I know that food metaphors are the province of lazy movie reviewers. Check the archives of every critic you’ve ever read, and start in their nascent period, before they achieved full-fledged professional asshole status – you’ll see at least 1 or 2 reviews built around the substitution of cinema for eating. It’s where clichés like “Eye Candy” or “Comfort Food” come from, from tired people numbed by pretty, mindless crap being poured into their eyeballs.

With that being said:

I used to be the kind of person who believed there was no such thing as “too much cake.” The concept was silly to a slovenly, melty person like myself. Tell Ron Jeremy there’s something like “too much sex.” Tell Stephen Hawking there’s something like “too much breakdancing.” “Preposterous!” they’ll say. “Ludacris Bridges!” Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is 151 minutes of truth to that lie.

Around hour one, I was pretty satisfied with this sugary cinematic confection. But then another cake was placed in front of me. And another. And another. And Another. And I couldn’t scrape off the frosting, or pick off the roses made of icing. I had to eat every last cake.  Not piece of cake; Whole Cake. There was no milk to wash it down, no moisture of any kind to help ease the cake into my tummy.  It was shoved down my throat like a rifle butt was behind it. It was fast, angry cake, stacked up, undigested in my stomach like Donkey Kong girders. At some point, I actually forgot what cake tasted like as I gagged on yet another mouthful of icing and sugar.  Then the movie ended.

Criterion controversially added both The Rock and Armageddon to their collection in the 90’s. They explained by saying something like “These films perfectly capture a style of filmmaking that deserves to be represented and examined by those who appreciate film.” I want to say that Criterion can go ahead and replace those two with this, because Revenge is a movie that perfectly encapsulates everything that is Michael Bay. In a filmography that includes Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor, this is Bay at his most masturbationally indulgent.

And yet, I won’t say that, partially because Criterion doesn’t give a s**t what I have to say (neither did the Rep working the lobby once he found out I was in radio,) but mostly because this isn’t really a Michael Bay movie. This is Michael Bay making a cinematic mixtape out of James Cameron’s filmography. Roger Ebert wrote that The Rock was a movie built out of other movies. Revenge of the Fallen is built out of the earnest grandiosity and sci-fi goofiness of The Abyss, the mean-spirited, often degrading sitcom vibe of True Lies, the posing, preening evil of Terminator 2 married to the technical brilliance and horribly sh**ty pacing of Titanic. And those are just tonal and plot similarities. The shots themselves are often direct lifts that make you think Bay’s DVD/Blu-Ray shelf begins with C and ends with Ameron.

Shia LeBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky, an everyday doof with a girl (Megan Fox) way out of his league, on his way to college after spending a couple years hanging out with his alien robot car, (Bumblebee) with whom he saved the world from alien robot jets. (Megatron and Starscream)

The film opens with a beautifully disorienting action sequence featuring the Army working in tandem with The Autobots, (good bots) climaxing in an alien robot truck (Optimus Prime) parachuting out of a bomber and onto the face of  wheeled alien robot thing blowing up Singapore for the Decepticons (Bad bots.)

An alien robot devil (The Fallen) wants to suck all the energy out of the sun , and so he sends alien robots to find a shard of the all-spark, last seen being shoved into an alien robot jet (Megatron) to kill him.  They then shove their shard back into Megatron, which (logically) resurrects him.

Sam, aided by his pet Alien Robot car, enlists alien robots Stepin and Fetchit, aka Car Car Binks, to pick up John Turturro and his hairy bananahammocked ass (rethink your IMAX ticket now) to find an Alien Robot Jet (Jetfire) who will teleport them to Egypt where Sam can decipher the alien symbols infesting his mind after touching his All-Spark Shard. From there, he will find The Matrix of Leadership, which will help Optimus Prime defeat The Fallen, ensuring Sam survives to hump his girl on the hood of his pet car yet another day.

Other things that happen include everything.

Gay dogs dominating each other. An RC truck doing a Buscemi impersonation humps Megan Fox’s leg. John Turturro escapes being peed on but spends a considerable amount of time being dwarfed by Robotesticles. There’s mousetrap sight-gags. A camaro crying. A jet farting a parachute. A boy goes to robot heaven. A woman eats a bag of weed cookies and tackles ultimate Frisbee players. Green Day.

Some will read this and agree: This is simply a case of too much cake. If I want to see the everyman ascend beyond death to be visited by alien angels with the answer to life, the universe and everything, I’ll watch Ed Harris do it. If I want to see a stone killer slowly stroll at the camera as clouds of destruction billow, Robert Patrick  is waiting on DVD.  Revenge of the Fallen is a shortsighted pastiche of all Cameron’s worst clichés with pacing as smooth as the Transformers “Bionicle-crapped-a-box-of-razors-and-brillo-pads” designs.

Some will read this and think: There’s no such thing as too much cake, and this pussy is basically telling me that Michael Bay just made the best movie ever.  The only thing better would be if the old British Jet-Robot with a walking stick sighs and says “I’m too old for this crap,” after totally kicking some Decepti-butt. Wait, that happens? Really? Well then, more cake, please.

Either reading is totally correct.

OVERHEARD CONVERSATION BETWEEN A TREKKIE AND SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T REALLY CARE ALL THAT MUCH, OCTOBER 2008:

“I don’t know about this new Star Trek movie. I mean, look at this picture of Spock.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s all wrong. He’s all shiny. He doesn’t look like Spock, he looks like Spock-flavored candy. And the bridge looks like an iPod. The cast looks like an Abercrombie ad. And the warp nacelles are too close together and the secondary hull—“
“Dude, whoa. Stop.”
“What?”
“You’re using words like nacelle, like I have any clue what the f**k that means. Look, last I checked, Star Trek was like, coma-inducing bulls**t. But this actually looks fun.”
“That’s another thing, it looks fun. What the hell is THAT all about?”

THINGS “STAR TREK” NEEDED TO DO IN ORDER TO CONVINCE PEOPLE IT WASN’T A BORING, SELF-IMPORTANT PIECE OF S**T LIKE MOST OF THE OTHER MOVIES:

“I dunno about you, but that was pretty f***in great.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You still give a s**t about the nacelles or whatever the f**k those things are?”
“Not really, no.”
“Are you crying?”
“No. What? No! I’m not–”
“Dude, it’s okay, I choked up a little at the beginning, too.”
“Really?”
“No, you f***in baby. S**T, I wish I could watch this thing again already.”

I was just BS’ing on the internet (there’s a shock, right?) and came across a messageboard thread entitled “What are your broken dreams?” Being a maudlin, sentimental sort of douche, this is the kind of thread that speaks to me. I’ve always been sorta fascinated with the stories of people on the fringes of things. The guy 3 rows back who saw Lincoln get assassinated at Ford Theater. The guy who worked on one episode of Saturday Night Live, got half of a skit into the show, only to have Chevy Chase ad-lib all over it, and then get dismissed from the writer’s room the next day. The Cup-of-Coffee minor leaguer who finally got called up by Detroit to take a couple pokes at the ball in the 8th inning against Cleveland. It’s those stories that always tug at me, of people close enough to the spotlight to feel how hot it is, but not close enough to actually get any shine. Salieri, not Mozart. Zmuda, not Kaufman.

So I waded into the thread to read about a bunch of 20-something guys telling total strangers online about the dreams they had growing up, and which of those dreams are still within their grasp, and which of them are like eggshells around their feet, cracked and blowing away. Lotta people wanted to be an astronaut with the powers of Superman, of course. Lotta people wanted to sit on their lawns in an inflatable pool surrounded by their lottery winnings, sipping fruity drinks and getting sunburnt. One kid wanted to invent video games, and he stocks shelves at Wal-Mart. Another wanted to be an astronomer but the inability to wrap his head around anything beyond Algebra totally kneecapped that ambition.

Getting paid to make people laugh is pretty damned close to my dream.  Entertaining people is pretty much all I’ve been prepared to do since the first time I found out I could make people giggle in the middle of my 1st grade reading class. But doing it inbetween Metallica songs was not how I dreamed it would go down.

The NBA is my first broken dream. I worked at this one from age 8 until age 15. I got pretty good. Made all-star teams, got voted MVP once, scored 30 in a game more than a few times. My skill-set might have gotten me a scholarship had I been around 6-5. I had pretty good swingman game, decent enough handles and court vision for a 2 or a 3. People used to compare my game to young Charles Barkley. I wasn’t anywhere near that good, of course, but it was a decent comparison point so far as the style of game went. If I was around 6-5 or so.

I’m 5-6. and a half.

Mom drank coffee and smoked while pregnant with me. All my siblings are around 5-9 to 6-1. Except for my oldest sister, who mom smoked and drank coffee whilst carrying. She’s 5-2. I goof on mom for this, because a lot of people did that sort of thing back then. I mean, I could blame her for being short, but that’d be sorta dumb. I don’t think I’d have reached 6-5 if she’d drank nothing but V-8 and ate Special K for breakfast every day. It was a different time back then, and it’s not like she didn’t love me or anything. She just contributed enough genetic makeup to make sure I was built like R2-D2.

Sometime between 10th and 11th grade my assistant coach tried to get around school rules regarding how early you could start recruiting and practicing for the following season by holding “open gyms.” I brought one of my streetball friends to a practice. He abused my assistant coach in the post for most of the “open gym.” The assistant got really flustered, angry, and started flagrantly fouling my friend. My friend smashed his face with an elbow. A fight broke out. I was cut from the team the next year for not showing proper dedication to the goals of the team. Not having anything to do all winter, I laid on the couch and watched sitcoms with mom while eating corn dogs and frozen twinkies. Hence the earning of my nickname the following year.

I also used to think I could break into screenwriting. Entered a bunch of contests, tried to get some agents. Nothing. I used to think it was my location, that because I wasn’t centrally located in Los Angeles, I couldn’t get any spotlight on these blockbusters I was churning out on my pirated copy of Final Draft. But really, it’s that my scripts weren’t that good. Plots were clunky, dialog sounded realistic but there was way too much of it and everything read like a self-indulgent 20-somethings attempts at being deep, filtered through bad imitations of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino’s filmographies. Which is what they were.

I registered all of them with the WGA. Pulled out what I thought of as the most solid all-around script about a month ago. Lifetime movie at BEST. Maybe not even that. I thought it was so important-feeling, so insightful and enlightening then, the raw voice screaming out, trying to teach the world the all-important lessons I had learned about life and love. It was just screaming, really. Nothing deep or important. Just “SOMEONE MAKE ME FAMOUS PLEASE I DREAM ABOUT MY NAME ON A CREDIT BLOCK.” That’s all it was. And that’s why it reads so facile and hollow now. I wasn’t in service to any of those stories. Those stories were in service to getting me a paycheck. I wasn’t a writer. I was a hack. And the worst kind of hack on top of that - the unpaid hack.

I’m murder at slam-dunk contests though. So long as the hoop is around 9 feet.  And I do help write a weekly radio drama series now. I did my first solo episode last weekend, about zombie apocalypse survivors stranded on ross island here in Portland. They break into a hospital to retrieve some antibiotics. It’s some real comic-book action type stuff, and I think it reads pretty well. Probably because I didn’t come up with the story, my friend Aaron did. But still, it reads like I’ve moved from Kevin Smith meets Quentin Tarantino to Joss Whedon meets James Cameron. Badly xeroxed and stepped on by a couple hundred people, but you know what I’m saying. It’s the Charles Barkley comparison of my writing “career,” broken dream that it is. It’s still not where I want it to be, but looking at how I did all those previous scripts wrong is helping point me towards making these little zombie chronicles work right.

I can’t even play basketball anymore - my hips essentially atrophied in my really fat period, and I’ve developed a strange little affliction where my knees try to pick up the slack my hips aren’t carrying, and it causes serious, intense pain in the back of my knees that render me almost immobile after about 15 minutes of a game. I’m probably in the best physical shape of my life now, and I can’t actually play the game anymore. I can ride a bike for hours at a time, I can do a bunch of pushups and situps, but 15 minutes of the game I spent so much time trying to perfect now makes me slump into a chair like an octogenarian and wince for an hour straight.

I’ve lost my court vision, too. The very last game I ever played was at Lents Park about a year ago. I played for 10 minutes. My team lost 15-6. I had maybe 2 assists. 6 turnovers. My passes were all late. My jumper is the only thing still there, and it’s a broken, tattered thing, too. I didn’t get enough lift on my last shot attempt, partly winded, partly in agony. The shot descended back towards the asphalt, a good 3 inches from the front of the rim. The catcalls from the got-nexters ushered me offstage. I left my old ball resting against the pole holding up the backboard, went to my car, and drove home to shower. The end.

The job I do have isn’t either one of those dreams. It changed, it shifted on me.  I actually did get to achieve my dream of entertaining people for a living. It just didn’t happen in the form and fashion I thought it would, and not on the scale I was dreaming of. But it DID happen. And how it happened is a pretty good story, too. I’m appreciative. Very appreciative. Don’t  mistake this as me singing the song of settling - I’m lucky to get this close to the dream and not have the sun melt the wax and send me plummeting back to earth. It’ll happen soon enough. I’m circling a sick sun. When Adam Carolla can’t hold a job for longer than 2 years, you know eventually I’m gonna have to wake up sooner or later. But I’m gonna smile with this sun on my face for as long as I can, so long as you’re still smiling, too.

But some days I wake up, like yesterday, not appreciative, but frustrated because the dream I just left behind on my unmade bed includes crossing someone up just beyond the 3-point arc, getting enough distance to one-hand a perfect alley-oop pass to the sort of beanpole kids I used to run with, who made all-state teams effortlessly, almost blasé in their mild appreciation of the physical gifts they’d been blessed with. They backdoor their defender, go up, and flush the pill like I had sent a butler to deliver it on a silver platter. I jog back to my defensive position with a smirk on my face. I’m 6-5 and nobody called me Fatboy and I’m working on my triple double and trying to find my mom in the stands. She toasts me with a V-8, lip of the glass parallel to the patch on her upper arm, sticking out just beneath the replica jersey with my name on the back.

It’s a nice place to visit every now and again, I guess. But it ain’t home.

Peter (Paul Rudd) is a Real Estate Agent who doesn’t have any guy friends. He loves “Chocolat” and pronounces it correctly, which is to say, like a poof. He’s not gay, he’s just soft and squishy and utterly unfamiliar in the ways of man, lost when it comes to stuff  like noncommittal grunts and fist bumps and why 5 spades beats trip queens. When coming home early to his fiancée Zooey (Rashida Jones,) he hears a veritable henhouse full of her friends clucking about how he’s a clingy nightmare waiting to happen, and decides he needs to go get himself some man-panions. So Rudd taps his little brother, a gay personal trainer played by Andy Samberg, who keeps accidentally channeling Mark Wahlberg with his performance. Or maybe not, considering the role.

I Love You Man is a movie that should have come out about a year ago, when the concept of something as insipid as “man-dating” still had some traction. That concept  takes a frequently funny buddy comedy and dresses it like a misguided tribute to a stillborn cultural meme, when it’s actually closer to a minor-key inversion of Wedding Crashers. Not only is it good enough to get Segel and Rudd the cover of Vanity Fair, it gives you a chance to ogle Rashida Jones for about 90 minutes.

By request from a listener who called up like “I need a transcript of the 3pm Dirty Laundry”

Good sir, I grant your wish, because I? I am an attention whore and the idea that someone would want my hackwork saved for posterity on the vast expanse of the intertrons? It tickles me. Tickles me delightedly. DeLICIOUSly, even. So here you go. 

The Headline: Blagojevich: How can I be ousted on allegations? Rod Blagojevich, the senator who got caught on tape trying to sell Obama’s senate seat to the highest bidder, testified at his impeachment hearing, stating that his impeachment would set a dangerous and chilling precedent if it went forward. “Not only would it be dangerous, it would be chilling” said Blagojevich, “and that is a combination that is both frightening and chilly, and also, if I may, quite risky, and more than a little nippy.” Blagojevich further went on to say “I will not give up. I am here to fight for the citizens of Illinois, primarily me, as I am a citizen of illinois and I like my job and I’m pretty important. I don’t know if anyone told you. I have really fabulous hair. People routinely tell me how good I look.” and then, in an example of classic defense strategies as employed by the likes of world renowned lawyers and adjudicators like Judge Harry Anderson and Matlock A. Matlock, Attorney at Matlock, he said “You know who you should go after? Rahm Emanuel. Yunno why? Because he’s mean.” The hearings paused for a second to consider whether Rahm Emanuel was the one with really fabulous hair caught on tape trying to sell Obama’s seat. He was not. I’m not sure that angle will be pursued. Probably because Rahm will simply de-throat anyone continuing to pursue it, and cook the throaty meat into a very tasty hoagie style sandwich.

The Headline: Elizabeth Hasselbeck of the View is pregnant again. I don’t even know who this person is. I’m guessing it’s the blond idiot from the show full of cackling yentas and the black chick with no Eyebrows from that One Star Trek where Professor Xavier from X-Men sat around and got migraines all day long. She’s the one that’s like a Bratz Doll version of Ann Coulter, right? Anyway, this was the 2nd headline on the AP Wire today, so that sorta forces me into reporting on it because it’s apparently legitimate news. Some blond wingnut with all the IQ of a goddamned rock was smart enough to bake baby batter into a living, mouthbreathing, non-contributing member of stupidity. I woudn’t say society, because the fact this cross-eyed blow-up doll is actually having children makes me fear for actual society, where sociable people know how to socialize intelligently, and whatever spawn will come shooting out of her clown car will not belong to society, but instead, to a culture of vapid stupidity, of which this cackling chickenhead is practically queen. This is her third baby with former Arizona Cardinals meatsack Tim Hasselbeck, who apparently was hit in the head a lot. “We are thankful for this blessing and we will be practicing our zone defense strategy immediately” said Hasselbeck. This reporter can only hope the strategy includes taking a sock, some mortar, and a garden trowel, plugging her hole with the sock, and sealing the maw with the trowel/mortar combo.