The Energon Pub

Most taxing indeed.......






The Most Taxing People in Film: Michael Bay


By James Rocchi
Special to MSN Movies

It would be one thing if Michael Bay were merely a bad director. Bay is, in fact, a very bad director, evidenced not just by the more epic and bombastic flourishes of his movies but, rather, how he can't handle even the basic tasks of a filmmaker — transitions between scenes, constructing coherent story lines, conveying motion through space and time in a clear, logical fashion. (There's a sequence in "Transformers 2" where characters go into the National Air and Space Museum in Virginia and exit to an abandoned airfield under vast Arizona skies. No explanation, no plot device. It's not as if you have to know where those two things are to know they don't go together; you just have to have eyes and a brain.)

Bay's films are also the purest representation of the triumph of shareholder cinema, where a film's quality is irrelevant as long as it offers a suitable return on investment. Bay himself doesn't have a great interest in principle or any other impediment to maximum profit — in a pre-taped address to the crowd of theater owners at this year's CinemaCon, Bay said, "Do you remember last year how I said I'd never do 3-D? Well, I lied ..." — and that kind of willingness to sell out in the name of cashing in becomes even more grim as you look past Bay's own directorial work to look at the films he's given us from his Platinum Dunes production company, a series of low-quality remakes of films that didn't need to be remade, like "Friday the 13th" (2009), "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (2003) and "Nightmare on Elm Street" (2010). The idea that the money made by bad films goes to make more bad films is a Hollywood tradition, but with Bay the trick seems even crueler and more disheartening as the production pipeline is opened up to full flow.

But perhaps the greatest offense that Bay has committed is this: He gives big, loud action a bad name by making films out of weak, bloated and cliché-riddled scripts — and worse, he doesn't have to. You can see sporadic flashes of skill in some of Bay's films — "The Island" is a bad film with several ace action sequences. The man also knows how to construct an attractive image, even if he saves it for weird moments that combine the art and look of country music videos, Army recruitment ads and truck commercials. There's no excuse for Bay to be making films as shoddy and expensive and lazy as "Armageddon" or "Bad Boys II" or the "Transformers" films. It's like watching a student who could be doing A-level (or even B-minus) work act out instead of focusing and, worse, inspire other kids to do the same.

Bay once said, pre-emptively defending his honor, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime." But the crime isn't the act, it's the execution. James Cameron, Justin Lin, Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Peter Berg and John Woo make movies for teenage boys, but they also make them exceptional movies — with character, with care, with craft, with substance under the spectacle and with a sense of personality, not just Bay's endless series of quick cuts and soft-focus lighting and slapdash storytelling and cheap sentiment as a substitute for real emotion. With Michael Bay, what's frustrating isn't merely the films that are, but the films that you can imagine if only he'd quit being lazy, put in real work and prove that a good movie can make money, too.