Here's what I posted on Twitter as I made my way through the madness known as TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON:

* OK, Michael Bay, try to impress me.

* I love that Hasbro is the first name in the credits. That tells you just what kind of movie this is going to be.

* We get a glimpse of Cybertron and... it looks like Zion from the Matrix sequels. Shaking my head.

* Alterna-NASA sci-fi stories have never excited me. Real NASA is already cool enough.

* Hot girlfriend, hangs out at the White House... Sam isn't exactly the "guy next door" anymore, is he?

* Great, more Michael Bay "comedy." Just because you can have wacky sidekicks doesn't mean you should.

* This was originally released in 3-D, right? That's why a lot of these scenes are all grey and colorless?

* Shockwave was the first Transformer I ever owned. That thing with the tentacles is NOT Shockwave.

* It's a BURN AFTER READING reunion.

* Too... many... silly... accents...

* Subplot about Sam, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's boss seems pointless. It better be going somewhere.

* On the positive side, Megatron's finally showing a little bit of personality for once in these movies.

* Michael Bay, even with Ken Jeong in your movie, you still can't do comedy. Just STOP.

* The movie is spinning its wheels, so to speak. A lot of talk, exposition, forced conflict, forced comedy. I'm bored.

* Suddenly, it's a gangster flick. Why aren't the transformers in this Transformers movie?

* It's Spider-Man's landlord!

* Robot fightin'! But the robots all look alike, so I can't tell which is which. I should be pumped, but I'm confused.

* What? Optimus just stands there and lets the villain walk away? And now we're at a fancy dinner party? Ugh.

* What should be a suspenseful twist is instead an excuse for Sam to do slapstick shtick. Ugh again.

* Didn't the second movie also do the "Oh, no, Optimus is dead for real" fake-out? Why do it again?

* What's with all the cuts to a black screen, and then back to the action? It's like they're still editing the trailer.

* Suddenly I'm watching BATTLE: L.A. Why can't this movie make up its mind what it wants to be?

* The Decepticons don't have phones? They communicate only by yelling at each other?

* "Boomsticks?" Seriously? Now I'm wishing I was watching ARMY OF DARKNESS instead.

* Now someone just yelled, "Shoot the glass," and suddenly I wish I was watching DIE HARD.

* "The needs of the many..." OK, that one HAD to be on purpose.

* Nothing says "Hollywood blockbuster" like the single-tear-falls-down-the-hero's-face shot.

* Sam has parkour moves now? Since when?

* "You'll have to go through me." That's it, keep the action cliches coming, movie.

* The final confrontation started with, "Holy crap!" but quickly sank back down to "Oh, brother."

* Movie's over and... it's almost 2 a.m.? I have to go to work tomorrow.

Just wanted to make public my extreme pleasure at being invited to contribute to DVD VERDICT, and share chambers with such esteemed colleagues...

I don't know how or why, but Empire of Assassins continues to be something a lot of people want to check out, at least until they read my review (I hope). It has been the top read review on the Verdict site for the past three days (although 39 Assassins is going to pass it very soon). My theory is that my review is the only one in existence right now so anyone interested in reading about it has nowhere else to go.

In the meantime, both the Max Manus and Orgasm Inc. reviews popped this past week. They were both a bit disappointing, but for different reasons. Max is about a saboteur but spends all his time moping instead of saboteuring. And there was nothing at all orgasmic about Orgasm Inc..

Just to clear any confusion about the latter, though, I didn't necessarily disagree with the conclusions drawn by Liz. I agree that a lot of what is considered to be "dysfunctions" in modern-day America aren't really medical conditions, and that isn't limited to sexual dysfunction. I think, for instance, that ADD and ADHD are way over diagnosed because parents just don't want to deal with excitable children. That being said, there's no question that some men have sexual dysfunctions, so it stands to reason that some women would as well.

Also, the end of Orgasm Inc. wants the viewer to be outraged because the patch that got shot down by the FDA got approved in Europe. However, the reason it didn't make it in the US was because it needed to be taken with Estrogen, which added all of Estrogen's problems to its problems. It got approved in Europe only in patients who were already on Estrogen, so that entire part of the argument was effectively removed from the equation and I see no problems with it being approved on that basis.

Just sayin'.

Apparently Empire of Assassins was a more highly anticipated release than I ever would have suspected; my review of it got a "special commendation" by being #11 in the "14 Day Most Popular" group. It also netted my first official feedback; someone clicked "no" on the "Did we give it a fair trial" link. Unfortunately whoever it was didn't email me or go to the forums, so I can only guess at their reasons for liking the film. All I can come up with is that the person was, perhaps, the mother of one of the actors. As an edit, I looked at IMDB's fan ratings and found one person voted it a 10 out of 10. It was a 30-something female, so it must have been a sister or wife, not a mother.

Conversely, there are 9 "Likes" connected to the "Facebook" link. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it sounds positive.

I probably should have worded the Closing Statement a little differently, since I don't have actual evidence that the film was made from cutting-room floor material. I hope it was, though, 'cause if not, the TV series must have left a lot to be desired.

Also, Land Girls popped today. There's not a lot to say about the show, except that I was pretty disappointed in it. It seemed like it could have been much better than it ended up being. I probably would have liked it even less, but I watched it with Anna and, since everything is always better when she's involved, it made the show enjoyable.

The next list came out and I told Michael to send me whatever he needed again. He sent me two movies and an entire season of a TV series. I'll have to manufacture a lot of time for that much viewing.

In other news, the back speakers of my surround sound system didn't work all (or even most) of the time so I called Sony and spent a couple hours doing all the things I had tried myself before I called. Finally they told me to send them in for repair, so I sent them yesterday. No word on how long the repairs will take.

There was nothing terribly exciting on last week’s list except for 39 Assassins which I signed up for knowing I wouldn’t get it. The more experienced judges get first pick (as they very much should), but I figured I definitely wouldn’t get it if I didn’t even ask.
For the rest I just picked the films from the bottom of the Backlog list and told Michael to send me whatever he wanted to get done the soonest. None of the ones I actually signed up for came, so clearly the bottom of the list isn’t the top priority. One that he did send was Bodyguards and Assassins, presumably as a sort of compensation for missing out on 39 Assassins, which I very much appreciated.

I appreciated it much more after watching the film, ‘cause it’s way better than last week’s similarly themed Empire of Assassins which was just horrible.
There’s an irony of sorts here. The worst film I’ve reviewed so far is the one that took the most research. Neither IMDB nor Amazon had anything useful about Empire of Assassins. All I got from them was the poorly written media blurb:

One man is out for revenge after a life-altering event destroys his family. After years of preparation he seeks out his justice, while unaware of its relation to on his brother. As these two brothers seek to destroy each other, certain memories are triggered and although many trusted allies will be dishonest and misleading, neither one will stop until they know the truth.

The rest of the Internet seemed oblivious to its very existence.

Eventually, after extensive Googling, I came across KungFuCinema.com and a thread in their forums entitled “Empire of Assassins? Anyone have info?” The thread itself didn’t have any information because, it turned out, the answer to the titular question was “no.” But it did have a clue of sorts by mentioning a similar movie that came from a TV show.

I Googled the names of the only two actors that IMDB had and wasted an hour trying to track down Xie Miao and Miu Tse because everything I could find on the two actors seemed to indicate they had the exact same background. Eventually I pieced together my problem: they are, in fact, the same person. He just used a different name for some of his earlier movies.

Knowing that still didn’t help much so I turned to the other actor, Li Yuan. Here I struck gold, in the form of his blog, written in Chinese but translated by Google. It talked about his work on the TV show “Legend of Shaolin Kung Fu 2: 13 Cudgel Monks”. It also had a strangely familiar looking picture of one of the set pieces on the TV show. Strange because it looked exactly like the set piece for the final inane action sequence of Empire of Assassins.

In case the IMG thing still doesn't work, the look at it here.

Uncanny, right?

So I went back to the forum and did some research on the TV show and pieced together the rest of the story: they had already released a movie based on "Legend of Shaolin" called Kung-fu Master and were dipping into the well again. Except it was clear Assassins did not follow any part of the TV show since neither of the main characters is a monk (well, until the end), which is what "Legend 2" is all about.

So, in the end, I did hours of research only to discover that a bad movie was even worse than I thought.

After that debacle I was a tad concerned about another assassin-titled movie that I had never heard of, but I do love kung fu films so I looked forward to watching it. This time I was rewarded with a well made, emotionally engaging film, even if it didn't have a ton of action up front. Everyone involved was very proud of themselves, judging from the interviews. I don't have a lot more to say about it since everything is in the review, though.

I do wonder if my reviews are a bit longer than they should be. The full ones are supposed to be over 1000 words, but some of the others that I read seem much shorter. Ah well, I'd rather be too long than too short, unless it gets so long that people get tired of reading it. But you'll let me know if that happens, right non-existent readers?

Thought so.