There's a new movie reviewer in town.

Fox actually had an ego problem of her own going at the time; TF Wiki.net's article on her has some more information, including such quotes of hers as:

"I told them that I would literally commit suicide if they made an action figure of me. I will kill myself."*

and

"I’d barter with [Megatron] and say instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super Bible-beating people in Middle America?"

As to why she was suddenly removed from the Transformers franchise, no one knows for sure. I've seen multiple accounts, ranging from "Spielberg told Bay to fire her because of her comments about Hitler" to "Bay was so shocked at all the weight she lost between films that he told her to go eat a sandwich because he was afraid that she was too thin to be healthy".

As far as her acting career goes, I watched the DVD of "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen". She didn't come off as if she was acting; she came off as if she was legitimately mad that she wasn't the star of the film.



*An action figure of her character was, indeed, released. As we all know, she is still very much alive.

to me she is just one of many young female movie stars. the article makes her sound a bit unstable - almost bipolar.

Yeah, but 'professional' reviewers tend to make their money (or their magazine/website makes their money) through advertisements from...film companies - who also have the ability to give or withhold 'exclusives' with them. So they tend to stick with star ratings, as film studios can stick 'four/five stars by 'X'' on the posters and ignore the rest of the article.
Much better than having to read through reviews to find usable comments they can clip - such as '...you'll be laughing every minute...' when the full quote should have been 'You'll be laughing every minute at the absurd plot, poor direction and worse acting'.

For most reviews that I do, the format is this:

*1 paragraph explaining any possible bias that I might have towards or against the film. IE: "I saw the original 1980s release of this film a decade ago, and still remember most of what happened."

*1 - 3 paragraphs summarizing the plot (without spoiling it) so that readers will know what the film is about. IE: "_____ (played by _____) is a banker who frustrated with his co-workers. Things change when his brother _____ (_____) offers to make him a partner in a new business venture. The brother, a trained chef, wants to start his own restaurant, but doesn't have the cash to take out a lease while still paying for the sort of equipment he needs. The two brothers agree to partner, with the understanding that ___ will be repaid first if the venture fails as it's his cash on the line. Unfortunately for the pair, the head chef at the restaurant that _____ used to work is furious about having one of his assistants "turn" on him, and so hires hitman _____ (_____) to remove him from the picture."

*1 - 3 paragraphs in which I offer my critique and provide a conclusion. IE: "The original worked, in spite of the odd premise, because director _____ trusted his stars enough to let them ad-lib on occasion, something that injected pleasant humor into the film. With the re-make, however, the writers either did not know or did not care about this; it's painfully obvious that the ad-libbing was in fact scripted, and that the director is forcing the actors to follow through even though they are clearly uncomfortable doing so. This is most apparent during the sequence with the llama."

*Score, film rating, and film run time.

I've got a 600-word limit (including the title), and so I try to keep things as concise as possible.

Its much the same in the video game industry, especially since the complaints about Mass Effect 3's ending. FAR to many of the 'journalists' commenting on this case were defending EA/BW more than the PR department did. Worse for them is that by insulting their readers/customers they caused said readers to take a far closer look into how reviews were (and alas still are) done.
This ended up with people becoming aware of several rather questionable practices and connections between developers and reviewers - such as inviting reviewers to all expenses paid weekend retreats. As well as reviewers basically copy-pasting the marketing pamphlets they'd been given. (Seriously, at least one review I read was practically identical to the adverts EA/BW had out at the time). And other tricks, from only sending review copies off a week before the game came out and allegations that the review copies of ME3 were not the same as the release version.
Out of this mess only three journalists came out smelling of roses. A German reviewer, who admitted that they hadn't been able to finish the game when they wrote the original review and downgraded the original score given to ME3 due to the bad ending. Then there were two reviewers, Erik Kain and Dave Thier, who covered the story almost from the beginning in a fair and balanced way. Rather tellingly Erik and Dave work for Forbes magazine, which doesn't rely on advertising from games companies.

The situation with films is somewhat different, since they are more mainstream and as such get covered by bigger companies. While games companies can 'blacklist' magazines and individual journalists (who tend to be freelancers). Movie studios find it harder to do this with corporations such as the BBC, which don't rely on advertising, and even networks that do rely on advertising don't make a significant amount of money from movie studios. So when it comes to films the 'power' is more in the hands of the reviewers than it is the studios.
Not to say that there are not 'journalists' who can't be 'bought' in one way or another. Nor that networks like Fox might not be tempted to hype up some films released by 20th Century Fox, which is after all their sister company. I for one can't recall ever seeing a bad review for a 20th Century Fox film in the Sun Newspaper (which is ALSO owned by the same company)...although to be as fair as I can be I'll note that the Sun is a paper I only bought twice back when I was doing sociology - and the second time I only bought it so I could see the look on the teachers face. (He had a near fit when I walked in carrying a copy of the London Times, accusing me (sort of in jest) of being so right wing I made Margaret Thatcher look like Lenin)

There was a time when paying off or employing your own 'reviewers' worked, or at least was something you could get away with. These days it is becoming increasingly harder for film studios to do this, or to hide a truly bad film, for any length of time. This is down to the internet, which as it becomes more widespread, allows people to swap stories, point out trends in reviewers (or sites/magazines) and give their own opinions. This makes it very difficult for 'paid' reviewers to get away with conning people for any length of time - figure maybe two or three films before people start to catch on and stop listening to them - unless its to laugh at what they say.

While I can understand why companies do this, after all the average 'blockbuster' costs some $120 million before marketing and studios will only make a profit on one or two films each year - of all the big studios only Disney could survive without at least one successful film per year. This is a business model that just isn't sustainable, or which wouldn't be without truly 'independent' reviewers people can rely on. Sure, 'good' is often subjective in regards films - I was bored to tears by Inception and liked Dredd, even though the reviewers (and most people) would probably put them in the opposite order. But you can only con people for so long before they stop listening to you, which I suspect has been slowly happening over the last ten years or so. Studios have been trying to counter decreasing ticket sales with gimmicks such as 3D, blaming internet piracy and trying to control the industry more strictly.

I suspect that we are going to end up with two or three big studios in the USA, all of which will be part of larger corporations who pull in money from more than just films. So figure 20th Century Fox and Disney surviving. Then a larger number of small and medium sized film makers who may bypass the big screen entirely to release films via the internet alone - although the latter are unlikely to appear in significant numbers until fast broadband becomes widespread and cheap. Which could be another 10-15 years, unless someone comes up with a much better (ie smaller) file system for videos.

This is what seems to be happening with computer games now. There are three big corporations (EA, Activision and Ubisoft) who have the money to make 'big' games and who are doing their damnedest to control everything about the industry. Then we have a plethora of smaller independent developers, who are gaining increasing popularity - Ten years ago if you'd have told people that a Polish developer would become more respected than the mighty Bioware, and in some cases outsell them, you'd have been laughed at. Yet CD Projek Red has done both. Some of this is down to price, but mostly because smaller developers don't feel the need to try and control every aspect of the industry with intrusive, restrictive (and in EA's case illegal*) DRM or required online components.

(*The DRM software EA used for the first Mass Effect game was ordered to be removed as it broke several US laws)

What film studios and games companies alike seem to miss is that their customers are not kids, and treating them as such just causes bad feelings. In the case of video games we have this mental image of them being played by spotty teenagers or those who live in their parents bedrooms - in both cases male. In reality the average 'gamer' in western countries is 35*, and just under half are women.

(*This applies to every country I can get information on, from the US to Norway)

This is where I come in.

Between the head trauma and the decade-plus of people wanting my blood over the religious apologetics work I do, I've gone beyond caring about the public sentiment.

If I don't like a movie, I don't like it... and will tell people so.

Movies like "Lone Survivor", "Bad Grandpa", and "The Best Man Holiday" might have been popular, but I dumped them all in the rubbish bin and for good cause.

Meanwhile, I did what I could to promote the heck out of "Ender's Game", "Grudge Match", and "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" despite the fact that they were largely written off.

I even made it a point to skip "The Hunger Games" in order to see "Delivery Man" because I knew most reviewers were going to just ignore the latter for the sake of the former.

You'll probably like it.

It's surprisingly "clean" for a film with a PG-13 rating.

Vulgarity is virtually non-existent.

Nudity is limited to one shot of Kiera Knightly wearing a bath towel and another of her and Chris Pine's character waking up in bed.

The bulk of the rating comes from violence ("intense action"), and said violence isn't too far off from what you'd see in a Connery-era or Moore-era Bond film.

It's just straight-up spy action with a dash of interpersonal conflicts thrown in.

...and a cameo by Mikhail Barishnykov, who gets one of the best one-liners in the entire film.

I give "I, Frankenstein" a 7.5 / 10.

The film tried to be philosophical about matters (for example, does the monster have a soul?), but lost itself in its own special effects and action sequences.