BdR76

If you like watching things move around and explode, you'll absolutely love Tranformers. However if you also want a movie to have a basic storyline then maybe Tranformers is not for you.

There is so incredibly little story or character development, even for a movie about killer robots from outer space. If they can afford all those CGI effects, surely they can afford better writers? What was with the whole backyard scene? It was completely pointless. Whatever happened to the power-struggle between Starscream and Megatron? I don't mind a few small plot holes, but why didn't the decepticons just buy the damn thing off of eBay and have it sent to them!? It makes the chases and the fighting all the more ridiculous when you think about that. And the all too obvious open door to a sequel was just laughable.

Anyway, it's mainly an action movie and the first helicopter attack seemed promising, but after that it moves from one car chase or explosion to the next. There's no build-up or suspense, there's no dynamics, it just turns the volume to 10 for the rest of the movie. What also bugged me, was that most of the Transformers fighting scenes are obscured by bad camera angles. For example, during the highway scenes, it suddenly cuts to random bystanders, and the action is somewhere off in the distance. And the organic robot design make the fights even harder to follow. First there's a confusing transformation and then two huge piles of scrap metal fighting each other. It's hard to even distinguish an arm or a leg.

The movie tries to offer some comic relief but the jokes are painfully unfunny. There's an obnoxious super hacker who lives with his grandma and plays videogames all day, a giant robot "urinates" on a government agent for no reason, masturbation jokes, fart jokes: all very tacky. I thought the whole Indian telephone operator scene was just awful.

I could go on about the shameless product placement, the pro-military propaganda, the incredible overacting, the stereotyping, the clichés etc. but I won't. I can't believe there are so many positive reviews, this movie is horrible.

This movie was a big surprise to me, it takes all the good things from horror-movies and leaves out all the bad stuff and tired clichés. It's like they took "Friday the 13th", polished it off and added some bells and whistles. There's lots of suspense and gore, but also a lot of humor. Even the gory parts still contain some (very dark) humor, for example the bear-trap..

The story is very similar to many slasher movies from the eighties. There is a group of various characters (up-thight office nerd, mysterious girl etc.), they are put into an unknown environment (team-building weekend in a former war-zone) and then suddenly danger emerges (psycho war-veterans). The office workers now have to face an actual "survival weekend" (ha ha..). And by the way, Palisade, the company that sent them on the team-building trip, is the same company that during the war supplied the killers with weapons.. oh, the irony.

But it's all done with a fresh new twist. The vicious murderers don't have supernatural powers, like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, they're simply insane and bloodthirsty soldiers. They don't use knives but high-tech machine guns and land mines, all courtesy of Palisade. The movie even addresses some of the horror-movie clichés, like turning your back on the bad guy after you (think you have) killed him.

All in all a very entertaining movie, highly recommended.

"Jensen!" is a Dutch late night talkshow modeled after American shows like "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" or "Late Show with David Letterman". It starts with an opening monologue, some comedy bits and then one or two guests. While the American talkshows can be entertaining and glamorous, Jensen is just cheap and lame.

The first problem with Jensen is the host, Robert Jensen. In American talkshows the host is usually a stand-up comedian, like Conan O'Brien or David Letterman, who know how to entertain and really put on a show. Robert Jensen is nothing like that, he became famous by harassing dutch celebrities and making prank phone calls on his radioshow. He's uncharismatic, laughs at his own jokes, makes inappropriately lewd comments and takes cheap shots at his guests.

The second problem is the guests. Occasionally there will be an interesting or famous person, but most of the time the guest's name sounds only vaguely familiar. Some people who appear very frequently are Herman (Dutch Idols reject), Kelly (transvestite from the third Dutch Big Brother series), Kim Holland (Dutch Porn star), all not very classy to say the least. The Netherlands is a small country and there simply aren't enough celebrities to fill five shows a week. Sometimes a guest has clearly got nothing interesting to say at all, for example some Britney-Spears-fan who shaved her head just like Britney, Jensen spent about 10 minutes on her..

Another problem is the comedy. The quality isn't very good to put it mildly. For example, they show bloopers from live gameshows (belspelletjes) and pictures or movie clips copied from the internet (you know, those e-mails you sometimes get from friends or colleagues), which I think is really cheap. Whenever they do create something original, it's usually footage from a news item with added sound effects or stretched faces or something like that.

In short, this is an awful talkshow, how anyone can find this garbage entertaining is beyond me.