Maybe Michael Bay Isn’t Such a Douche Nozzle After All?
By Matt Baker March 24, 2010
I don’t have much respect for Michael Bay as a filmmaker. As a person, who knows? The small amount of footage I’ve seen of him suggests I might find him to be a bit of a prick, but I can’t really say for sure. However, I have seen more than enough of his movies to justify my almost complete disdain of his filmmaking chops. If you follow our website you may remember that last summer I said I was going to watch all of Michael Bay’s movies and then write a blog about why he is the laziest director of all time (how many shots of a helicopter in a sunset do you really need of the span of your career? There’re none in Pearl Harbor, you say? True, but only because there were no helicopters in WW2. So there are abundant planes in sunsets instead. What a tool). Unfortunately, after watching The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and The Island I just couldn’t take anymore and had to give up on the blog (for the record, the only Michael Bay movies I haven’t seen are Bad Boys II and Transformers 2, which by all accounts are his worst movies. So I feel justified in talking smack about him).
The best I can say about him is that his shots are extremely well composed, like every frame is supposed to be a photograph. Other than that I think his movies are pandering, boring, occasionally borderline racist and substitute cutting so fast and shaking the camera so much you can’t tell what is going on for actually building suspense and tension. It has always seemed to be that his primary concern is making a movie that makes as much money as possible, without regard for quality. But this is where I might be wrong.
Ever since Avatar made shitloads of money off of the extra $3/ticket of a 3D movie, studios have been trying to get everything made in 3D, even to the point of converting 2D movies to 3D (and Alice In Wonderland has just shown us that people are willing to pay extra even for this fake 3D). So obviously Transformers 3 will be in 3D. Or at least that’s what we all would expect. It turns out that Michael Bay may have a smidge of integrity after all. He has been testing 3D technology and has decided that the 3D cameras are too large and heavy for the kind of action he shoots. He then sent some footage from Transformers 2 to be upconverted to 3D and claims that it looks “like fake 3D”. He goes on to state “People can say whatever they want about my movies, but they are technically precise, and if this isn’t going to be excellent, I don’t want to do it… Studios might be willing to sacrifice the look and use the gimmick to make $3 more a ticket, but I’m not. Avatar took four years. You can’t just shit out a 3D movie”.
So there you go. Artistic integrity. From Michael Bay. Sure, it has nothing to do with characters, or plots, or making any sort of fucking sense, and is just about how sexy the movie will look, but hey it’s more than I thought he had.
Quotes are from www.slashfilm.com, who got them from Mike Fleming at www.deadline.com.