I’ll just cheat with more YouTubage.
Tape of love, baby.
Saw the coolest freakin movie last night.
Well, lemme back up a little…
I woke up sick yesterday, totally sick as a dog. So, stayed home from work and slept, which is my magic fix all for being sick, and woke up with MastaG rattling around, entirely bored, in the living room. He came in and we watched a movie on the big fancy LCD tv in my room (its doing nicely, thanks), and relaxed until it was time to get Pigpen from school.
I was feeling a bit more on my feet, so we swung by the video store on the way home from work to get 300, TMNT, and hopefully the Bourne Supremacy (MastaG and I have a Daddy/son day scheduled for tomorrow, the last day of his summer break, and wanted to see the third Bourne movie sometime soon). They didn’t have Bourne in, the bastards, but did have Hot Fuzz and Renaissance.
And man, Renaissance kicked my ass.
Animated entirely in black and white, it was a futuristic-y film noir thing, looking for the kidnapped girl, with people shooting, and whatnot, but the plot took a backseat in my eye to the amazingly freakin awesome animation.
Good stuff, good stuff. I also bought me a $40 HDMI DVD player to hook up to the TV for the bitchinest visual, at like the 1080i or whatever the thing is.
Woot.
Seriously, it was so cool. I took pains to go into it without judgement, without any baggage of childhood enjoyment, and watched it purely as a summer movie, and OH MY GOD, it was great.
The movie is massively long, 2.5 hours, but there was so much action and humor (I belly laughed at several points) that the time flew by.
Totally, best movie I’ve seen all year, easy. Best I’ve seen in a long time.
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Next person insulting me for having a childhood gets a new permanent nickname.
Seriously, buncha mean people…
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Saw a preview for this super secret JJ Abrams movie, had no title, and hardly showed anything except a party sequence shot on home video that ended with massive explosions down a New York Avenue, with the head of the Statue of Liberty being flung and landing in the camera’s frame.
I think it may have been the best two or three minutes I’ve ever spent in a theater. If the movie is anything like the trailer (which I haven’t found on the internet YET), I will personally have its babies.
Last night, about 3 AM, I woke up completely wide awake for various reasons:
I thought maybe the excitement stemmed from a dream I had that BJ wasn’t really dead, that it was all some sort of mistake, and she was back home. Sounds harsh, but I have that dream a lot, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I wake up happy for the opportunity to have spent a little bit more time with her, and thankful for the time I had with her. The days of me painfully missing her are over, for the past month or so, and hopefully for good, but thats not what this post is about.
No, I was thinking. I couldn’t remember what it is about today that I was excited about. It wasn’t a Friday, so I had to work. I had to figure out when to get G to the doc, which is never something I look forward to, but still, there was something I couldn’t get my fingers around.
I finally figured it out. I had bought tickets for me, the kids (along with Realtorchick’s youngest, who’s been kinda living at my house lately), and Jimmy from the Time Out Deli, to go see Transformers at 4:35 PM today.
Now, I wasn’t excited about it, other than seeing the boys’ wide eyed enthusiasm, because I kinda think I’m going to be disappointed about the movie. I mean, Michael Bay, c’mon. He can’t do Transformers.
But still, there was something deeply ingrained in me about the Autobots and Decepticons, something thats been with me longer than my wife, my kids, and some of my siblings, and I realized that I was kid-in-a-candy-store thrilled about seeing this stupid movie.
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I was Pigpens age, five years old, when I first saw the Transformers. I remember sitting in the Den of our old house in Chattanooga, the one I grew up in, before I moved out and the folks bought the Blueberry Farm, watching cartoons as was my early morning wont, when I saw the commercial. I don’t remember much about it, just sitting transfixed, with my bowl of cereal, looking at this big massive red truck turning into a bigger, massiver robot, with these sweet jet planes turning into robots and shooting at him.
Now, I loved trucks, planes, and robots. I was the target market.
I was hooked.
That Christmas, I got my first Transformers, Cliffjumper and Thundercracker. The Biscuit (Dad) and 
I worked for 30 minutes to get Thundercracker, one of those sweet planes, transformed into its robot mode, and man, lemme tell you, it was 30 of the best minutes of my life.
The Transformers cartoon show started around that time, and I was absorbed into the stark desert landscape that the Autobots rolled around in, protecting power plants and whatnot from Megatron and the Decepticons and their evil schemes to transform all this stuff into glittery energon cubes so they could do something with them that I didn’t really comprehend (world conquest, or something, hell, I dunno… they were freakin Transformers man, who cares!)
The next Christmas, about all I wanted were Transformers. I was the target market.
I prayed, begged, whined, cajoled, whimpered, and schemed to get Omega Supreme. As the name implies, he was the end all/be all of Transformery excess in the winter of 1985 (or was it 84?). He cost $50. I went to K-mart frequently to look at the massive box, drooling at the awesome mural image of Transformers in space, blasting each other. I read the little stats for him printed on the box, with the maxed out firepower and strength rating, and hyperventilated on the few occasions Omega Supreme appeared on the cartoon.
Problem was, there wasn’t a whole lot of money going around growing up, and I knew he was too expensive. 
Still, I prayed, and hoped, and begged.
I opened my presents that Christmas Eve, and he wasn’t there. That night tho, I snuck over to see what Santa dropped off (again, as is my childhood wont), and damned if Omega wasn’t sitting there, out of the box, in robot mode, big massive gun hand pointing right at me.
It was the happiest day of my young life.
Time went on, and in the summer of 1986 the Transformers animated movie came out. The ads would come on TV, and I’d be transfixed, taking in all the awesome. The colors were brighter than the show, the explosions were more explody, the robots were shiner. There were new robots, and rumors of huge changes to the Transformers pantheon!
I never saw that movie in the theaters. I heard, tho, as time went on, that Optimus Prime, that mighty red truck, the leader of the Autobots, the savior of little boys, died that summer.
Man, I tell you what, that hit me hard. I was afraid to admit it, because who wants to admit that they’re crying over a cartoon, but I had a hard time. That summer, my favorite teacher moved away (she taught the gifted class at Mountain Creek Elementary), and my cousins friend, who I had met a time or two in South Carolina, died in an automobile accident. The three things combined, and weighted my little 3rd grade heart down.
But I really think it was Optimus that did it. He was a hero to the target market. He was a massive truck, who turned into a massiver robot, who’d get down and play basketball with orphan kids. He cared about all of these little puny creatures on Earth, and died defending them. Wired called him the father to a generation of latchkey kids. I don’t think I’d go quite that far, but then I had a Dad, and wasn’t necessarily a latchkey kid.
I was just in the target market, and he was the hero.
So, today, at 29, in 2007, 21 years after he died the first time, I’m excited about seeing him. Bay may well screw it up, but I’m not expecting much, except to maybe see my boys have the enthusiasm and happiness that I had at their age, with a bowl of cereal, and a badass robot.