Uber-director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys, etc.) has built a career out of directing projects produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, but he also has a friend in Steven Spielberg. It was Spielberg himself who sent Bay the script for The Island and told him it should be his next project.

Well, that was a few summers ago and we know that didn't turn out well. The movie tanked. (It was because there were no bankable stars; the project itself was fine, but I digress.) Spielberg, I imagines, felt pretty bad about it, so once he realized that a Transformers adaptation was just itching to be made, he went to Bay. And knowing Bay would turn it into the crazy-amounts-of-explosions bombast that Bay was known for, Spielberg pitched it to him in the most Spielbergian way possible: "It's about a boy who gets his first car."

Bay eventually warmed to the idea, and long story short, Tuesday marked the official opening of the Transformers movie. And the result? From what I've heard, it's a very Spielberg story (i.e. young male protagonist in the middle of a sci-fi epic), only instead of Spielberg's skill and polish, we get Michael Bay's explosions and messiness: we lose track of the kid's story halfway through, product placement is used to a ridiculous degree, etc. In other words, we get exactly what everybody expected.

Which of course means the film will make all sorts of money. There are worse things in the world. We've got plenty of Transformers content up at TheCinemaSource (we actually have an exclusive page that links to everything, check it out), but as for my own stuff, I'm responsible for the spotlights for stars Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson.

So check them out. And yeah, that was three paragraphs leading up to me plugging my own work. But I like to imagine that you all enjoyed the anecdote. Either that, or you're rolling your eyes because I'm judging a film I haven't even seen. By the way, what does everybody think of Shia LaBeouf? I kind of like the kid.