Michael Bay is a Properly Good Director and I Will Stand by it Because it is True
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It seems like the entire world of film-enthusiasts came together and decided to bully one person for no reason what so ever. And that one person is Michael Bay. In some instances the words "Michael Bay" are even used as a kind of a slur, that means something akin to the french Cinéma du look, which is an often used criticism of directors like Luc Besson, another underrated filmmaker. Cinéma du look is describing shallowness of a story, while the image of the film looks good. A kind of eye candy, mindless entertainment type of thing. But those critics often do not see, or do not want to see the deep underlying things in the those films. Luc Besson is far from a shallow director. And I'm about to ramble about how I think Michael Bay is similarly misunderstood. And how he is truly a modern cinematic auteur.
There is an interview with Michael Bay where he shows incredible insecurity in himself, yet never says it. And in the same time during the interview he shows multiple signs that he might have ADHD. The insecurities I'm talking about stem from him being very upset about anybody who is leaving during the interview and being very happy when people complement him, bragging also multiple times about how good he is. And the ADHD is observable in all those moments when he goes on tangents unrelated to the questions being asked. Or when he completely forgets about what he is doing. Or when he notices things that should be extremely unimportant.
The insecurity is understandable, if you take him seriously. The man is working his ass off trying to produce the best cinematic experiences ever ( we will talk about it ), yet his work is far from being appreciated by anybody who matters. The critics pretty much hate his name and automatically hate anything he is attached to. So over the years he has been driven to that state where he needs to constantly remind people that he means good. Or that he is good at least in some aspects. Which is kind of heart-breaking to be honest, because I truly believe that he is actually good.
The ADHD thing is very interesting though. There seems to be an explosion of ADHD lately in the world, which was accelerated greatly with technology. Media became shorter and more bombarded with excitement. I tried watching "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" with my Girlfriend and she was bored to shit. And I don't blame her. The films are way faster now than they were a few decades ago. So to succeed in today's world a film director must have some sort of ADHD. And if Michael Bay actually really has it, that might explain why his films make so much money.
While critics do not seem to understand Michael Bay, audiences run into the cinema to experience the shier sensory overload that Michael Bay is so good at creating. He famously made the highest grossing film that won the "worst picture" award at the Razzies. This shows the incredible discrepancy between critics and audiences when it comes to Michael Bay.
A lot of critics call Michael Bay movies unfollowable and "a visual noise", but they are followable, if you have a fast enough brain. And people with ADHD have way faster brains. This is what makes people with ADHD so quick at switching between tasks. It seems like Michael Bay's brain is racing a million miles an hour and most critics are just too slow to catch-up to him.
And yet sometimes it seems like Michael Bay does that "visual noise" thing entirely on purpose. In my review of Transformers I touched upon the idea that the film is made subjectively. That scenes like the infamous Megan Fox looking at the engine of a car scene, was the way it was, because Michael Bay was shooting it from the perspective of Shia Labeouf's character and was trying to make us, the audience, feel what the character would feel in that moment. This is serious film-making and if it was done by somebody else, like Lars Von Trier, for example, that would be considered high cinema. Yet when "Michael Bay" is written in the credits of a movie, somehow the critics just don't like it anymore.
Steven Spielberg made one of the most favorite Michael Bay scenes in Saving Private Ryan, the beach scene in the beginning of the film. The scene is not easy to follow. You could technically call it an action scene. There are people shooting at each other. But it is more of a horror scene. It is about the experience of the characters. Not about the clarity of the plot or whatever.
Now think about something like Transformers or Bad Boys II in the same way and you can see that what Michael Bay is trying to do is not just an action scene, but an action scene that makes the audience feel the way the characters in that scene would feel. Michael Bay is desperately fighting for audience's Adrenalin, because in a high octane car chase, Adrenalin is what you get.
There are multiple reports of actors praising Michael's attention to the characters. Michael's obsession with what the characters goes through. He is not making a movie just for the sake of explosions. He is genuinely trying to make the story work on some incredibly visceral level. It is just what he finds interesting in the stories, the excitement, the Adrenalin, the shier viscerality, is not what interests critics, it seems.
Maybe the problem with Michael Bay and the critics is that he is stuck in a cycle of action films with very few exceptions like Pain and Gain that, as far as I remember, has only one explosion. And critics, watching a bazillion amount of movies every year, are just tired of watching a yet another, for them, car chase, or a yet another explosion. They want something unique. Something nobody ever experienced before in the cinema. Yet as much as I like to believe in it, it seems like in the case of Michael Bay, they are just bullying him for being Michael Bay.
Michael Bay always pushes stuff forward. He makes his action louder and injected with more and more Adrenalin. He pushed visual effects forward multiple times. He made Transformers in fucking 2007. They still look good. The only other film from that time, who's CGI hold up as well as this is probably only Avatar. Yet unlike James Cameron Michael Bay goes by the Christopher Nolan book, trying as much as possible to do everything in camera. For Ambulance as a new exiting tool in the cinematic language of action Michael Bay hired teenage drone racers. 19 year olds. And he was so impressed with one of their practice stunts, that he used what the camera on the drone was recording in the moment in the film. And now after that movie, other action directors want similar shots, so they hire similar people.
Every director who is attacked by critics go through a phase of un-inspired shit. They make a few good films. Then they make something that didn't quite please the critics. And for few next films, they operate from within depression and self doubt. M. Night Shyamalan was said to be the "next Spielberg" after The 6th Sense but then didn't do quite well on The Village and ended up making stupid shit like The Happening and The Last Airbender. But the guy is good. And lately he had a resurrection with films like Trap. Even directors who are beloved by critics like Quentin Tarantino go through a phase like this. Tarantino famously made a not so great film called Death Proof. Not a lot of people understood that movie. So he had to follow it up with an absolute banger. But only a few directors recover that fast.
Bay was putting out consistently amazing films throughout his career. And even when shit hit the fan with Pearl Harbor and Transformers 2 bay persisted through them making amazing cinematic experiences despite devils sprinkling doubts into his head.
When I saw Pearl Harbor for the first time, I didn't know it was supposed to be bad. I thought it was a proper Hollywood drama about World War II. And I cried in the end like a baby. And the scene in the middle, of the attack itself, was genuinely, properly emotionally devastating. I think because I didn't know that the movie was supposed to be bad, I actually liked it. And this is true for everything Bay ever done.
If you take all preconceptions about the man out of the picture and try to appreciate his films going into them, expecting good cinema from a director that really knows what he is doing, you will more then get that experience.
Michael Bay is a properly good director. And I will stand by it, because it is true.
Happy Hacking!!!
Blender Dumbass
c:1... c:0
@Anonymous Guest I probably should review both the old and new ones.
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