transformers 2: bigger, longer, more disappointing

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1055369/

i went to see transformers 2 on a day when it was hot. really hot. i sat all the way through it primarily because the theater was air conditioned.

sometimes i wonder whether i am getting too old to enjoy modern action films. for example, the shaky camera thing. my tired old eyes just cannot follow anything that is happening on screen when they do that. perhaps it is time for me to invest in eyeglasses and suspenders and a perpetually bewildered facial expression. another thing that bothers me is the shift from treating femail leads as characters with dialogue that happen to be eye candy to treating them as characters that are eye candy and happen to have dialogue. would angie dickinson (aka, "feathers" in rio bravo, 1959) have put up with a role like megan fox did? no, of course not. angie dickinson had self-respect. megan fox probably has an agent who heard the term once and whose job it is to protect her from exposure to such things. i quite frankly think that they could have seamlessly replaced the femail lead in this film with porn kiosks in the theatre lobby. this would have had two positive effects: number one, a new business opportunity for some clever entrepreneur and number two, the movie would have lost about an hour of useless drivel.

where was i? right, transformers. they are giant robots, except for the small ones, that can turn into other stuff. except some of them do not turn into other stuff. i think. the camera was too shaky for me to really tell. anyway, you probably already knew all that. did you also know that transformers are overly dramatic and amazingly stupid? if i were a robot, i could rule them all simply by *refraining from doing obviously stupid things*. i mean, really. the decepticons did exactly one thing right, the entire movie, which was to compromise the human's communications. the humans, of course, should have remembered, from the first movie, that decepticons know how to break their communications systems and moved to more LOS-based comms and steganographic techniques, but sure, i get it, they have to move the plot along, and none of their good writers were in that day. or any other day.

also, how do you *forget* about having an extra piece of the matrix floating around? if i had a piece of this matrix thing, i would not give it to megan fox to hang onto for me. oh hell no. that shit stays on my person at all times. *all* times.

in conclusion, if you are thinking that you will go watch transformers 2, i recommend that you think twice and come to the opposite conclusion the second time.

wasabi

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281364/

lots of face-punching. otherwise kind of campy. god i love face-punching.