The title of this post is a bitter way of expressing that I actually kinda liked the new Transformers movie. I'm shocked, really. I went to it expecting to be pissed off at how badly it was botched. I expected so little of it (aside from solid robot violence) that I think I wanted it to suck. But it didn't.

Was it perfect? No. It was about as good as your average summer blockbuster: enjoyable, but with a merely-adequate plot with fairly ignorable plot holes between the completely awesome effects. For us old nerds, the Autobot characters were surprisingly true to the original personalities (though the Decepticons... not so much).

I did cringe at the 6th-grade level humor at some points. Did Bumblebee really need to "pee" auto-fluid on a dude? Did we need the lame slapstick of the Autobots accidentally breaking stuff while hiding in a suburban backyard? And then there's Frenzy (the small boombox robot)... Mr. Bay, didn't you learn anything from JarJar?

Those quibbles aside, I guess I'd actually recommend checking it out.

More importantly, is Michael Bay still a tool? Yes. From this Wired article:

But other alterations were simply Bay's prerogative. Optimus Prime now boasts bright orange cholo flames and — much to fans' horror — lips. "I'm the director. I make my own decisions. I like to paint the house green, even when everyone says it's got to be white."

I don't understand why that quote and the following quote are so far apart in the same story:

"At best, it will be a fun summer movie with explosions," one 35-year-old Transformers devotee conjectured at a recent WonderCon. "But it seems like guys in Hollywood... Unless they're really reined in, they have to pee all over something to make it theirs, like big cats."

So, hopefully another director will take the reins for the sequel and fix Prime's paint job. The leader of the Autobots is not a f***ing gangbanger.