Hi all,
It's been a while since my last blog post, in my defence I'm in America. (or I was when I started writing this originally, sue me.)
I hate Micheal Bay. I really, really hate him. For those of you who may not know who Michael Bay is let me explain.
Michael Bay is a Hollywood director of some of the most profitable movies of recent years. He is responsible for Armageddon, Bad Boys, The Rock, Pearl Harbor and the cinematic excrement that is the Transformers series. It is my concerted and firm belief that this man is responsible for some of the biggest pieces of turd ever put on celluloid. His films are sexist, racist, obsessed with fetishising the military and worst of all they are popular.
"Oh Mr Camelot" I hear you cry "they are just big summer blockbusters. Popcorn movies don't have to make you think, they just have to entertain you." to which I reply, shut up, sit down and let me tell you why you are wrong.
I accept that summer blockbusters don't need or want deep philosophical stuff in them. The latter two movies in the Matrix series for example suffered from an attempt to be too clever and ended up just looking pretentious (not to mention the end of the second movie was actually pointless making the whole movie a tremendous waste of time). However, Bay's movies actively denigrate the concept of being intelligent. Anyone who is supposed to be clever in a Bay movie is seen as weird and geeky and is often portrayed as the guy who loses it big time. Armageddon is the worst for this, lauding a bunch of ignorant rig pig pricks over NASA and when they get on crap CGI Asteroid who loses his shit? Yep Steve Buscemi, the guy who was pointedly mentioned as being the most intelligent of the lot. This leaves Bruce Willis to save the day in the most overblown way possible.
Actually this is a symptom of a much larger theme in Bay's movies. The rampant hate for authority, particularly civilian authority. Every Bay movie features the individual struggling against some kind of organisation. It's like the Ayn Rand inspired scribblings of a bad sixth form English student. It's ignorant and boring at this point. The only authority Bay has any time for is the US military but he treats this with an almost fetishistic appeal that borders on totalitarian. Also it is the individual military characters that he is interested in and there is always a point in a Bay movie that the military character(s) have to act on their own authority or disobey orders. Again the hate of authority coming into effect.
Then we have his treatment of women in his films or rather the treatment of the boob and arse carrying frames because that's all they are in a Bay movie. Compare this with James Cameron, for all his faults he always has strong female characters in his movies. Bay never has this, his female characters are there to look hot and pout, pine for their menfolk or provide comic relief in the case of older females (I'm still in fucking therapy about the doped brownies bullshit in Transformers 2). The lack of any realistic female characters is frankly laughable. Even Paul W. S. Anderson can do a kick ass female character for fuck's sake. It's not hard.
Then there's the over production of his movies. Bay is in love with slow motion, odd camera angles and jump cuts to the extent that the film becomes plastic and unreal. He also uses only two colours in his movies teal (orange) and blue because they are opposite on the colour spectrum and thereby provide a good contrast. His movies do not feel real because they exhibit an overproduced cinematic style; one that divorces itself from reality. It is as if Bay wants to make films that overwhelm your senses thinking that in some way this makes them memorable when in actual fact the relentless pace of his movies does the exact opposite.
This relentless pace does irreparable damage to characterisation in his movies. Bay mistakenly believes that dialogue and character building can be done in short snappy sentences and brief scenes. Everything is rushed in his films because he does not trust his audience to have an attention span. That leads to cliched characters and stilted dialogue because the characters have no time to develop a personality. A good director finds some time in his movies to slow the pace in order to frame the frantic pace of the action. Bay just barrels ahead like a juggernaut.
Bay's racism is evident in a lot of his movies. The horrendous "wigger" stereotypes in the second Transformers movie are the most obvious example of this, however he's been doing it for a while. The guy who betrays the honour bound Colonel in The Rock? Yup the black guy. John Tuturro in the Transformers movies? Jewish guy who lives with his overbearing mother. The Cosmonaut in Armageddon? Yup crazy and living in a crap space station, because it's, y'know, Russian and all their stuff is shit. Oh how we laughed. In the absence of time to develop an actual character Bay just uses lazy racial stereotypes because that's easy.
All of this brings me to the crux of the matter. Bay makes easy movies. No subtlety is involved, no craft, no skill. The point is he is appealing to the dumbest person in the audience. He just wants to overwhelm you with sound and image because I suspect he does not have the talent to employ subtlety. Either that or he knows that he doesn't have to. If you can just put a souless and relentless parade of banal action together and it still grosses a billion then why try?
This is the problem. People look at the money that Transformers and the like make and they realise that the more basic a movie is the better it plays overseas. There is a reason that Baywatch is the most viewed TV show in history because everyone understands tits. Similarly Bay's over produced, relentless and earsplitting drivel can be understood by anyone, be it a moron in a western multiplex or someone who speaks no English in a small movie theatre anywhere in the world.
I am resigned to his success by know so I have taken a vow never to endure any more of his orange and blue cinematic vomit. I urge you all to do the same. Not because I believe it will spell the end of Michael Bay (because it wont) rather I implore you to avoid it for your own sake. Watching a Bay movie is the equivalent of admitting that you don't care about cinema, that you would rather watch spectacle than nuance. Do yourself a favour and watch something else, something that involves you on an emotional level, something that deserves merit. Trust me, you are better than Bay's bullshit
Your resident hack praying that Michael Bay will crawl off into a fucking hole somewhere and stop inflicting his bullshit on us all.
Fall of Camelot
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