Transformers 3: The Reviews Are In!

As established upon the release of its predecessor, the only way I will be attending a screening of "Transformers 3: Revenge Of The Dark Side Of The Moon" (in theaters today), directed by this blog's Public Enemy #1, Michael Bay, is if Paramount sets me up on a scotch sampling date with Sienna Miller at Duke of Perth. Otherwise, no go.

And yet - yet!!! - some of the reviews are saying the movie isn't so bad. I mean, they're saying it's bad, sure, obviously, but that it's also, maybe, on some level, perhaps on multiple levels, "bad". No, no, no, no, no, no! Not "bad". "Good."

Am I the only one thinks Rosie Huntington-Whiteley looks like a Stepford Wife?

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon writes: "What makes 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' interesting, to the extent that something that's so fundamentally idiotic and soul-deadening can also be 'interesting,' is what you might call its aesthetic and ontological ambivalence. To put that in English, Bay doesn't seem quite sure what kind of movie he's making, or what the point of it is. With 'Dark of the Moon,' he pushes the dumbass summer popcorn-movie formula to the max, and then pushes beyond that into an incoherent, purely symbolic realm that's closer to experimental cinema than to Hollywood: sunsets and helicopters and vertical plunges through space and aircraft crashing to the ground and images of apocalyptic destruction and male bodies in motion and female bodies at rest (always as observers and objects, but never as subjects), all of it set to a throbbing score that never quite reaches the moment when it tries to sell you a beer or a pickup truck or pills to make your dick bigger."

And A.O. Scott of The New York Times writes what has to be my front-runner for Best Movie Review Of 2011. He writes: "I can’t decide if this movie is so spectacularly, breathtakingly dumb as to induce stupidity in anyone who watches, or so brutally brilliant that it disarms all reason. What’s the difference?"

He continues: "Plot summary is unnecessary: the script, by Ehren Kruger, is its own Wikipedia. Everything will be explained, as the cameras swirl and jump, and the music (by Steve Jablonsky) rumbles and blasts. 'Drop the bridge!' someone will say, referring to one of the drawbridges that span the Chicago River. A few seconds later you will see the bridge dropping and, just in case you are uncertain of what is going on (maybe you were texting your friend, who sneaked into 'Bad Teacher' with hopes of hearing Cameron Diaz swear), someone else will say, 'The bridge is dropping!'"

His review almost makes me want to see this movie. Almost, I said.