Clunker Dept.

The toy that does all the playing for/at you - scanners

Why waste spleen on Michael Bay? Because it was 2.5 hours of interminable badness. I'm not being facetious or cute when I say I thought it was much longer than it was. I explained it this way to a friend last night: A critic vents after a bad movie because they feel like they have to retaliate. Imagine you're at a dinner party and you hear some blowhard hold forth on a subject he knows VERY LITTLE about, one you happen to know A LOT about it. Imagine the rising urge to chime in with "Well, actually..." every time the guy says something even more stupid and outrageous than the last thing. Now imagine that guy got the floor for 2.5 hours before you got a chance to speak. THAT'S why critics write angry.

I posted in the same thread, although my comment was a great deal shorter.

Movie critics are most offended by it for reasons I can fathom pretty closely. For the most part, many of them had to sit through it — it's their job, after all — and they look at it and say amazing amounts of money and technology thrown away for something that amounts to Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots: Live and In Concert.

So what's the big deal? people say. If someone wants to enjoy a big dumb movie, why not let them? Sure, but there are some of us who feel complicit in a crime against one's imagination whenever we say things like that.

Here's my counter-offer. You want something big and stupid where things blow up? Go see Doomsday. And if someone liked Transformers but took a miss on that one, I'll be scratching my head.

(Update: I've just been informed that bashing Transformers is now officially passé as a blog subject. Next post I return to talking about high school girls who attach automatic weapons to the stumps of severed limbs.)