(Optimus Prime image by Roxanne Ready, CC BY SA 2.0)

Having never been a fan of the Transformers toys, cartoons or comics before the original Michael Bay atrocity reared its head in 2007, I might not be the best person to judge the franchise. What I can do however, is judge the film itself as it stands. Obviously, a spoiler warning is in effect but let’s all be honest with ourselves, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie, and do you really think you’ll be taken by surprise by anything in this film? I think not.

One:

I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to film. Not a snob in that I’ll only see left-wing French theatre, shot on black and white and projected against the side of a truck in a New York City alleyway, a snob in the nerd sense. I don’t condone the Star Wars prequels for example, nor do I acknowledge the existence of any X-Men film not directed by Bryan Singer. That kind of thing.

That snobbery carried itself over to the Transformers franchise and helped me decide instantly that Transformers cannot and should not be classified as a “film”. To me a film needs more substance than a poorly conceived love story peppered with explosions, one dimensional characters and plot holes you could back a Winnebago into.

Two:

When wading through Michael Bay, you know you’ll see stuff explode. It’s expected. But halfway through act three of Transformers 3 I wanted the explosions to stop. There couldn’t have been anything left in that city to detonate after the Transformers had their way with it like they did. But no, I’m wrong. Cut to a wide shot of a main city street and few buildings appear damaged. Just a few scratches. If we’re going to make everything that does and doesn’t move explode for 25-30 minutes, can we have the common decency to reflect that in the wide shots, please?

Three:

A robotic Kraken? Seriously? I’m not sure what’s worse, the robo-Kraken or Patrick Dempsey.

Four:

I mentioned plot holes, inconsistencies and general “wait, what?” moments, and my are there some spectacular ones. Most notably is the fact that Transformers now expel what appears to be badly rendered blood from their wounds during battle. When did that happen? Also, why did Optimus Prime get tangled in crane wires for 10 minutes when he’s armed with a sword and a jetpack? And what happened to the parents at the end of the film? Better yet, why were they even there? We only needed one line of dialogue on an answering machine to say they’d gone travelling in their Winnebago and wouldn’t be back, but no, we needed to have them in there. Why didn’t the appearance of another enormous planetary body so close to Earth’s atmosphere affect the way the planet works in the slightest, and why did the half-conjured Cybertron evaporate only when Patrick Dempsey’s ridiculous excuse for a character touched it and not the first time when Optimus Prime blew the bejeesus out of it? These are a few examples but trust me, there’s many more to find on your own.

Five

Why let two offensive, stereotypical robots give us nauseating ‘comic relief’ when you’ve got great comedy actors like Alan Tudyk and Ken Jeong sitting in their trailers being underused?

Six

I can accept that the film goes for roughly three hours. I can sit and diligently watch it until the last 15 minutes at the conclusion of the final battle where all of your cliche Christmases come at once, neatly packaged in a box you’re sure to throw up into later. The conclusion of the love story between Sam and Carly is nauseating as is Bumblebee’s cringable mention of future nuptuals (complete with ‘Here Comes the Bride’), Optimus Prime’s speech screeched American patriotism with a battered USA flag flying proudly despite its war-torn appearance and (spoiler alert) if all it took was to get the hot chick to convince Megatron to turn on Leonard Nimoy-voiced Sentinel Prime with two lines of dialogue, why didn’t we do that at the beginning of the third act and spare the ammunition?

Seven

Product placement works exclusively on morons and there’s no shortage of it here. Lenovo, Cisco, Apple, Mercedes, various phone manufacturers and others are all featured prominently. People stupid enough not to notice aren’t likely to buy any of these products and anyone who did notice is probably too annoyed at the whole farce to consider buying any of them again.

Eight

There’s a black soldier who, in the middle of a battle, makes sure to stop and tell his commanding officer that “he didn’t sign up for this”. Sigh.

Nine

According to my wife, Carly’s shoes changed themselves magically around four times during the final battle. It’s a multi-multi-million dollar movie and they can’t afford a continuity manager who’s on the ball?

Ten

Michael Bay’s treatment of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s body in act one is gratuitous and borders on sexual harassment. Yes, she’s an underwear model and she is quite nice to look at, but I came here to watch robots punch on, not to watch Michael Bay’s spank reel.

Those are just some of the issues that bothered me. I have others but ten is more than enough to convince you that this isn’t a film you go to for the scintillating sub-plot, riveting character development or deep narrative. This is a film you go to to see the easiest pay-day Leonard Nimoy ever had. This is a film you go to to see why Shia LeBeouf isn’t in more movies. This is a film you go to to see to see what your friends were yapping about, only to realise they’re still idiots for yapping about it. This is a film you go to to see an awesome Ferrari getting about. This is a film you go to to see Rosie Huntington-Whiteley squeal about in small outfits.

This is a film you go to to see to lower your intelligence in general, and on reflection, should never be watched again.

PS: If you saw it in 3D you’re a bigger idiot than the rest of us.

It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all…

(iPad 2 image by Pedro Eugenio Antunes, CC BY 2.0 )

Ever since the eMac came out in its funky, fruity colours, I’ve been a fan of Apple products. From the eMac, up through the various generations of iPods, into the MacBook range and finally the iPhone, I remain a fan. At least I was a fan of Camp Apple until the iPad and I moved in together. Boy, did the honeymoon end quickly.

My name is Luke and I’m a reformed iPad owner.

12 months of pining for a gadget was brutally murdered by spending 18 days with it. After 18 days, I knew the iPad 2 was mutton dressed as lamb.

The problem with the iPad is that its not the device we were promised. We were promised by Uncle Steve, a device for the post-PC era. That means a portable device that can do all that a PC can do and more. To me, the iPad is a step backwards due to the sacrifices the user has to make to own one.

The problem is partially the design — what with no external USB port(s) or a card slot — but it’s mostly the software.

I have an iPhone also and iOS is great on that. It’s perfectly suited for the job: small screen, portable, and relatively fast. The problem with the iPad is that it’s pretty much a direct port onto a larger screen with a few essentials removed. The iPad software forgoes the phone, calculator and weather applications to name a few. Concessions like this make it a lacklustre device.

So I got rid of it. I had pined after it for so long and looked so forward to calling one my own, and when I had it, I hated it. I did make a small profit on selling it though, so it brought me some joy at the end.

What I’m now deciding is: do I replace my 2008 MacBook Pro (2.4 ghz Core 2 Duo) with a new, unibody, Sandy-Bridge enabled model, or do I wait for the Sandy Bridge enabled MacBook Air supposedly coming in June? Something tells me I’m setting myself up for the same fall with the latter.

My advice here is accept no substitute. If it’s your money, spend up to the limit to get something that does everything, or as close as you can get to everything. You might not check all your boxes but it’s better than shooting yourself in both feet with a gun called iPad.

(Ruslan Kogan image by KoganTech, CC BY 2.0)

Outspoken retailer, Gerry Harvey, has finally made the move to an online marketplace. We wont talk about the quality of the offerings or the store here because every joke has been rehashed and recycled several thousand times already. What he asked his online team to do however is turnover $300 million in the first two to three years, and move onto $1 billion of turnover within five to 10 years. Power to him for being ambitious and good luck to his sales team on what is a tough ask.

But sometimes ambition can border on stupidity.

I’ll admit, I’ve been a fan of Ruslan Kogan for a while. I like his way of sticking it to the retailers in the battle of old versus new retail. The problem is that he’s getting a little too ahead of himself when it comes to grabbing headlines. And yes we can talk about the irony herein until the cows come home, but Kogan made some pretty bold statements of his own following Gerry Harvey’s billion dollar target.

In a blog post, Kogan said that he had instructed his sales team to make $10 billion over 10 years.

“Gerry has laid down the challenge and has ordered his team to do $1 billion in sales online within 10 years. We accept the challenge! That is why, today, I have responded to Gerry by asking my team to do outdo Harvey Norman 10-fold – that means $10 billion in sales online within 10 years!”

Sure it’s a stunt and hopefully he’s not serious (if he was I bet his sales director had a heart attack), but if he’s not serious, why say it in the first place? It’s tough to peg whether he’s joking about that or not, but to quote Delimiter, Kogan has a staff of 22 and made $12.2 million in revenue last year.

Ignoring the obvious shortfalls in revenue, Kogan has asked each of his staff (perhaps himself included in that count) to turnover more than $4.5 million for the business in revenue every year.

(Credit: Kolin Toney, CC BY-SA 2.0)

So Osama’s dead now. I’m almost opinionless on this.

Let me say this:

The war on terror has cost the coalition of the willing countless lives, and while this is a remarkable achievement to kill the figurehead of modern extremism, it won’t make a single ‘insurgent’ put their gun down. If anything, they’ll now fight harder while the next one steps into the breach.

I’m sure we’ll all hear amazing revelations over the next few weeks but surely it was a huge mistake to “bury him at sea” as has been reported.

There’ll be more conspiracy theories about this than the moon landing, Princess Diana and Sept 11 put together, surely.