Deliverance

I was not into actual Transformer toys when I was a kid, so I was not freaking out to see the first movie when it came out. Thinking back, I'm not even sure I saw it in theaters. But whenever I did see it first, I was hooked.

It was exactly what it was supposed to be: an action movie that provides some funny moments, good looking people, cool-looking robots, and big explosions. It's not Academy Award worthy, but it delivers.

Revenge of The Fallen does as well.

Yes, the movie is probably too long. The first one was too. One of the parts of the movie I didn't like was that because of the success of number one, the filmmakers decided to make this movie on a little grander scale and branched out to other countries, namely Egypt, France and times in 17,000 BC. While this did a good job of advancing the story, it got real confusing at times as to what you were watching. There were a lot of battle scenes, which were exciting to watch, but could have been cut back on time.

Another confusing aspect to me was the purpose of Sam Witwicky's roommate at college. When I was listening to him explain his website, I could not totally grasp what its purpose was. It sounded like it was about alien conspiracies, but then he went into this thing on kitten calendars, and then he had a "crew" finding videos online and trying to get credit for them first or something like that. Maybe I'm ignorant, but until I see the movie again and I can focus in, someone has to explain what this was about.

However, like I've said before, what makes a movie good to me is how I feel when leaving the theater, or room, or wherever I saw the film. This film leaves you with "I want to kill some big freaking robots!".

Hot Rod, a movie I just half-watched, gives you the "Wow, I'm glad I got that free from the library". Different feeling.

It seems to me that sometimes "professional" movie critics take the job too seriously. They'll look into things like production values, chemistry on screen between actors, and other things like that. Yes, theres an audience for those things, but the bottom line is, did you enjoy the movie? Would you watch it again?

I hate to go in another direction here, but this is the problem with the Academy Awards. I can't tell you how many of these so-called "great" movies I've tried to watch and haven't been able to finish. Yeah, there's great acting in them. Yeah, there's drama. Yeah, there's twists and turns. Yeah, Meryl Streep is in it.

Who cares? Would you ever watch "Revolutionary Road" twice?

Do you want see Mickey Rourke die at the end of the Wrestler again? (That was my interpretation).

My theory is everyone needs to relax: it's only a movie. Just entertain me.

The bottom line is, you're going to feel good (maybe tired), after you see Transformers 2.

It's exactly what you expected.

My streak of fantastic movies ended, but I'll say I went 1 for 4 instead of 3 for 4 at the plate last night.

Rating: 3 stars

Note: just to clarify on movie ratings, my system is not exactly balanced. For example, a jump from 2 stars to 2 ½ stars is smaller than the jump between 2 ½ and 3 stars, and so on and so forth. So do not think a 3 star movie is just a little bit worse than a 3 ½ star movie. It's actually a pretty big swing. Come to think of it, I should probably revise my system. Oh well.

Another note: Relax, I will be getting back to sports material soon. I hope to update the Tincaps soon and whenever else something pops up I want to write about, I will. Thanks guys.