Viva's back! Well it was only my words that ever went away for a while. Maybe I should write a self-help book like Good Blogging is Hard (believe in pots of gold and rainbows). And what is good blogging anyway? Ask any 'proper' writer and they'll tell you that writing everyday is torture or as Brit poet Philip Larkin once described modern jazz (compared to ye olde music) akin to sipping a quinine martini whilst taking an enema. Bloggers still don't get a very good press these days. Oftentimes they're treated a bit like the teeny bots in Transformers: the Dark of the Moon- pets jangling about the house making witty informed comments, admired for their metallic transformative nature but never quite taken as seriously as the big guys human or otherwise. i.e. if you were really any good wouldn't your words be helping save the planet or something e.g. writing for The New Yorker? ;)

Julia Roberts' 'house husband' Dean (Bryan Cranston) in Larry Crowne (according to her and our eyes) does little more than post a few comments each day and surf porn sites - his two published books spilling over his study in multiples. And seeing the aforementioned duo of films out this week gets you thinking along the lines of recent New York Times articles about taste in cinema, pleasure, high/low art etc etc. You'd be unlikely to ever find that discussion in the Brit newspapers. Over there, Hollywood has been forever thus only occasionally being given a seat at the same table as the 'long live left-wing 'art-house' cinema'.

Who are the 'normal' people that will want to see Transformers: the Dark of the Moon? Having established Viva probably wouldn't have seen this out of choice, would she have forked out the dollars for la hunky date? And why is it none of these men nowadays ever seem to have any money or always insist on going 'dutch'!? They can't all have been downsized like Larry Crowne can they? But Viva seems to be the only one who has this problem. C'est la Viva....So: where were we? -yes, machines doing unspeakable things to the planet. Now if humans in these movies are allowed to cry at the loss of a 'dear' machine, why don't we ever see the machines procreating? OK: I'll tell you where I'm going with this....

Viva has to admit that she enjoyed Transformers. Well, you know she's a bit biased towards things cosmic. Great recent photos from NASA's Spitzer telescope orbiting the sun. And anything must be good that gets us into the Carl Sagan frame of mind and into the 'there must be more to the universe than Brooklyn'. Have you seen the last clip of the YouTube Life in a Day in which an ordinary working girl posts her almost midnight reflection that in her day THAT day nothing exciting happened? And then the play out credit sequence is a snail close up on what looks like a hard-boiled egg as said escargot munches it's way through a little Chinese cracker saying, "Mind your own business". I wish I'd sent my clip in now. That denouement is so politically refreshingly incorrect - life is beautiful, everyone is equal blah di blah di blah. Viva loves Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (his real name meaning Mr. Person how alla monde can one get!). How he finds beauty and tranquility watching the daily round of the man who runs a corner store. But clearly THAT wasn't enough for Pessoa either! He had to create 100's of different personalities to write about the different ways he felt about our little planet.

So what in Gaia's name has all this to do with the Hollywood movie Transformers? The movie doesn't profess to be about real life but it is. It's French farce, except instead of doors frenetically flying open and shut we have the 'good guy' transformer machines from the last Transformers pic who've been helping humans, do battle with the bad bots who want ultimately to use humans as slaves to rebuild their own dead planet. Humans play masquerade games with other humans. Monsieur Dylan (Patrick Dempsey) secretly plots with the bots to be hailed the slave humans new leader. John Malkovich (Bruce) plots to save his hairstyle by being leader of a techno organisation and obsessed with color. The good human husband bots trick the bad husband bots into making them think they were 'done in'. And so on. Well not quite....

Viva kept wondering what footware Carly Miller had to save her pretty toes from annihilation - all that racing around the ruins as Chicago was pummeled to pieces. Director Michael Bay's shot list moves so fast in that last 45 minutes (of a 2.5 hour movie!) there was only a glimpse of low heeled strap on Carly having survived escape from the skyscraper eaten in half thence to shreds by the bad bots. Girls of NYC will crave for that pragmatic item of footwear. A merchandising point one doubts is in Paramount's arsenal;)

The trouble with our summer 'save humanity' blockbusters (including The Green Lantern) is that while they profess to be human there's little humanity in sight (a similar problem in Cars 2 though there we're talkin' about creative folks who have wit in abundance). Having said that, perhaps that path isn't such a stupid one to tread. Transformers: the Dark of the Moon is on the right track with their 'comic book' styling. It is funniest (though not often enough) when the reality is farcical. We first glimpse Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley)with her softly focussed bare derriere ascending the stairs (she was formally the Victoria's Secrets lingerie model) to greet boyfriend Sam in bed with white bunnies (stuffed variety). The set design is crumbly warehouse baroque and indeed this human couple could be straight out of Puccini's opera La bohème - both working/socialising with the jet-set though neither having the money to justly inhabit that world.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf)receives a medal from President Obama but is subsequently downsized (why...he smashed something in the Oval Office?, anyway not important). Every job interview he then has is akin to the hard-sell The Apprentice phi Beta cappa. But this couple of Sam and Carly are outside the box. And the movie seems to say that is precisely the reason why they survived. Much of their dialogue is risible and embarrassing - a cross between a chocolate bar ad and one for a sanitary towel. But again, this seems less accident than intention on the part of the filmmakers. NASA's power female Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand) plays the 'straight man' in all this (the end credits 'out take' of her kissing Seymour Simmons (John Turturro) should have been in that actual final moments of the film not an afterthought). The filmmakers also somewhat hedged their bets on the 'farcical' human qualities of the good bots (though not on the antics of the teeny ones) - bots have been working with humans long enough (half a century) to have picked up some nasty habits.

Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) was always 'in the box' but just never realized. 20 years as a cook in the Navy, 'Gaia' knows how many years as a salesman at U-Mart. Then one day he's downsized - simple telling low angle shot of his car pulling into a lovely suburban drive-way after just being told. OK. Maybe he's not the 'everyman' figure in everyone's mind's eye but Hanks (both as actor and director) makes you believe that Larry Crowne is America's Everyman.

This self-directed movie could be ever-so cloying. And no doubt some will find it thus. But Larry Crowne seems to be the type of Hollywood movie (it's actually Hanks own company Playtone together with France's Canal Plus and ex-Warner exec Rousselet) that was the reason Hanks entered his profession in the first place. A film about people. Hanks wrote the script with Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding - the film that became the bread-winner for Hanks production company) and while Larry Crowne feels 'scripted' it's nonetheless believable and endearing. And though 'scripted' the film's pacing never feels forced. Viva's not what you'd call a Julia Roberts 'fan' but she's certainly always harbored a 'soft spot' for Ms. Roberts. And she makes it easy to see why her disillusioned college teacher character Mercedes Tainot ended up with that husband of hers. He was probably the only male appendage even in long range whose body shared the flimsiest of intelligent life a few feet above. Ms Tainot helped of course by copious medicinal cocktail hours.

And what film (such as this) with movie stars these days is courageous enough to have a dig at Facebook and Twitter and the declining attention span our young Americans?! I can't for the life of me see why the same audience for Transformers wouldn't go 'ah....that was sweet' without a hint of irony for Larry Crowne. There are no bastards in this movie only nice, good people. How could that possibly reflect the real world? In rhetoric response, do we go to the movies ever to see the 'real world'? The irony of cinema is that it began early last century frightening the bejeezus out of audiences with trains hurtling into their seats. Ever since, the cinema has tried every which way to reclaim that illusion of innocent spectatorship involvement. 3D tries desperately and will always fail miserably because we've seen it all before. (Great fun for cinematographers, though). The New York Times did precisely its job in airing the Dan Kois debate over eating his “cultural vegetables” by attending 'art house' cinema.

Do people really want to be educated at the end of a long week Friday/Saturday night? And what is it to be educated anyways? Does comedy educate us? Viva would answer most certainly, it reminds us of our human truths. Whether we do anything about it is another problem entirely. Don't shoot the comic for his message only for his bad delivery. And if everyone has/is entitled to different tastes then how can Hollywood studios possibly gauge through test screenings whether a film will rise or fall?

A fascinating meditation on all this is a film that scooped many of the prizes at this year's Berlin Film Festival, A Separation. Initially one's heart sinks as it forebodes plodding social realism. The intricacy of its fabric, though, becomes ever more intriguing. We are all the same but different seems its cliched message. But like every cliche it began its life as a human truth. The by turns liberating and depressing truth ruthlessly unveiled by the internet is that we are all covering or coveting something. All wanting to be left alone and yet be secretly be the star of the show. The commerce of Hollywood and the internet want to personalize everything for us in order that our lives be happier and more fulfilling. But how do we know what we want when our taste is constantly tempted for good or ill? When we flirt with being 'something else'?

Maybe the privilege of being a bat stuck in a movie theater ain't such a bad thing. Maybe being somewhat removed from the world can be only a good thing in understanding it. And maybe, just maybe, things that go 'POW', 'WHAM', 'WHALLOP' and 'I LOVE YOU' can live quite symbiotically within the seaweed of words and images that is the semiotics of cinema. But as my photographer Mr. Fish observed (without even having seen Peter Sellers' Being There, "you mustn't pollute the water man". Respect. Respect.