Dec 24, 2015 10:32 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 24, 2015 10:36 PM by Magical Realist.)
I saw a preview of a new movie coming out about the Benghazi embassy attack. Cool I thought. A good military hero flick. Then I saw Michael Bay's name flashed as the director. Nope. I'll never see it. I don't go to Michael Bay movies. The only one I've seen was Armageddon, which was passable. But I don't support the idea of making money off movies that use nothing but explosions, fast car scenes, and sexy women to boost ticket sales. Thankfully I'm not the only one:
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"Michael Bay is one of the most intensely reviled filmmakers of the past 30 years.
"The crassest hack in the business," Rolling Stone's Peter Travers—perhaps Bay's least generous critic—said of the director after watching 2003's Bad Boys II. "Is Michael Bay the Devil?" an Entertainment Weekly headline read in 1998. South Park co-creator Trey Parker wrote an entire love song for Team America: World Police about how much he thinks Michael Bay is terrible.
Bay has been nominated for four different "Worst Director" Golden Raspberry Awards—a near-record. "Michael Bay is quite the perennial!" says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards. "I don't think he's an adult filmmaker. He has this tendency to revert to the model of, 'It's Been 7 Minutes, Something Has to Blow Up Now.'"
It's a near-constant stream of criticism and condemnation of which the director is fully aware.
And he insists he couldn't possibly care less about it.
"I really, really don't care," Bay tells me, calling from Los Angeles. "For instance, you look at the box office returns: Break it down, and you see that 120 million people went to see Transformers 3. So, you know, 500 critics are not going to take the fun out of it for me. I make movies for people. I make movies for audiences to enjoy. A few sour apples are not going to spoil my fun."
Bay is definitely having fun. He's worth $400 million. His nine films have grossed over $4.5 billion total worldwide. He's Leonard Nimoy's cousin-in-law. He owns a gorgeous Miami Beach house that once belonged to Hulk Hogan (a place Bay calls "a nice house to read in").
And he has staked out a reputation for making a certain type of summer movie: expensive cars, blaring noises, audacious stunts, thin plots, toothsome women, shameless laughs, and (when an R-rating permits) hard drugs. It's a crowd-pleasing formula that has given him carte blanche to do virtually whatever he wants, for practically whatever size budget he desires. But beyond the cash, fame, and mindless cinematic kicks, there is plenty more that's worth a closer look. In the same way that Harry Truman's presidential legacy was rehabilitated after he left office, pop-culture history could one day call for something comparably unlikely: an artistic reappraisal of Michael Bay's oeuvre.
The action and the stylized violence that define Bay's universe—whether it involves detonating a Boeing 727, or destroying an entire Cuban shantytown with a bright yellow Hummer—are crafted with the care of a composer: the tricky stunts, the close-quarters camera work, the elaborate staging. And the man knows how to talk about his work like an auteur. "Editorially, it's very much like music," Bay comments. "Action in movies has rhythms, it has cadence—it should build towards a crescendo. There's a kind of staccato, there's aggression."=====http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05...n-and-gain
===============================================================
"Michael Bay is one of the most intensely reviled filmmakers of the past 30 years.
"The crassest hack in the business," Rolling Stone's Peter Travers—perhaps Bay's least generous critic—said of the director after watching 2003's Bad Boys II. "Is Michael Bay the Devil?" an Entertainment Weekly headline read in 1998. South Park co-creator Trey Parker wrote an entire love song for Team America: World Police about how much he thinks Michael Bay is terrible.
Bay has been nominated for four different "Worst Director" Golden Raspberry Awards—a near-record. "Michael Bay is quite the perennial!" says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards. "I don't think he's an adult filmmaker. He has this tendency to revert to the model of, 'It's Been 7 Minutes, Something Has to Blow Up Now.'"
It's a near-constant stream of criticism and condemnation of which the director is fully aware.
And he insists he couldn't possibly care less about it.
"I really, really don't care," Bay tells me, calling from Los Angeles. "For instance, you look at the box office returns: Break it down, and you see that 120 million people went to see Transformers 3. So, you know, 500 critics are not going to take the fun out of it for me. I make movies for people. I make movies for audiences to enjoy. A few sour apples are not going to spoil my fun."
Bay is definitely having fun. He's worth $400 million. His nine films have grossed over $4.5 billion total worldwide. He's Leonard Nimoy's cousin-in-law. He owns a gorgeous Miami Beach house that once belonged to Hulk Hogan (a place Bay calls "a nice house to read in").
And he has staked out a reputation for making a certain type of summer movie: expensive cars, blaring noises, audacious stunts, thin plots, toothsome women, shameless laughs, and (when an R-rating permits) hard drugs. It's a crowd-pleasing formula that has given him carte blanche to do virtually whatever he wants, for practically whatever size budget he desires. But beyond the cash, fame, and mindless cinematic kicks, there is plenty more that's worth a closer look. In the same way that Harry Truman's presidential legacy was rehabilitated after he left office, pop-culture history could one day call for something comparably unlikely: an artistic reappraisal of Michael Bay's oeuvre.
The action and the stylized violence that define Bay's universe—whether it involves detonating a Boeing 727, or destroying an entire Cuban shantytown with a bright yellow Hummer—are crafted with the care of a composer: the tricky stunts, the close-quarters camera work, the elaborate staging. And the man knows how to talk about his work like an auteur. "Editorially, it's very much like music," Bay comments. "Action in movies has rhythms, it has cadence—it should build towards a crescendo. There's a kind of staccato, there's aggression."=====http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05...n-and-gain