Gordon Gekko, Hollywood’s preeminent swindling banker, is back.  Sent to jail in 1987 for practicing the “greed is good” mantra he preaches, Gekko finally gets out just in time to witness the global bitter fruits of decades of Wall Street greediness.  In his heyday Gordon the Gekko was one of the most notorious financial fraudsters in history.  The Big Apple was his playground and he was treated like its schoolmaster.  Those days are no more.  The aristocracy of modern New York doesn’t recognize him and even his suits seem to have lost a little of that playboy sheen.  Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), on the other hand, is an ambitious but naive up-and-coming trader reveling in million-dollar bonuses and untold luxuries.  Since Moore just happens to be dating Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan), the two greenback addicts inevitably cross paths.

“Money Never Sleeps” marks yet another of Stone’s honorable attempts at biting, satirical prescience, but fails to deliver any kind of finishing blow.  The setup is all savory goodness.  The opening scene is the film’s best wherein a prison guard returns Gekko’s personal belongings to him including a silk handkerchief, a gold money clip — sans money, and a mobile phone the size of brick, which immediately dates the old swindler as a dinosaur being released into a changing environment bearing no resemblance to the one which he once ruled.

Payoff, conversely, is something the film only delivers to its glamorized criminal characters.  Gekko, who corrupts Moore with his devious rationalizations and promises of the world, is a mere shell of his former quietly ferocious, Satanic diplomat — and a boring shell at that.

Josh Brolin as the Gekko stand-in is adequately seedy but never rises to the challenge of role that defined Michael Douglas’ career.  And the war between his character and LaBeouf’s seems downright laughable compared to the relationship between the Gekko of the past and Charlie Sheen’s character.

And for all his railing against unchecked corporate greed and casino capitalism, Stone and his writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, seem unable or unwilling to show any real consequences for engaging in such despicable behavior.  No real permanence is attached to any acts of excessive greed or poor choices, and only a fleeting attempt is made to show the terrible real-life results inflicted on the innocent thanks to a system that rewards inefficiency and irrational behavior.

Explosions!

2007′s “Transformers” was a mindless, tasteless, overly CGI-ed and under-plotted piece of explosion-driven schlock. Not a terribly good movie, but a reasonably good time nonetheless. It’s sequel, however, refuses to take its anti-intellectualism, anti-tolerance, anti-progress, anti-humanity, or anti-cinema lightly.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most aggressively bad movie I have ever seen. There may be passively worse films out there hampered by budget, time or resources, but no other film has ever managed to do so little with so much.

Director Michael Bay, not known for his subtlety, propels this mangled amalgam of badness to an unprecedented level of open disregard for characterization, emotional authenticity, basic continuity, moderation, balance, humanity or common sense.

If there was anything resembling a cohesive narrative this is the part where I would include a brief summary of the plot in order to set the stage and contextualize the critical evaluation to follow. But since I have so little to work with I’ll skip that part and attempt to explain my utter disdain for this piece of worthless refuse as clearly and concisely as possible.

The following are my categorized and enumerated arguments against “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”:

1. Misogyny – Can you name one female character in this film that isn’t either unnecessarily and exploitatively gorgeous or a subhuman bumbling buffoon?  Yeah, neither can I.  It’s also readily apparent that Bay has never set foot on a college campus, despite what his Wikipedia page may claim.  Each female is a more grossly exaggerated adolescent male fantasy than the last.  And you’d be hard pressed to find any acknowledgment of the existence of textbooks.

2. Nationalism/Jingoism – This is the type of ignorantly nationalistic, America always knows best, type of film that will find it’s way into regular rotation in the collections of the likes of Bush and Cheney.  Other countries… what are those?  Well, according to Bay’s movie, if you’re not a white American male, the measure of your existence is only fulfilled upon being mercilessly ridiculed and subsequently destroyed.  And why did Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) parents go to France?  For no other reason than that it gives the filmmaker an excuse to make fun of the French, of course.  And why open your film with the indigenous inhabitants of an ancient underdeveloped nation?  So the giant space alien robots can have something insignificant to destroy, of course.

3. Racism -The two concept Chevy bots, Skids and Mudflap, don’t simply perpetuate black stereotypes, they revel in their mockery of what is portrayed as an idiotic and inferior race.  Their baffling inclusion in the film, combined with the fact that virtually all non-whites are either brutally murdered or depicted as savages, dimwits, or terrorists, culminates in perhaps the most explicitly racist film since D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915).

4. Anti-intellectualism – I have no qualms with low-brow, action-driven concepts, or broad slapstick comedy. It all has its place.  But this piece of indulgent imbecility is an embarrassment to cognition.  Fart jokes, relentlessly crass and unfunny sexual references, and minorities being mocked and killed is what passes for comedy in this bizarro world.  “Revenge” is on such an elite level of awfulness that it may warrant inclusion in the Library of Congress as a singular catalyst of mass human de-evolution. It will likely be studied in film schools, and in anthropology and sociology classes for years as the top scholars in the world attempt to unravel the mystery of how one man’s demented vision can be so actively detrimental to the progress of life on earth.

5. Anti-humanity – Culture, after intelligence, is what scientists believe is the one great barrier between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Art, language, mathematics, philosophy, and government are singular achievements in the history of life on earth.  We built the pyramids for crying out loud!  But Bay only sees these great religious and political testaments of mankind’s ingenuity and determination as nothing more than cool junk to blow up.  And following an unbearably cacophonous sequence of catastrophic destruction, mayhem, and unspeakable bloodshed, Megan Fox delivers one of the most inhuman lines ever uttered in the history of film.  Instead of having been rendered speechless, or commenting solemnly on the horrific and tragic loss of human life and history she can only smile and say to her boyfriend, “It took all this to say you love me.”  What?!  This is a protagonist?  Nothing human could utter something that insensitive in the wake of such mind-boggling destruction and horror.

Maybe it’s all a dream. Or better yet, maybe Sam and Mikaela are secretly decepticons.  Hello trilogy! It’s hard to say if “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” stands alone as the worst movie ever made, but it’s definitely in the discussion.

The star of Michael Bay’s upcoming “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” confirms he will appear in director Oliver Stone’s follow up to “Wall Street” entitled, “Money Never Sleeps.”

LaBeouf describes the film as “a walk and talk money movie” that’s “wordy and heady.”

The “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” star will be joined in Stones’ picture by Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his role in the original 1987 film.

Filming is set to begin in August, something LaBeouf says should be like taking a college course saying he has “no concept” of the inner workings of the financial world.

“I dont know what … a credit derivitive is,” LaBeouf said. “I have no idea. I dont know what a CPO is. IPB. LVC. You gotta know ticker names.”

Paramount Pictures annouced Monday that the DreamWorks-produced “Transformers 3″ was scheduled for release July 1, 2011. Considering no casting or pre-production has been started for the film it seemed a little hasty. Yet, fanboys gushed over the thought of another film so soon, even before the first sequel, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” has even been released.

On Tuesday, however, director Michael Bay called out the studio on his blog saying, “Paramount made a mistake. They asked me on the phone, (and) I said yes to July 4 (weekend) — but for 2012. Whoops, not 2011! That would mean I would have to start prep in September. No way. My brain needs a break from fighting robots.” Indeed Michael. I think our collective brain needs a break from fighting robots, Shia LaBeouf running with a frightened look on his face, and Megan Fox substituting real acting with close-ups of her looking into the distance with contemplatively.