Fed

Tonight, mckitterick is substitute teaching for a friend's ENGL 362 class, and as of the weekend, the CSSF summer activities are in full swing. So yesterday was our last quiet evening together for nearly a month. I splurged at the cheese and olive bar at the grocery store to serve a spread of wine, cheese, bread, cherries, strawberries, guava paste and white cheddar--a whole table of yum. It was delicious, and we got to enjoy a bonus of the flash and rumble of a thunderstorm that never quite coalesced. Although it did rain on us when we tried to enjoy the show outside.



In a completely inappropriate coincidence, my copy of Beyond the 120-Year Diet arrived through inter-library loan yesterday. I'm already well into it and it's interesting. I think Walford's trash-talking of other diets is unnecessary, but his examples of experiment after experiment are convincing. If nothing else, I'm intrigued by the examples that show minimized bone-density loss in long-lived mammals on a CRON diet. The experiments that show mammals on a CRON diet are also less susceptible to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and cataracts (cataracts? WTF) are pretty spiff, too.

I woke up a few minutes after 4:00 a.m. this morning. Yay.

Transformed

Well, rats. I was looking forward to seeing Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox being hot together in the new Transformers movie. That's all I wanted. Hot young actors looking hot together. And some neat CGI effects. From the multiple reviews, it looks like we don't get even that small request granted in this sequel. Fox's character goes from "clever mechanic girl made of sex" to "needy whiner who cannot run without holding a man's hand". LaBeouf's character, moonily-in-love with Fox's character in the previous movie, cheats on her in the first thirty minutes.

Um. No.

And that's not the worst of it. Autobots set up as a racist stereotypes, complete with ghetto accents and a gold tooth? A mom who flips out after accidentally eating some weed? Oh, and a professor at Princeton who leers at a female student after she eats his apple that he dropped on the floor?

Oh. No.

All I wanted was some mindless fun, but it sounds like Revenge of the Fallen is just mindlessly offensive.

auroraceleste posted some links to reviews, and I'll share them here.

An LJ post from a woman who walked out of the movie.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: Movie Review By Joe Lozito.

I'm posting this review even though it contains the five damning words "I'm not a feminist but..."

affreca posted these:

Roger Ebert's take. Unfortunately, his review of the first one isn't available for comparison. I wonder if he liked it better.

A reviewer at OregonLive.com who did like the first movie.

And here is my favorite review of them all, from someone I've never even heard of. I'll be reading his reviews more often.