I don’t know if any of you have noticed the most recent readings on Rotten Tomatoes. If not I will give you three or four minutes to go and take a look. Go ahead. You are going to see a few of the top movies that opened the week before Christmas, the ones that we all expected to hear about. Aquaman is sitting about where I expected, hovering right around 64%. Its fresh but not by much, barely keeping its head about water. Not funny? I know, sorry, but neither is the rest of the reviews on last week’s Tomato-reader.

Mary Poppins is holding steady at 77%, less than I had hoped for certainly but still respectable especially given what it has to live up to.

But the one that has been keeping me up nights for a week and the one that we are really here to talk about is Bumblebee. Rotten Tomatoes

In case you have no idea what a Bumblebee is, let me jog your memory and remind you that the character has appeared in a supporting role in all dozen or so of the Transformers movies of the last few years. Somehow after the dismal failure of the last few, the adorable yellow bug garnered his own film.

Now I had heard about it, I shrugged off the trailer when it came out and went on to be excited about scads of other films that seemed far more worthy of my time. I went to the theatre for the first Transformers movie too! I was among the large audience who applauded when Optimus Prime first appeared on the hill. But the longer Michael Bay churned out his loud, over done, visually exhausting films the less interested we all became am I right?

So no one expected much out of Bumblebee. I guess it must have been a sweet surprise to all of the critics to finally be rid of Michael Bay and have a Transformers movie that was both charming and…well, not half bad.

Bumblebee is sitting at a whopping 94% on Rotten Tomatoes right now. To put that in perspective that ties the original Iron Man movie, La La Land topped out at 91% and last year’s brilliant near silent war movie Dunkirk only hit 92%.

Yeah so once again my friends, the latest Transformers movie, based solely on the one cute Transformer who doesn’t even speak…94% To me, this can only mean one thing…Rotten Tomatoes might be dead to me.

So for a long time I have been relying fairly often on Rotten Tomatoes for my movie going experience – who doesn’t at this point really? But egotistical as it may sound, I was probably using Rotten Tomatoes long before most of my friends and family had ever heard of it.

You all know how it works by now. People who work for the company decide whether or not the a critic’s review is positive or negative no in between, no grey area: its one or the other positive or negative, that’s it. Positive reviews accumulate and over time they average out and the amount of positive reviews a movie gets – BOOM! There is your score!

So that means that out of all of the reviews that Bumblebee has gotten 94% of them have been positive. Or at least 94% have been deemed positive.

Same holds true for Mary Poppins. 77% positive reviews. 77% of the reviews have been deemed positive by the staff of Rotten Tomatoes. Let that sink in for a few moments if it hasn’t already. The Transformer movie…has outperformed the movie with the man who wrote Hamilton in it. Mary Poppins has a 91 year Old Dick Van Dyke dancing on a table, Bumblebee has a robot who doesn’t even talk! I haven’t even seen either one of these movies but I am not going to be any help to Rotten Tomatoes because there is only one movie I am paying money to see.

And I am betting you know which one that is…