Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen Controversy
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hasn't even been out for 24 hours and its critics are already attacking the mega-blockbuster summer movie.
Eonline reports that some of the the critics anger seems to be aimed at the movie's twin autobots Skids and Mudflap, whose over-the-top, hip-hop-inspired vernacular and stereotypically black-sounding voices are, at best, racially and culturally insensitive and, at worst, grossly ignorant and offensive.
The blog site UGO is claiming that the movie seems to some how offend everyone...Muslims, Asians, Jews, Italians, Scots, German, the French, women....but that's a whole other story.
The twin autobots, when not incognito as Chevy concept vehicles, sport gold teeth, can't read and cite their place of origin as "da hood."
The New York Times' Manola Dargis describes their voices, provided by Tom Kenny and Reno Wilson, as "conspicuously cartoonish" in a way that indicates "minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood" as when The Phantom Menace reared its head 10 years ago. And AP critic Christy Lemire referred to the autobots as "Jar Jar Binks in car form."
Back in 99', George Lucas was scrutinized for unleashing his Jar Jar Binks character with his subservient, suspicously accent.
And, as CinemaBlend's Josh Tyler reminds us, Skids and Mudflap are more than "a collection of every bad stereotype imaginable, not targeted at any one ethnicity." There is no doubt that audiences will argue the various levels of offensiveness Transformers provides, but if that doesn't bother you the obscene amount of money that was spent building a bombastic visual spectacle atop a flimsy, cliché-ridden script will.
