Nelson Eddy would be 107 today if he hadn’t died 42 years ago, but that’s show biz. With his partner Jeanette MacDonald he was part of one of the most popular film musical teams in Hollywood history, albeit one whose audience hasn’t grown much past people who remember them first hand.   But hey, judge for yourself. Here they are singing their signature song, “Indian Love Call”:

And here’s another for you kids who think Mel Brooks wrote the songs for Young Frankenstein:

Unusually for such a successful performer, Michael Jackson seems to have harbored no ambition to become a movie star. Maybe making videos gave him more than he cared for of being in front of the camera; maybe they spoiled him for a working experience that would not be entirely under his control. Or maybe he learned from the example of fellow 80s superstar Madonna, whose desperation to be a movie star was evident in each increasingly ill-chosen film project she accepted.
Then again, maybe it was the troubled production and poor box office of The Wiz, Sidney Lumet’s 1978 adaptation of the Broadway hit that reset The Wizard of Oz into a soul milieu, that made him determined to wrest control of his musical career. (The film was where he met producer Quincy Jones.)
Jackson did make two non-musical appearances in films that you’re not likely to see in any of the obituaries that will consume the world media this weekend. The first was an amusing cameo in the generally woeful Men in Black II:

The second, unfortunately, was in Miss Cast Away & The Island Girls (2005), which may well rank at the bottom of the barrel of lousy spoof movies that have proliferated in the wake of Scary Movie. Jackson apparently was a friend of director Bryan Michael Stoller, and let him shoot the movie on his Neverland Ranch. The movie does all it can to capitalize on Jackson’s brief appearance, and the DVD features a “Making of” short that may stand as the singer’s final filmed appearance. (Thanks to Ed of MediaFunhouse for uncovering this.)

Like just about every adult reviewer who saw the first Transformers movie in 2007, I was astonished at how good it was. It wasn’t simply that it was better than anyone expected from a movie made for an audience of 8 to 25 year old males: Director Michael Bay smartly balanced his digital effects with several interweaving storylines and multiple characters who held your attention through the film’s two and one-half hours. And you never lost a sense of awe at the size of the giant robots, culminating in a spectacular finale set on the streets of I forget which major American city.

The paradigm of the filmmaker who works with techniques honed in commercials and music videos, Bay has a reputation for overkill. But often as not he deliver solidly entertaining movies like Armageddon, The Rock or the underrated The Island.

So it’s a disappointment to have to report how lousy the sequel is. I won’t attempt to recount the plot, which essentially brings more giant robots both good and evil to Earth to duke it out. Someone apparently decided that the success of the first movie (which grossed $700 million worldwide) was entirely due to the sight of giant robot battles, and so this sequel eliminates most any other story concerns to concentrate on that. (It’s like the current remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which is inferior to the original because it cut out all the ancillary stories and characters that made the 1974 movie so engrossing.)

The opening sequence, a battle in a European city, gives you so much in terms of special effects that there’s nothing left for the rest of the movie to do: there’s no sense of anticipation.  It’s like a monster movie where you see the monster at the beginning. And maybe it’s just me, but I find it frustrating that the giant robots are never still long enough to get a good look at their details. Optimus Prime appears to be comprised of a scrap heap that somehow holds together—is there a design there? If so, let us see!

Even the gag central to the line of toys from which the franchise originated years ago—that these robots can be folded into cars, trucks, and other common vehicles—is treated perfunctorily. Watching them digitally change shape is substantially less fun than a young child might have at doing the same thing with a cleverly designed toy he can hold in his hands.

As for the humans, Shia LaBeouf is back, well on his way to becoming the Corey Feldman of his generation. The story ships him off to an Eastern university whose student population seems to consist entirely of technonerds and Maxim models. Megan Fox is also back as his girlfriend, in which role she is photographed slightly less pornographically than she was last time, but not by much. Bay, whose first directing credit was for a Playboy Centerfold video, so often photographs her running in slow motion that you start to wonder if she got paid by the mile. (Or by the bounce.)

John Turturro is also back to play comic relief, though he’s reduced to buffoon status. An actor of this caliber shouldn’t have to expose his ass on camera for the sake of a cheap joke, though I’m sure his salary for this was enough to fund another independent film he might want to direct.

The whole film is pretty much a matter of killing time until we get to a dull climax set in an Egyptian desert. Suffice to say that giant robots fighting amid sand dunes is much less interesting to look at that giant robots fighting amid skyscrapers. Along the way we get leg-humping robots, farting robots, and street-talking robots who are this films’ equivalent of Jar Jar Binks.

The first Transformers proved that you could make a special effects blockbuster that appealed to all audiences. This sequel only proves that lightening doesn’t strike twice.

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I imagine that someone in Hollywood looked at a calendar and noticed that it’s been a few decades since they used one of their standard templates, the one that involves putting modern comedians in a prehistoric setting. Maybe it’s because they overused it in the late 70s/early 80s, with diminishing results: Life of Brian, Caveman, History of the World Part 1, Wholly Moses.

And so we have Year One, starring Jack Black, Michael Cena, and a lot of people who you’ve seen in Judd Apatow movies. Apatow produced this, which I will point to in the future as proof that I don’t automatically like everything Apatow touches. It was directed—and here’s the key—by Harold Ramis, who was with Second City for a spell back in the 70s and made enough famous friends there to guarantee himself a long career.

As far as I’m concerned, Ramis has directed exactly one good movie: Groundhog Day. Sure, his name is on a lot of hits, but they’re all movies that got by on the strength of their casts. Uwe Boll could have directed Caddyshack and Analyze This without hurting them much.

I’m going to have to apologize for this next remark in advance, but Year One was written by one Gene Stupnitsky—and it looks like it was written by a Stupnitsky.

I suspect Ramis thought he could get away once again with coasting on the public appetite to see his stars. But Black’s limited schtick wore out its welcome somewhere before the second reel of Nacho Libre, and Cena is too bland not to have to depend on strong material.

You could tell in advance that Hollywood had no faith in it because theaters, which tend to cram summer movies onto as many screens as they can get away with, are mostly running this on a single screen. Crowds, in other words, are not expected to be a problem.

Here’s how bad it is: all of the funniest stuff in the movie is in the trailer. And there’s nothing funny in the trailer, which you can see below.

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It’s hard to have anything intelligent to say about a movie when you can’t figure out why it was made in the first place. Land of the Lost is a $100+ million movie based on a Saturday morning TV show that ran for three years in the mid-1970s. The show was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, who also gave kids of the era “H. R. Pufnstuf” and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” (film adaptations of which are also in the works), as well as “Lidsville,” “The Brady Bunch Hour,” and “The Krofft Superstar Hour with the Bay City Rollers.” (MacDonalds commercials featuring Ronald McDonald and the other denizens of Hamburgerland weren’t made by the Kroffts, but they sure look like they were.) If you grew up in that era, I guess you might have some nostalgia for the cheesy cheapness of those shows. Will Ferrell, who stars in the movie and presumably was the 800 pound gorilla behind it, was seven when the show premiered. But as far as I know from friends who consider themselves Kroffts fans, what they enjoy is the surreal aspect of regular people interacting with manic characters in bizarre costumes that don’t even try to be plausible on sets made on a budget that apparently couldn’t afford papier mache. In other words, an expensive Kroffts remake is by definition dead in the water. For the non-fan who won’t be able to discern any subtle references to the show which the writers have worked into the script (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt), there’s pretty much nothing of any interest here. It consists of ninety minutes of Ferrell, Anna Friel and a slightly-less-unbearable-than-usual Danny McBride running around an “alternate universe” (how they got there isn’t worth the explanation) being chased by CGI dinosaurs and foiling the universal domination plans of some bipedal lizards. The special effects are adequate, the characters utterly uninteresting, and the jokes way too PG-13 to make this suitable for young children. There’s even a joke about how dumb the Polish are, which I thought went out in 70s.

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I was never a particular fan of David Carradine, “Kung Fu” having hit the airwaves just past the time when I broke my addiction to television. Nothing against him, mind you, I just never saw him in a role that really caught my attention. (I will shamefacedly admit to not having seen him as Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory or the film he directed as a labor of love, Americana.) But I was always interested in him, as an outgrowth of having followed the career of his father, the character actor John Carradine.

The elder Carradine saw himself as a Shakespearian actor, and for all I know he may have been a fine one on stage. In movies, though, he was relegated to villainous roles in an endless stream of B horror movies. In the best of them, he took over the role of Dracula from Bela Lugosi and reconceived it. As for the worst of them, well, there are dozens of them, and you can’t believe he was ever so desperate for money as to bother appearing in them.

David Carradine spoke at times of his carreer as having started as an act of revenge against what happened to his father. I don’t know if his brothers Keith and Robert shared that; the fact that there are so many Carradines in the business alone is a kind of revenge.

He certainly inherited his father’s work ethic, having made more than 220 appearances in film and on television. You’d be hard pressed to name more than a few of them, and when he did show up in a hit, like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, most people reacted as if he’d just come out of retirement.

(For all that Tarantino likes to cast his childhood favorites in leading roles, it hasn’t helped a lot of their careers. Sure, Pulp Fiction did wonders for John Travolta. But can you name any of the 40 movies Carradine made after Kill Bill? DId Pam Grier and Robert Forster’s careers take off again after Jackie Brown? Did you ever see Lawrence Tierney again after Reservoir Dogs? Did Sonny Chiba breakthrough to the mainstream after Kill Bill?)

Anyway, Carradine is dead, and while I didn’t get the lump in the throat that fans of “Kung Fu,” it’s sad news anyway, for one of two reasons. If he did indeed kill himself, it flies in the face of a man who claimed to have found peace in spiritual studies. (He knew nothing about martial arts when he took the role of Caine, but the role piqued his interest.) Still, it might be even worse if the other theory is true, the one that has lead to hundreds of smirking blog posts all day today and which, if true, will append itself to the man’s name for as long as he is remembered. I suppose an accidental end to a good life is better than suicide as a remedy for a life no longer valued. But no one deserves to be remembered as a dirty joke.