When Great Reviews Happen to Awful Movies or: Why I'm Paying to See Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

No, I'm not talking about when Entertainment Weekly gives some inferior romantic comedy a B- and goes on about whatever tabloid-worthy relationship the shooting spawned. I'm talking about the kind of mindblowingly awesome diatribe from a respectable film critic that does the exact opposite of what the critic intends.

I had no intention of ever seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen in its opening week. The only reason I was subjected to the first movie, an exercise in bad actors staring unconvincingly at the air in which their CGI co-stars would appear in post-production, was due to a bus trip I took with a group of people who brought all of two DVDs: Transformers and High School Musical. (I was not spared from the later.)

I've done my best to avoid the sequel like the plague. I show up to most movies right before the film starts, missing most trailers. I don't watch much television, and as such have yet to see any teasers. I'm a Ford man, so I haven't stopped to admire the all-new 2010 Camaro, playing the role of Bumblebee. So, what gives?

A one star review by Roger Ebert has convinced me to see this movie in the format most befitting it's terrible nature: the fake IMAX available at the overpriced AMC Theater, which is right below a bar, where I'll be for four hours before the movie starts. I was suckered in by Ebert's first paragraph:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Save me the ticket price? You just guaranteed that I'll be plunking down my $15, thumbs be damned.

It isn't all Ebert's fault - I love going to see just plain awful movies. I can't help it, I've always been like this. During summer breaks in Michigan, my friend Matt and I would walk a mile to the Showcase Cinemas two or three times a week. We saw every tentpole movie, no matter how awful. We saw plenty of dumb action, dumb comedy, dumb, dumb, dumb. We didn't care. Movies were (somewhat) cheap back then, and it was easy to sneak in concessions. We saw maybe 25 films a summer, until the Showcase Cinemas dedicated themselves to Tyler Perry movies.

By then I had a car, and Matt had a job at the movie theater and didn't particularly care for putting down the money he earned sweeping up after slobs like me on movies he was paid to catch the endings of. So I started going to an absolutely massive theater in Canton with Neil, a friend from high school. Movies were more expensive, but between movies I saw with Neil and movies I saw by myself, I managed to take in close to 30 a summer, which is insane if you're not getting paid to do something like that.

We started with the spring movies that managed to straggle into their fifth of sixth week at the theater. The low-budget, poorly made horror films. The video game adaptations. The low ball comedy. Neil ate this stuff up. I made fun of it, as was the tradition at the talkative Showcase Cinemas in Dearborn, a tradition not always appreciated by the three or four other people in the room. We sometimes saw three movies a day, sometimes two and a Detroit Tiger's game, sometimes an actually entertaining movie. Mostly, we ran a contest in our heads - what movie could possibly be worse than The Fog? First Lady in the Water. Then The Happening. Then...

When we both stopped coming home in the summer, the game migrated to the winter, where The Fog ran into stiff competition from January fare like One Missed Call and The Unborn. When you look at Box Office Mojo and wonder how movies like that managed to gross even a paltry $20 mil., I am partly to blame. I know going in to most of these movies that whatever enjoyment I get from them will be from laughing at the movie. I am a snob. I am a cynic. I am a hypocrite. But I only caved on Transformers because I was stuck on a bus.

I know that Neil will be seeing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen thanks in small part to Michael Bay filming parts of the movie at Penn, presumably because Princeton, the school Penn is standing in for, isn't a photogenic enough collective of rectangular buildings. I'm seeing this movie as an endurance test, like The Spirit, Watchmen, The Love Guru, and Zombie Strippers! before tonight, Jimmy Fallon at Bonnaroo, and the John McCain/Sarah Palin superrally in 2008. If I ever meet the movie that makes me get up and walk away after paying $7.50 (or in this case, $15), I'll have met the movie that killed my great summer tradition, that brought me low, that humbled me.

But it's still Ebert's fault. He envisions Transformers 2 as Michael Bay losing out on a Faustian bargain, as though Bay had a soul to sell in exchange for the big time success that this movie is set to become. One star reviews are not supposed to be ringing endorsements for going out to the midnight premiere, but this one is. We are, after all, enthralled with accidents on the side of the road, plane crashes, train wrecks. Bad movies are, in a way, how I got around to finding this blog's purpose. They are my weakness. My kryptonite.

The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars.

That's exactly the kind of thing I laugh most at. Ebert doesn't know this, but anybody who has been to a movie with me, even once, knows it and either accepts it or wants to kill me where I sit. No movie is safe - not even documentary films at museums - from my enormous, booming laughter.

I do not expect Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen to turn out for the best, like my experience at Speed Racer, which I originally rated a The Dude Abides before realizing that I take this sort of stuff almost seriously. I don't expect that this post clearly explains why I'm paying to see Transformers 2 when Goodbye Solo is playing in my town, or even makes a lick of sense, but I know what I'm doing. If Roger Ebert sat through it, so can I.