Downtown O-town

      This last week, the Casey Anthony trial made downtown Orlando a bit more of a focal point than it usually is. The amount of media and bystanders this last week has made navigating downtown a pretty big pain in the butt!

   Downtown Orlando, bless it's heart, is pretty small. I do like doing shoots in urban areas and I have done the best I can with Orlando. Here are some shots that I have managed in this small area in the last year and a half or so:

Deus ex Machina, on overdrive: Transformers 3

  One week ago tonight, I was in Miami at Sun Life stadium for a U2 concert. I had purchased tickets for this concert about two years ago and the concert was supposed to be last summer, but Bono banged up his back and had to postpone the concert a whole year. Which finally happened last Wednesday.

   The set and the performance were predictably amazing. Except for one song. About halfway during the concert, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullens left the stage for an acoustic song that Bono and the Edge did. Bono said that Transformers 3 would be opening in theaters the next night, the director Michael Bay was at the concert in the VIP box, and U2 did a song for the movie, and, well, here's the song - and it was pretty bad. After they had finished, Bono said something to the effect that, "Well, maybe we should have practiced that a bit more".

   They recovered quickly and the rest of the concert was well worth the 2 year wait and the insane amount of money I paid for "cheap seats".

   So, the concert was awesome, director Michael Bay being there the night before Transformers opened was pretty cool, the blown Transformers song was pretty un-awesome, and the movie Transformers 3 was…

   …anti-awesome. :(

   At least I thought so.

   I did kind of like the first Transformers. It was a pleasant distraction. The second Transformers was an absolute mess. I had heard this Transformers was a little better. So I gave it a whirl this afternoon. 

   (Insert sigh here.)

   The problem with porn, from a story-telling standpoint, is that it frequently suffers from a lack of solid motivation for its characters. For example, I stopped by a convenience store today for a quick slice of pizza. In porn-world, the chick who took my money would have been much more attractive than she actually is, a brief verbal exchange of a questionable nature would have occurred, and naughtiness would have ensued. This, in the dirty-movie-version of my day, would have been the first in a series of carnal muse acts that pop seemingly from the ether with little or no motivation.

   There are other objections, I am told, to porn that have nothing to do with the mechanics of storytelling. And there may be objections to my mentioning something so unseemly, but there is a method to this smutty madness.

   Porn, when it has any story at all, tends to be sexual set pieces strung together with the least effort made to plausibility possible.

   As I watched Transformers 3 this afternoon, I couldn't help but thinking I was watching action-porn - one badly motivated scene of mechanical violence to the next. And how the characters showed up in exactly the right time at the right place time after time made me roll my eyes. And the way that they were saved time after time in the most improbable manner available just pissed me off. 

   Was it spectacular? Yes. Was it a "big" summer movie? Yes. Was it a good movie? No. I found it exhausting and annoying. 

   One good thing that I really enjoyed about this movie was… no Meagan Fox. That was a bonus. :)

   A cynical part of me thinks that Michael Bay considers the summer movie-going public to be a bunch of mindless automatons only concerned with big things blowing up and breaking. 

   And that cynical part of me is glad that U2 screwed up the song for his movie last Wednesday night.