In the interest of doing something positive ...

Rachel Weisz plays a human transformer in the amazon production
feature called _Complete Unknown_. She repeatedly changes her
identity, becoming a nurse, a research assistant on frogs who
claim to have lived in Tasmania, a magician's assistant in China,
a hippie wandering in Mexico ... in other words, a non-violent
James Bond/Jason Bourne composite. She must be a genius to be
convincing as all these, and indeed she seems to be a piano prodigy
before dropping out of college and off the grid. Although "off
the grid" is precisely the opposite of what it used to mean. She
must have managed to do research on these alternative identities by
using the internet (which she is repeatedly shown doing). The
film doesn't talk about technology, but in a way, the continued
advances of smart phones and faster network, dumping previously
obscure knowledge at our finger-tips, can one day enable such
fast learning, perhaps even with the help of medical "re-wiring"
of our brain. Another technological breakthrough -- the use
of robotic surrogates -- may also point to a future where we
can experience multiple careers.

The fact that she has been a pianist betrays the premise though.
One becomes good at being a pianist, a nurse, and a lab technician
by reptition, by practice, trial and error. Also giving the lie
to this is the sequence where Weisz's character Jenny/Alice/whatever,
and her one time lover Tom played by a thoroughly unpleasant Michael
Shannon, visit Danny Glover and Kathy Bate's apartment. Alice
goads him into emulating her, into pretending to be a doctor
dispensing advice to the older couple, suggesting that preparation
is not needed.

By the way, Alice's behavior is obviously that of an actor/actress,
so there is a meta-cinema aspect to the film. But good actresses
prepare like hell; they don't just walk on set and deliver.
Rachel Weisz the actress gives an extraordinarily sensitive
and exciting performance in a film that is all about her. The
one thing she doesn't have, even though she has substantial
theater background, is voice control. All her characters talk
in the same studied, assured way. Michael Shannon's Tom, as
her foil, has stayed put in one place, tried in vain to push
through legislation. He is caught up in the immovable
establishment, while she has cut herself free but is unable
to put down any root or effect changes beyond herself. It is
an interesting film, maybe better suited as a miniseries to
explore the philosophical consequences. But the public seems
to hate it. After seeing this film, one wishes Rachel Weisz
had been tapped to play a replicant in the new _Blade Runner_.

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Armond White frequently praises Michael Bay's technical panache,
and the special effects in _Transformer: Age of Extinction_ are
indeed nothing to scoff at. The "transformer" machines have real
weight to them, unlike the handful of comic book superhero flicks
I have seen, which are so weightless they may as well be Saturday
morning cartoon cutouts.

The interactions between the human characters and the CGI ones are
amazing (at least on my tiny screen). Even the fights beween the
CGI machines are truly visceral, and have some semblance of logic
to them. (In the Marvel comics adaptations, although I have seen
very few of them, there is never any rhyme or reason why someone
would win or lose a fight; people just bludgeon each other until the
director got tired of of the scene.)

The reason I looked at this late entry of the franchise is that
Hong Kong is supposed to feature in it. Fortunately, not that
much of Hong Kong is destroyed in this edition. The new
skyscrappers owned by Communist China lost a lot of windows,
and the cross-harbor "Star Ferry" fleet is badly decimated,
but much of the carnage takes place in outlying areas (actually
inside China -- you can tell because most Hong Kong locations
have bilingual storefronts). The really quaint parts of the
ex-colony, including Victoria Peak on the main island, the
ingenius set of elevators that lead halfway up the peak, and
the shorefront between the island and the Kowloon peninsular,
are mostly untouched. Bay clearly doesn't know enough about
the place to commit too much sacrilege against it.

As for the story -- what story? It has the father-daughter-
would-be-suitor dynamics recycled from _Armaggeddon_, and the
usual corporation treasonous conspiracy. Beyond that, I am not
familiar with the back story, and barely paid attention to this
one anyway. The transformer machines are far less interesting
than Rachel Weisz, and their voices are much, much more
monotonous. What is amusing is that Michael Bay, notorious for
kissing up to the U.S. military, seems to curry favor with the
Chinese military -- up to a point. In one scene the Beijing
top brass are shown to declare, with clenched-jaw determination,
"we will do everything we can to protect Hong Kong!" (Two Hong
Kong separatists elected to the Legislative Council are in
danger of being disqualified by the Chinese government in
blatant violation of the Basic Law, so I almost threw up.) In
the event, four Chinese fighter jets show up to do a fly by
after all the fighting is over. It is hard to decide whether
this is due to incompetent story-telling or is a backhanded
slab to the Chinese. (The film clearly tries to court favor
with China audiences, even including a love interest in
Li Bingbing, who is the designated China audience surrogate
-- she is also in the Resident Evil films.)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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