Wow, what can I say! I mean, I am almost speechless, but I will try to continue. Tonight was a very special night in the Mickelson household. Netflix, my DVD purveyor of choice, sent me the Transformers movie, which I had near the top of my queue. I won’t say that I had high hopes for the film, but I figured that it would be at least entertaining. I could not have been more wrong. For only the second time that I can remember, I had to press Eject on my DVD player before the credits were rolling on screen. Michael Bay, you really have outdone yourself this time! Maybe you really did deserve the Oscar your CGI team concocted for you.

Let’s take a look at the characters. You have the annoyingly awkward teenage boy, who uses the eBay account name, “LadiesMan217″. You have the hot chick who is mad at her boyfriend. She gradually warms to annoyingly awkward teenage boy even though they do not seem to share any chemistry. The only thing that seems to keep her with the annoyingly awkward teenage boy is the fact that they happen to have the same scenes together. And then there are the transformers themselves. I don’t ever remember the transformers in the original cartoons having so many spikes and shit hanging off of them. And lets not forget the obvious product placement: All of the Autobots are American cars. I don’t remember Bumble Bee being a Camaro. When asked where they learned to speak English, Optimus Prime responded with “The World Wide Web”, and when asked how they found annoyingly awkward teenage boy, he responded “I found you on eBay”. ARGH!!!!

The clincher for me was the scene where the 40 ft tall Autobots were trying to hide from annoyingly awkward teenage boy’s parents, all the while destroying the yard that the parents spent a few seconds in an earlier scene perfecting. That was some nice foreshadowing Mike. The awkwardness of the scene combined with the inane dialog between the Autobots was excruciatingly painful. All I was hoping for at that moment was a bunch of Japanese and European cars and trucks to swoop in and send the Autobots to the scrap heap. I knew that was never going to happen, so I fumbled for the remote and pressed the Eject button, loaded the DVD back into the envelope, and placed it in the mailbox without thinking.

To put things into perspective, using IMDB’s Bottom 100 films as a comparison, the only other movie that I can remember turning off for no other reason that I could not take it anymore was Glitter, the 28th worst movie on the board. I have sat through Troll 2 (36th worst according to IMDB), and I really enjoyed Chairman of the Board, 32nd worst, yea call me weird. There is just something about that weird orange haired man.

Enjoy!

Edit: Apparently Fox made Google take the video down, try this Yahoo Video link instead.

top -ocpu -O+rsize

Plop an alias in your .bash_profile file and never think about it again.