Much has been made about the fact that Michael Bay outfitted one of his robots with wrecking ball testicles in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but really, it's Bay who has the giant cojones. There are so many utterly shameless moments in this film that I could have filled another Movieline Nine with Bay's wacko, unfettered hubris, but for now, I'll stick to the movie's first hour and try to be non-spoilery.
So what exactly do I mean by "shameless"? Well, have a look at the very first item on our list and I think you'll get the picture:
1. Shia LaBeouf's college dorm room is outfitted with a gigantic poster of Bay's own Bad Boys 2. Just in case you miss it the first time it comes up (you won't, because the person next to you will begin snorting laughter), it receives its own loving close-up when Shia begins writing an equation on it later in the film.
2. There are two robots in the film called Mudflap and Skids, and despite being red and green, respectively, they are voiced in a way that clearly designates them to be the "black" robots. Also, Skids has a gold front tooth (no, I'm serious) and both cannot read.
3. Every single woman in this film is sexually objectified, save for John Turturro's mother. Every single one -- even Shia's mom! Whenever there is a scene set in a combat unit or government office, there are no women featured or even glimpsed because then they'd have to be wearing pants, presumably.
4. And from what I could gather, Shia attends a historic, Ivy League-type college that mandated short shorts as part of its co-ed integration.
5. One hot chick is revealed to be a Transformer, and naturally, we discover this when a mechanical tail comes out the back of her thin blue panties. You could allllmost make some sort of Freudian interpretation of this scenario and the fear it strikes in the male characters, except that it was clearly motivated by Bay going, "Let's get a pantie shot of this hottie."
6. At one point, two characters are in Paris eating escargot and they're accosted by a mime because that's all that happens in Paris, right? Those two things? That and maybe the Eiffel Tower gets hit by something and explodes.
7. Not to worry, though, because set amidst this stereotypical French tableau is a highly conspicuous Budweiser bottle. In fact, the product placement is so egregious and random in Fallen (for some reason, a huge Planters peanuts can is placed smack in the middle of a garage floor during one scene, because that's where one usually keeps food -- on the floor with nothing around it in a huge garage) that I practically expected them to rename Megan Fox's character as part of a lucrative branding deal ("Run, Sony Vaio! Run!").
8. Throughout the film, an evil government bureaucrat keeps making reference to a president who authorized him to override the plans devised by our benevolent military heroes. Right when you start wondering what paycheck-gobbling veteran actor they've tapped to play this president, a character announces, "President Obama has been taken to an underground bunker." So that's kind of weird.
9. OK, it's not in that first hour, but: those wrecking-ball testicles. Oh man. Yeah.