I'll get you, hero, if it's the last thing I do!

If you were able to assemble a gigantic corpus of all dialog ever written for film, television, and children's programming, and then sort each line by frequency of occurrence, you would have a pretty enjoyable little pile of cliches at the top. Some of these lines might have even coalesced into individual lexical items, like (everyone together!): "Timetotakeoutthetrash."

Now enter the top one hundred of these phrases into an iPod scramble. Submit playlist to big budget studio. Collect money for the script for Transformers 2.

Not that I was expecting, well, English words from something called "Revenge of the Fallen." But this "movie" (I ask the Gentle Reader to contribute emphatic finger quotation marks, thanks) actually contains these lines, and it's not meant as a spoof. Ready?

bad guy: "Revenge will be ours!" (fist curl)

dying bad guy: "We shall rise again!"
heroic good guy: "Not today!" (shoot)

hissing bad guy: "You have much to learn, my disciple."
kneeling bad guy: "Yes, my master."

bad guy: "You are so weak!" (stab)
good guy: "Arrrrgh."
other good guy: "Noooooo!"

little bad guy: "Who are you?"
hot female good guy: "Your worst nightmare."

Hahahahaha-- WAIT! Someone was paid for this! Give me his name and address, I want in on that.

The thing that really baked my noodle was trying to identify the intended audience. See, this dialog might actually sort of fit in (really unimaginative) Saturday morning cartoons. But although Transformers plays like a kid movie -- not only the script, but the voices and acting, could all have been recorded by two boys playing robots on their bedroom floor ("You will die!" "Oh no!" crashcrashcrash) -- there's way too much non-kid-friendly content. All the violence? Every curse word except the F one? Drug use? Pretty explicit sexuality?

Who exactly did they make this for?

I guess not I! (Adjusts monocle while swirling brandy glass and harrumphing over colleague's scientific new findings, written in Latin.)