Rob Bricken Watches Transformers(ers) so you don't have to

And thank god for that. I don't think I have the constitution to withstand it. Here:

Why would a robot need to fart, pee, or vomit? And why would it need testicles?
Michael Bay does not understand what a robot is.
...
Why can only a Prime kill the Fallen? Why can Jetfire teleport? Why can the Fallen wave a staff and make shit fly around? Why do actual cars and Autobots get sucked into Devastator's maw, but John Turturro and that other kid can run around?
Because... because FUCK YOU, that's why.
....
If you had to pick a single scene that exemplifies Michael Bay's utter disdain for story and continuity, what would it be?
When five Decepticons sink to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve Megatron's corpse. A submarine tracks five "subjects" going down, and when they get there, one of the Decepticons is killed to give parts to Megatron. 5 -1 +1 = 5, right? No, because the sub somehow tracks "six" subjects coming up. Not only is this very basic math, this is the simplest of script errors. It could not possibly have been more than one page apart in the script. And yet Michael Bay either didn't care to notice or didn't give a fuck. "Math? Math is for pussies. My movies are about shit blowing up, man."
...
Could you sum up the film in one line of its dialogue?
"I am standing directly beneath the enemy's scrotum."

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a bad movie

There, I said it. 

UPDATE: Slumdog Millionaire is alright, I guess, but it's no great shakes. 

Discuss

"The Incredible Hulk" really sucks

I'm sorry to report that it is far worse than the Ang Lee version. This does not bode well for the proposed Avengers movie.

How does it suck? Let me count just a few of the many ways:

* The action pieces are boring, poorly composed, and full of jump cuts that were probably supposed to mitigate the CGI, but succeed only in making it hard to see what's going on.

* The character's motivations, especially for the most important decisions in the movie, were nonsensical.

* Tim Roth is probably an understated supervillain in real life, but other than his, the acting was really bad.

* The Hulk's CGI face was expressive enough to reveal that even its acting was terrible.

This is just one blogger's opinion. Have you seen it? What did you think?

The nuclear option

Operation Ivy Nuclear Test, October 31, 1952 (NARA) by pingnews.

I'm not a big believer in vast corporate-media conspiracy theory, but how else can one explain why reporters seem to have such short memories?

A quick search of Google News reveals that absolutely no mainstream media outlets are bothering to point out the fact that--not very long ago--the same Republicans who've been using the filibuster all year were ready to change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster. In fact, the only applicable Google News result mentioning "the nuclear option" is from Think Progress. At least they do a nice job of it, offering up the following quotes:

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS): “[Filibustering] is wrong. It’s not supportable under the Constitution. And if they insist on persisting with these filibusters, I’m perfectly prepared to blow the place up.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spokesman: “Senator McConnell always has and continues to fully support the use of what has become known as the ‘[nuclear]’ option in order to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate.”

It's incredibly frustrating!

Internet ghosts

W.B. Yeats obituary @ Drumcliffe by ~C4Chaos.

The USA Today recently gave a brief report concerning the victims of the Virginia Tech Massacre: “Slain Students Pages to Stay on Facebook”. The social networking website’s administration decided that these students’ profiles will not be taken down; instead, they will be remain frozen in their last updated state. This decision goes against Facebook’s policy of removing profiles of the recently deceased out of respect for their privacy, but this is not a new phenomenon. There is simply no way for these websites to keep track of which of their users are dead or alive - the dead are all online now; they “live” on websites like Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, or Flickr, and they’re not going anywhere.

Yikes. I don't think they realize how many small traumas this is going to cause. I'm still a little leery of signing on to Myspace ever since I saw a recently deceased acquaintance being advertised in the "cool new people in your area" section. What's worse was clicking through to his page and reading the comment posts by friends of his that clearly didn't know he had died.

BoingBoing: Facebook profiles, dead or alive. No, seriously. Dead? Or alive?

Battlestar Galactica thread

A terrible meltown? Or the most terrible meltdown in sci-fi television history? Discuss in the comments.

UPDATE: Past the jump, check out John Aravosis of Americablog, who has found out why eveything turned to shit.

Just watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. All I can say is, good riddance. Never has a TV show gone from brilliance to crap in such short order. It's only the third season and they have already destroyed one of the best television shows ever. It's as if the writers all suffered a mass aneurysm this year. It's not even the same writers, it can't be (I think they moved the real writers over to the new spin-off - of course, if these are still the original writers, then they're really in trouble). It's 2am on a Monday morning, so I'm permitting myself a little latitude to vent about a TV show most of you probably haven't watched. But I love TV, and I know TV. This series was amazing television. And now it's pathetic, predictable, nauseatingly unbelievable crap. I just can't understand how something so good could so quickly turn so awful.

...

PS Okay, it's all making sense now. Check out this interview with the executive producer over at Salon.com. Basically, he says that a lot of the show is him just winging it and changing things at the last minute, "organically."

Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?

A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes.

And this:

We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly.... You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it.

And this:

In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.

That explains a lot. He just changes major parts of the plot on a moment's notice, at the last minute. Well, I got news for you. It shows.

UPDATE 2: There's going to be a straight-to-DVD movie prequel about the Battlestar Pegasus during the break. Perhaps we can all just will this spring season out of existince.