the official "what did michael bay ever do to you?" thread
06-27-05, 11:19 AM
#1
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the official "what did michael bay ever do to you?" thread
i've seen enough of the michael bay hating. can anyone explain why michael bay, above all others, deserves such insane hatred around these forums?
06-27-05, 11:33 AM
#4
DVD Talk Legend
can anyone explain why michael bay, above all others, deserves such insane hatred around these forums?
Bad Boys II
Pearl Harbor
Armageddon
The Rock
Bad Boys
06-27-05, 11:39 AM
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Originally Posted by Coral
It's simple:
Bad Boys II
Pearl Harbor
Armageddon
The Rock
Bad Boys
Bad Boys II
Pearl Harbor
Armageddon
The Rock
Bad Boys
what makes these action movies so much crappier than others?
john woo's MI-2 was at times way over the top in terms of symbolism and charlie's angles movies really put the audience's ability to suspend disbelief to the test. but these aren't nearly as ridiculed as anything bay does.
interestingly, i have a small list of movies i watch very frequently. rushmore, romeo + juliet, armageddon, cradle will rock, hook, and the rock.
bay seems to make some pretty rewatchable movies, IMO.
06-27-05, 11:47 AM
#6
DVD Talk Legend
He's a big Hollywood name and his movies make a lot of money. Insipid internet flunkies think that making it their lives focus to shit on people in the spotlight that they will feel somehow better about themselves or that other losers will accept them for being "different." If Bad Boys had been based on a comic book, the dorks would be lining up to suck Bay off and starting online petitions to have Bay direct the next Star Wars movie.
Then, there are people that just don't like his work.. you can usually tell these honest opinions because they're more contained.
Then, there are people that just don't like his work.. you can usually tell these honest opinions because they're more contained.
06-27-05, 11:56 AM
#7
DVD Talk Special Edition
I don't hate Michael Bay's films. For the most part, I find them entertaining enough.
I do have a problem with the editing during his action sequences, however. Yeah...yeah...I understand they are supposed to reflect the chaos of the moment, but I often leave them shaking my head, wondering what in the world just happened.
Its hard to be concerned about the welfare of a character when you can't honestly tell what's happening.
I do have a problem with the editing during his action sequences, however. Yeah...yeah...I understand they are supposed to reflect the chaos of the moment, but I often leave them shaking my head, wondering what in the world just happened.
Its hard to be concerned about the welfare of a character when you can't honestly tell what's happening.
06-27-05, 12:38 PM
#8
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Originally Posted by PixyJunket
He's a big Hollywood name and his movies make a lot of money. Insipid internet flunkies think that making it their lives focus to shit on people in the spotlight that they will feel somehow better about themselves or that other losers will accept them for being "different." If Bad Boys had been based on a comic book, the dorks would be lining up to suck Bay off and starting online petitions to have Bay direct the next Star Wars movie.
Then, there are people that just don't like his work.. you can usually tell these honest opinions because they're more contained.
Then, there are people that just don't like his work.. you can usually tell these honest opinions because they're more contained.
06-27-05, 12:41 PM
#9
DVD Talk Godfather
Originally Posted by PixyJunket
If Bad Boys had been based on a comic book, the dorks would be lining up to suck Bay off and starting online petitions to have Bay direct the next Star Wars movie.
The only one of his movies I truely despise is Bad Boys II. Terrible movie. All the others have their moments. I love the Rock though.
06-27-05, 12:43 PM
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he's provided a fair amount of solid entertainment for me namely:
The Rock
Bad Boys I & II
Armageddon
and yes, even Certain moments in Pearl Harbor.
The Rock
Bad Boys I & II
Armageddon
and yes, even Certain moments in Pearl Harbor.
06-27-05, 12:47 PM
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I'm mixed on Michael Bay... I kinda liked Armegeddon and The Rock, but that's only because of some of the actors involved... the rest, don't care for them at all.
You know he's getting a infamous reputation when Matt/Trey can rip on his movies in their Movie!
You know he's getting a infamous reputation when Matt/Trey can rip on his movies in their Movie!
06-27-05, 01:13 PM
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I like a few of Bay's movies like The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor. I realize Bay gets pissed on a lot by certain fans for some reason or another, and I also wonder why. I don't know if I would call it "insane hatred", but there is definitely some resentment, jealousy, or something. Bay caters to the popcorn crowd, and he may have a reputation as being a sell-out, or a one-trick pony, but he's a competent director. I think Bay is just one of those people in Hollywood who falls under the category of "whipping boy"...it's just fashionable to rag on Bay because his movies are sort of guilty pleasures.
06-27-05, 02:00 PM
#16
DVD Talk Platinum Edition
A good piece from Slate.com:
The Bad Boy of Summer
Michael Bay vs. his critics.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 4:01 PM PT
Here's one good reason to see the new thriller The Island (DreamWorks) on July 22. The director is Michael Bay, the closest thing Hollywood has to a nuclear warhead. Bay specializes in disaster pictures, which contemplate the total annihilation of Earth (Armageddon, 1998), Western civilization (Pearl Harbor, 2001), or merely San Francisco (The Rock, 1996). Bay's critics say that such calamities are nothing compared with the hellfire the director is unleashing on the American cinema. "For years I believed that the introduction of MTV marked the beginning of the end for movies," a reader wrote the Los Angeles Times after seeing Armageddon, "and now I am convinced that the end is finally here." Journalists have called Bay "manipulative" and "shameless"—and, in a more open-minded spirit, asked, "Is Michael Bay the devil?"
With his free-range hair and surfer-dude locutions ("This is gonna be bitchin'!"), Bay doesn't seem like a harbinger of the End Times. Nor had it previously been thought that the Antichrist would emerge, as Bay did, from the Pasadena Art Center. The apoplexy Bay's movies inspire reveals something interesting about film critics: That no matter how much they insist that they've made their peace with the summer movie, and its bullying domination of the multiplex, they can still go limp at the idea of the summer movie as an artistic end in and of itself. Bay is a pure creature of summer, a man who has no ambition other than to dazzle and pummel. As he once put it, savoring his critical infamy, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime."
Who is Michael Bay? He was born Feb. 17, 1965, in Los Angeles and adopted shortly thereafter by Jimmy and Harriet Bay. Later, after a bit of sleuthing, Bay learned of rumors that his birth father was John Frankenheimer, the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer furiously denied parentage and took some DNA tests to prove it, but the idea has a poignant irony: Bay, a reviled summer-movie artist, as illegitimate son of a decorated auteur. (Only Bay knows for sure if The Rock was an homage to Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz.)
Bay went to film school at Wesleyan, where his professor Jeanine Basinger says he eschewed "film majors all dressed in black" for the brighter company of his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers. Frat-boy adventuring is one of the hallmarks of Bay's films, which always involve a group of men on a mission. In Armageddon, his troupe consisted of Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, and Steve Buscemi—a honey of a pledge class, though you wonder what Buscemi would bring to the spring formal. Bay's fealty to the Greek aesthetic made him something of a curiosity at Wesleyan. While his classmates angsted over mannered senior projects, Bay submitted a film about a very good-looking guy driving very fast in his yellow Porsche. The movie's exuberant texture, says Basinger, was recognizably that of a "Michael Bay film."
After a graduate stint in Pasadena, Bay cut his teeth with music videos (the DiVinyls, Donny Osmond) and TV commercials ("Got milk?") before falling under the sway of the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It was a fortunate meeting. Bruckheimer has long coveted commercial directors for their ability to deliver what his swaggering productions need most: a triumphant high in 30 seconds or less. Bay, in turn, has taken the Bruckheimer imperative to new heights. In addition to the old Bruckheimer coda, the massive explosion, Bay has added two new signatures: the droll joke, which he delivers effortlessly in The Rock and Armageddon; and, in keeping with the zeitgeist, an affirmation of patriotism. "The United States government just asked us to save the world," Bruce Willis barks at his team in Armageddon. "Anybody want to say no?"
Bay also achieves rapid-fire highs by cutting between shots very quickly. A beguiling image might appear on screen for a half-second before Bay replaces it with another—then another, and another—creating a mind-bending visual collage. This is the source of much discontent on the parts of critics with Bay and his summer brethren, since "fast-cutting" is seen as a hackneyed technique of music videos, not cinema. In fact, patching a bunch of quick cuts together is a massive undertaking in the editing room. Moreover, Bay has a fluid, gliding camera—he's using quick cuts to create atmosphere, not to whip up false momentum. (Basinger has an alternate explanation: Bay's quick cuts are the director's attempts to introduce something like abstract expressionism to the $150 million blockbuster. There are studio chieftains who will faint at those words.)
Bay has a worshipful, almost tender reverence for his male stars. His trademark shot makes them look like Renaissance statuary: His camera begins at their right arm, then swivels around behind them, and comes to rest gazing up at their granite chins. If anything, this swooning pales in comparison to Bay's lusty admiration for government agencies. "For 30 years they questioned the need for NASA," Billy Bob Thornton crows in Armageddon. "Today we're gonna give 'em the answer!" Bay's first feature, Bad Boys (1995), can be read as a paean to the Miami Police Department; The Rock as tribute to the FBI chemical weapons expert, as embodied by Nicolas Cage.
Such homage may make Bay slightly Dadaistic. But it doesn't make him the devil. What really irks critics is that Bay feeds from the detritus of 30 years of summer movies—as the New York Times puts it, his films feel "stitched together, like some cinematic Frankenstein's monster, from the body parts of other movies." Hollywood has heard versions of this complaint before. With the first generation of popcorn directors, led by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the standard protest was that they had learned all their tricks from television. With Bay, the complaint is that he has learned his tricks from Lucas and Spielberg. The implication is that, within a few generations, Hollywood will produce a director who knows nothing but the grammar of blockbusters—the bastard son of Top Gun's Maverick and a velociraptor. Bay further exacerbates the problem by blockbusterizing his directorial pronouncements. For him, a characteristic boast is not, "I write all my own movies," but, "I write all my own action."
The danger is that Bay will heed critics' advice, forsake his chaotic blockbusters, and try to do something noble—which is more or less what happened with Pearl Harbor, his most humanistic and least effective movie to date. The Island, in which Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play clones on the lam, represents a return to form. DreamWorks screened the first 45 minutes of the film last week, followed by a hair-raising highway chase scene that was shown out of context. There are those who say that watching a Bay movie is itself like watching one long chase scene out of context, as Bay whips from one image to the next, but I think Bay is on to something. He's whittled the summer movie down to its smallest constituent parts—without the clutter of character, cohesion, or exposition. Go ahead, embrace him. It wouldn't be the end of the world.
The Bad Boy of Summer
Michael Bay vs. his critics.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 4:01 PM PT
Here's one good reason to see the new thriller The Island (DreamWorks) on July 22. The director is Michael Bay, the closest thing Hollywood has to a nuclear warhead. Bay specializes in disaster pictures, which contemplate the total annihilation of Earth (Armageddon, 1998), Western civilization (Pearl Harbor, 2001), or merely San Francisco (The Rock, 1996). Bay's critics say that such calamities are nothing compared with the hellfire the director is unleashing on the American cinema. "For years I believed that the introduction of MTV marked the beginning of the end for movies," a reader wrote the Los Angeles Times after seeing Armageddon, "and now I am convinced that the end is finally here." Journalists have called Bay "manipulative" and "shameless"—and, in a more open-minded spirit, asked, "Is Michael Bay the devil?"
With his free-range hair and surfer-dude locutions ("This is gonna be bitchin'!"), Bay doesn't seem like a harbinger of the End Times. Nor had it previously been thought that the Antichrist would emerge, as Bay did, from the Pasadena Art Center. The apoplexy Bay's movies inspire reveals something interesting about film critics: That no matter how much they insist that they've made their peace with the summer movie, and its bullying domination of the multiplex, they can still go limp at the idea of the summer movie as an artistic end in and of itself. Bay is a pure creature of summer, a man who has no ambition other than to dazzle and pummel. As he once put it, savoring his critical infamy, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime."
Who is Michael Bay? He was born Feb. 17, 1965, in Los Angeles and adopted shortly thereafter by Jimmy and Harriet Bay. Later, after a bit of sleuthing, Bay learned of rumors that his birth father was John Frankenheimer, the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer furiously denied parentage and took some DNA tests to prove it, but the idea has a poignant irony: Bay, a reviled summer-movie artist, as illegitimate son of a decorated auteur. (Only Bay knows for sure if The Rock was an homage to Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz.)
Bay went to film school at Wesleyan, where his professor Jeanine Basinger says he eschewed "film majors all dressed in black" for the brighter company of his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers. Frat-boy adventuring is one of the hallmarks of Bay's films, which always involve a group of men on a mission. In Armageddon, his troupe consisted of Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, and Steve Buscemi—a honey of a pledge class, though you wonder what Buscemi would bring to the spring formal. Bay's fealty to the Greek aesthetic made him something of a curiosity at Wesleyan. While his classmates angsted over mannered senior projects, Bay submitted a film about a very good-looking guy driving very fast in his yellow Porsche. The movie's exuberant texture, says Basinger, was recognizably that of a "Michael Bay film."
After a graduate stint in Pasadena, Bay cut his teeth with music videos (the DiVinyls, Donny Osmond) and TV commercials ("Got milk?") before falling under the sway of the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It was a fortunate meeting. Bruckheimer has long coveted commercial directors for their ability to deliver what his swaggering productions need most: a triumphant high in 30 seconds or less. Bay, in turn, has taken the Bruckheimer imperative to new heights. In addition to the old Bruckheimer coda, the massive explosion, Bay has added two new signatures: the droll joke, which he delivers effortlessly in The Rock and Armageddon; and, in keeping with the zeitgeist, an affirmation of patriotism. "The United States government just asked us to save the world," Bruce Willis barks at his team in Armageddon. "Anybody want to say no?"
Bay also achieves rapid-fire highs by cutting between shots very quickly. A beguiling image might appear on screen for a half-second before Bay replaces it with another—then another, and another—creating a mind-bending visual collage. This is the source of much discontent on the parts of critics with Bay and his summer brethren, since "fast-cutting" is seen as a hackneyed technique of music videos, not cinema. In fact, patching a bunch of quick cuts together is a massive undertaking in the editing room. Moreover, Bay has a fluid, gliding camera—he's using quick cuts to create atmosphere, not to whip up false momentum. (Basinger has an alternate explanation: Bay's quick cuts are the director's attempts to introduce something like abstract expressionism to the $150 million blockbuster. There are studio chieftains who will faint at those words.)
Bay has a worshipful, almost tender reverence for his male stars. His trademark shot makes them look like Renaissance statuary: His camera begins at their right arm, then swivels around behind them, and comes to rest gazing up at their granite chins. If anything, this swooning pales in comparison to Bay's lusty admiration for government agencies. "For 30 years they questioned the need for NASA," Billy Bob Thornton crows in Armageddon. "Today we're gonna give 'em the answer!" Bay's first feature, Bad Boys (1995), can be read as a paean to the Miami Police Department; The Rock as tribute to the FBI chemical weapons expert, as embodied by Nicolas Cage.
Such homage may make Bay slightly Dadaistic. But it doesn't make him the devil. What really irks critics is that Bay feeds from the detritus of 30 years of summer movies—as the New York Times puts it, his films feel "stitched together, like some cinematic Frankenstein's monster, from the body parts of other movies." Hollywood has heard versions of this complaint before. With the first generation of popcorn directors, led by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the standard protest was that they had learned all their tricks from television. With Bay, the complaint is that he has learned his tricks from Lucas and Spielberg. The implication is that, within a few generations, Hollywood will produce a director who knows nothing but the grammar of blockbusters—the bastard son of Top Gun's Maverick and a velociraptor. Bay further exacerbates the problem by blockbusterizing his directorial pronouncements. For him, a characteristic boast is not, "I write all my own movies," but, "I write all my own action."
The danger is that Bay will heed critics' advice, forsake his chaotic blockbusters, and try to do something noble—which is more or less what happened with Pearl Harbor, his most humanistic and least effective movie to date. The Island, in which Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play clones on the lam, represents a return to form. DreamWorks screened the first 45 minutes of the film last week, followed by a hair-raising highway chase scene that was shown out of context. There are those who say that watching a Bay movie is itself like watching one long chase scene out of context, as Bay whips from one image to the next, but I think Bay is on to something. He's whittled the summer movie down to its smallest constituent parts—without the clutter of character, cohesion, or exposition. Go ahead, embrace him. It wouldn't be the end of the world.
06-27-05, 02:31 PM
#17
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
I don't hate Michael Bay. He makes entertaining movies. I own all of his films besides The Rock and Armageddon and I'm planning on buying both in the future. His films aren't great but they're fun to watch.
06-27-05, 02:32 PM
#18
DVD Talk Hero
I love The Rock and Bad Boys.
I like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.
The only film of his that I hate is Bad Boys II. It's sad when you find the action sequences in an action film far too long and numerous for their own good but that's my main gripe with this film. After the first 30 minutes the whole film just sorta blurred into one over long action sequence. Too much of a good thing, I guess.
I like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.
The only film of his that I hate is Bad Boys II. It's sad when you find the action sequences in an action film far too long and numerous for their own good but that's my main gripe with this film. After the first 30 minutes the whole film just sorta blurred into one over long action sequence. Too much of a good thing, I guess.
06-27-05, 02:38 PM
#21
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
I can't say that I've ever hated Michael Bay. I've never been a huge fan either, but some of his movies I enjoy. Some not so much. I'm looking forward to The Island, though.
06-27-05, 02:38 PM
#22
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I can live with his directing (I actually like the flashy, jump cut editing), but the writing for Pearl Harbor and Armageddon needs a better polish. Fuckin' animal crackers, forchrisakes! 
06-27-05, 02:44 PM
#23
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
That Slate piece is the dumbest fucking thing I've read in awhile, and I say that as someone who doesn't hate Michael Bay.
06-27-05, 02:59 PM
#24
DVD Talk Legend
I actually enjoyed most of his movies (Pearl Harbor not so much), but I don't always like his directorial style. I think the main problem with Bay is that he does everything with the "volume set to 11". Fine for action, but when he has to tackle emotional stuff (like parts of Armageddon and most of Pearl Harbor) it comes across as melodramatic and fake. Still, Armageddon was 5 billion times better than Deep Impact.
06-27-05, 03:13 PM
#25
DVD Talk Legend
If Michael Bay would direct a film consisting of one liners and over the top of action sequences... it would easily be the greatest film ever made. If someone pulled a "phantom edit" on Bad Boys II and reduced the film to around 110 minutes (by removing all of the plot and keeping in all the comedy and action sequences), it would easily come close.