What I am saying is this: Transformers 2 sounds like a really truly awful movie, and there are some eye-wateringly valiant attempts to summon righteous anger, or at least a belly laugh, from being forced to watch it for the critic’s livelihood.

I’ve collected the most successful of such attempts. Enjoy, and remember, I love you as much as Michael Bay sucked when he made Titanic, and that’s a lot.

Those who think “Transformers” is a great or even a good film are, may I tactfully suggest, not sufficiently evolved. I hope they climb a personal ladder into the realm of better films, until their standards improve. They don’t need to spend a lifetime with the water only up to their toes.

—Roger Ebert, “I’m a Proud Brainiac”

So the Decepticons made a slutty robot to attend his college and enrolled her in classes and put her in on-campus housing just in case Sam ended up being important at some point in the future?
Apparently. It was an elaborate plan, but it sure paid off.
I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I’m just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.
Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.
Fuck you.
I’m serious.
Fuck you. There’s no way.
It’s true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa’s head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he’s awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.
I may be ill.

—Rob Bricken, “Rob’s Transformer’s 2 F.A.Q.’s”

Director Michael Bay has yet to direct a movie that can be described as anything but deeply and arrogantly dumb. It’s mildly terrifying, in fact, that the first Transformers is likely the most clever movie he’s ever made.

—John Scalzi, “Relax! Transformers Is Not the End of Cinema as We Know It”

Transformers is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane.

—Charlie Jane Anders, “Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie”

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because thy require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

—Edsger Dijkstra

Wittgenstein: What a mathematician gives you is a model which can then be used for certain purposes.

What is the relationship between trying to solve it and solving it? How would it be intelligible to say, “He looked for it and then found it”? Isn’t it absurd to say that?

Turing: Is it not at all absurd. It is like “He looked for a white lion” or “a white animal between a lion and a horse”.

Wittgenstein: But it is not like that. The very point of this discussion is to see the great difference…Have you found a white animal if you’ve drawn it? Could I draw the construction of the heptagon before I find it?

Turing: One could explain how to recognize the construction of the heptagon.

Wittgenstein: Yes, but that is very different from the description of a white lion. In the case of the white lion you can say what it will be like when you’ve found it. But not so in the case of the heptagon…The result of one’s search for the construction is that one finds that the question is meaningless.

Isn’t it queer–you look for something by drawing things. What the hell? You’re not looking for something.

I knew my way to Alice. I knew where to find her. I walked across the campus that night writing a love plan in my head, a map across her body to follow later. It wouldn’t be long. She was working late hours in the particle accelerator, studying minute bodies, pushing them together in collisions of unusual force and cataloging the results. I knew I’d find her there. I could see the swell of the cyclotron on the scrubby, sun-bleached hill as I waked the path to its tucked-away entrance. I was minutes away.

Unlike the physicists, my workday was over. My department couldn’t pretend it was on the verge of something epochal. When the sun set we freed our graduate students to scatter to movie theatres, bowling alleys, pizza parlors. What hurry? We were studying local phenomena, recent affairs. The physicists were describing the beginning, so they rushed to describe it or bring about the end.

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem

–Lunch guest today

“Work that endures…is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own traits and it is also a map of the world…As long as an author merely relates events or traces the slight deviations of a conscience, we can suppose him to be omniscient…but when he descends to the level of pure reason, we know he is fallible. Reality is inferred from events, not reasoning; we permit God to affirm ‘I am that I am’, not to declare and analyze, like Hegel or Anselm.”

–Jorge Louis Borges, “The First Wells” (Borges: A Reader, 172)

Remember people, I slog throught these wastelands to bring you gold!

[Continued after break due to suitably adult language]

The whole tree of knowledge debacle was all about this.

God is all like “No distribution of my IP”.
Then the Snake is all like “I haves the 0-day”.
And then Eve is all like “Adam, dude, here’s a torrent”.
Adam to Eve “No way, God will totally rootkit our ass”.
Eve back to Adam “Chillax, guy”.
Then Adam is like “K”.
And God totally kickbans them from the server.

Bonus: “I kicked Bono’s ass at Warcraft III!”

–Steve McConnell, Code Complete, p. 686.

–Unamed Of Counsel (and ex-Judge), upon opening his new Outlook email client for the first time.

“Boy, I would sure be happy with a head of hair like that!” quipped the former mayor of Chattanooga as he exited the men’s room.

Now, many people have commented, and usually in a flatteringly-favorable fashion, about my bouffant. Some have, in Dionysian fits, touched, twaddle, twirled, and stroked it, usually without its owners consent.

But this marks a new apogee of fame for my locks, their most famous fan yet. Should Mr. Bob Corker win his Senate 2006 campaign, my hair will have been recognized by one of only an august hundred of the people’s representatives. Perhaps he’ll introduce a bill for me or something. Then I shall rule the known world!

Back to my response, or more properly, back to my lack of a response. Being situated in an unaccommodating position in the men’s room, I could not turn and face Mr. Corker, which took up the valuable mental processing time that was otherwise needed to formulate a crafty and clever response. So instead I twisted my head around and in an unnaturally loud voice for such close quarters backhanded a “Thanks, thank you…”, whipping my neck back from it’s untenable position and possibly inducing whiplash. Don’t worry, I’m not suing. But I work for a law firm, and the only time I see people is during bathroom forays.

–McConnell, p. 96-97.

–Steve McConnell, Code Complete, Second Edition, p. 40.

Is the IT department the new business consultant? Continued on Monday…