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Author's Note: This will not - repeat, will not - be an unmitigated attack on Michael Bay either professionally, personally, philosophically, physically or psychically. Uwe Boll has exclusive rights to those in the BOP universe.

Opening Quote: "I do not make films that have sell-by dates." --Peter Greenaway

Introduction: In deciding how best to approach a Chapter Two critique on the highest grossing (domestically) and one of the "Rotten-est" (Tomato-ically speaking) scoring releases of 2009, I found myself as perplexed as if I had been asked to elaborate on some of the deeper themes in one of Godard's lesser known and more oblique works. And since I have free reign to talk about whatever the hell I want to within this electronic space, it certainly wasn't as the prospect of an act of martyrdom that I relented to see the latest/biggest/loudest spectacle on the last day (of its second run release) that it played in the greater Portland metropolitan area several weeks ago. After months of lash and backlash flying around it, I had to give in to my curiosity and make my own determination.

In evaluating my response to ROTF, I am glad to have the considerations of all the critics before me, particularly Manohla Dargis' (of The New York Times) and Armond White's (of NY Press) wildly differing takes. During my graduate days at New York University, my Senior Seminar class was on film criticism and I chose to examine the critical reception of A.I Artificial Intelligence, which had come out that summer. RottenTomatoes was still a fairly new site at that point and I remember thinking, "Wow! I can read full reviews of this and other films from over 150 different critics?!" Such were the days when the interwebs still seemed as magical as leprechauns and unicorns.

Side note 1: A.I. is on my all-time favorite list and one of a small handful of films that I am most curious to see how they will be remembered 50 years from now. As befits a project that is a "Stanley Kubrick Production," A.I. is a film that you can choose to approach today, tomorrow, next century, and the disorienting and unsettling web it weaves will still seem as immediate and as alien as it did in 2001.

Research: I did watch both Transformers (2004) and Transformers: The Movie (1986) for the first time in the months prior to seeing ROTF. It was the 20th anniversary edition of the latter and I was excited about what I thought would be a feature-length documentary about Transformers that would spell everything out for a novitiate such as myself. It turned out to be the film with Pop-Up Video style facts submitted by fans. These occurred at first quite frequently and then not so much as if after 42 minutes, there wasn't all that much new to add. I was quite shocked to hear Weird Al on the soundtrack and to finally hear "The Touch" in its proper cultural context. My thought on the two films were "Meh" and "Wow. That was 84 minutes of violent action!" respectively.

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