'Sharks in Venice'

One of the curses or delights of modern filmmaking, depending on your perspective, is the pervasiveness of "high concept." Put simply, it refers to an easily relatable movie plot, sometimes even one sentence. Alien becomes "Jaws in space." The Towering Inferno is just The Poseidon Adventure upright and in a building. Snakes on a Plane is awesome.

People who are totally hostile to high concept are mostly full of shit. Sometimes great ideas don't need more than a sentence. We accept that brevity is the soul of wit and love one-liners, so deploring brevity elsewhere seems a little convenient to snobbery and inconvenient to consistency, especially when so many great movies can be written off with the one-liner treatment. High concept movies aren't bad because high concept movies are a priori bad. (Alien is arguably the first high concept movie, and by any rubric, it rules.) Most are bad because they're mentally geared at the 12-year-old level, intended to be enjoyed by kids and adults with the same degree of pleasure, produced by trashmeisters like Jerry Bruckheimer, filmed by people who hate epileptics and written by screenwriters who Bruckheimer views as, like, really great with words and stuff — like a word doctor, or something.

'Transformers' Is Comprehensively Awful

(For a review of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, please click here.)

I remember reading a message board discussion of this movie about a year ago and being blown away by people arguing that it might be the best movie of the year. I hadn't even seen it yet, but I was fairly certain that no one could possibly generate a thought like that unless they also still considered getting a Happy Meal and then a Chuck E. Cheese pizza the only lunch and dinner options on their birthdays.

Still, I thought it'd be fun in a turn-brain-off, watch-thing-blow-up way. It's not. Transformers is a blockbuster of dong-huffing. It was written, directed, acted and scored as if the one question above all that everyone on the crew asked themselves was, "In this scene, am I doing enough to make sure this movie huffs the greatest number of dongs?" If Transformers were a car company, its slogan would be, "Dong-Huffing Is Job #1." If every disaffected Korean youth with a surname starting with D were given free paint cans and unlimited alone time in the garage, there would still be significantly less huffing of Dongs than in this movie. This movie is awful.

How's the Weather?—A Hurricane FAQ

One of my favorite hobbies involves answering the phone during hurricane season and calmly explaining to friends and family that, no, the storm 250 miles off the coast and moving westward away from my house hasn't really been a big deal for me. My friends and family aren't dumb, so it's a regular source of amazement that, somehow — despite wall-to-wall media coverage of any significantly large tropical storm — a rough understanding of hurricanes' effects and basic geography continues to elude them.

The second thing baffles most of all. I live in a boring interior suburb, but it's close enough to a large and nationally well-known area of Florida that people just assume I'm from there. It's on all the maps, and the people in galoshes and yellow "I'm going to the Sizzler" rain slickers on the TV talk about it. In fact, it's almost impossible to not detect it when they show a map of the state. So when they show a hurricane crossing the state 300 miles to the south, east or west of me and I still get phone calls, it makes me wonder if these people breathlessly call San Francisco residents after an LA earthquake and ask ARE YOU ALL RIGHT???