What's REALLY Wrong With Transformers

It's already become passe to make fun of the Transformers movie, which somehow deserves both all the praise and every piece of scorn that gets heaped on it. Amidst the two and a half hours of amazingly cool footage of robots beating the tar out of each other, there was almost no plot, no character development, and some truly laughable storytelling elements. But while people have picked on virtually every discernible element in the movie, they've missed one of the key points that utterly destroyed whatever hope this movie had of remaining watchable throughout its gigantic runtime: the gross miscasting of Ramon Rodriguez.

Now, Rodriguez is not necessarily a bad actor, but he was cast in a role that required him to:
1. Be a computer nerd.
2. Have a funny alpha-male rivalry with non-alpha-male Shia LeBeouf.
3. Strike out with every girl he came to.
4. Have lots of throwaway "I'm so pathetic!" lines.
5. Panic and fake-cry throughout all the action.
6. Finally grow some balls right at the end, to the surprise of the viewer.

You know who you cast for a role like that? Someone who can play a geeky loser. Somebody short, or fat, who has bad hair or big glasses. Somebody who we root for even as they screw things up for everyone.

Someone like Jonah Hill, who they offered the role to and who turned it down. Someone who's a Jonah Hill type, a schlubby guy the audience feels a connection with and can laugh at.

Definitely not this guy:

No offense to Mr. Ramirez, who seems to be a fine actor, but he's a guy who's best known for his role in "The Wire," a show about life in the projects of Baltimore without a whole lot of slapstick comedy. So here's a list people who could've played that role better than Ramon Rodriguez without blinking an eye:

1.Jonah Hill
2. Josh Gad
3. Jay Baruchal
4. Justin Long
5. Michael Cera
6. Christopher Mintz-Plasse
And really, Michael Bay, you'll spend 16 months on post-production effects of cars turning into robots, but when one geeky actor turns you down, you decide to just ditch the whole casting call and hire whoever you feel like? At least with Megan Fox, there's a legitimate excuse there. Here, there's none.

Also, when Shia Lebeouf dies and travels to the Land Of The Primes, that was the stupidest thing I think I'd ever seen.

Root Beer Reviews: Virgil's

Virgil's is a cocky sort of root beer. The label, not content to just make one overly exaggerated claim, is packed so full of superlative that it manages to claim twice, in two separate contexts, that its taste is "so pure, you'll swear it's made in heaven." The website is equally verbose in its praise:

Think of Virgil's as a gourmet root beer. We're what Ben and Jerry's is to ice cream, what Dom Perignon is to champagne. We're a micro-brewed root beer made with all-natural ingredients. We use herbs imported from around the world and unbleached pure cane sugar.
That's the introductory paragraph on the website, which also includes a number of recipes to which you can add Virgil's, which include Pecan Pie, Rootin' Tootin' Chocolate Torte, and Prawn Tempura (really!). This is a root beer with a high opinion of itself.

Unfortunately, it's not really a root beer that's all that great. I mean, it has some good qualities to it - it's creamy and has a nice taste to it right as it hits the palate - but it fails on a number of other levels. It's major problem? A nasty aftertaste that forced me to keep drinking to try to cover the strange sensation. When I finished the bottle, I was forced to dig up some pretzels to take out the taste. Not a good way to finish up a root beer experience. It also didn't translate well into other formats - it tasted pretty good cold, but was lousy once it got closer to room temperature. To be fair, I didn't try every available option for experiencing Virgil's Root Beer. I didn't make the prawn tempura.

More intriguing is the rumors of other taste sensations produced by Virgil's, including - wait for it - Bavarian Nutmeg Root Beer, which sounds just thrilling. If someone knows how to get their hands on a bottle, I'd be curious to learn just why Bavarian Nutmeg is superior to all other nutmegs.

All it in all, Virgil's is an acceptable, tasty root beer with some strong marks in its favor and equally strong ones against it. But if this is the Dom Perignon of root beer, Moët & Chandon should double-check their vintage.

And Don't Nod Understandingly If You Don't Understand, Because Then Later It Gets Confusing.

Someone once said that videos are a lot of work. "For every minute of screen time, it takes a whole hour of work," announced this person.

This person, whoever he or she might be, was full of crap. Evidently this person was only throwing together vacation footage and snapshots in his basement to Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)," because that's utter claptrap. A major motion picture takes 600 people working overtime for 2 entire years to put together, and that's something like 3.6 million man-hours for 97 minutes of movie. Likewise, one-man production teams have to come up with concepts, shoot footage, import and organize it, edit into a cohesive video, do audio correction, do color correction, add graphics and soundtrack, export the video, compress it, and burn it to a DVD. Rather than the one-hour-to-one-minute equation, a stronger rule of thumb is to ask the producer how long the video will take to come together and when you can have it by, then assume he knows what he's talking about.

So to answer your question, no, you can't have your six-minute promo by the end of the day.