Poor Michael Bay...gets an awful roasting!

Richard Dower

Look, say what you want about Mr. 'spolsions McBay....but the lad makes movies to make money, the are not fine art or a critics darling....but he's made some very big grossing movies over the years.

He's a "Hollywood" movie maker, he knows what sells, what the audience want or moreso what the studio wants and puts it out, for all the abuse thrown at him, some of it warranted, you have to give the man some props...just sayin'

krudler

Well The Rock is an action classic and I wont hear a bad word said about it, Bad Boys is loads of fun,Armageddon has a fantastic first half but falls apart once they land on the asteroid, Bad Boys 2 is just bloaty excess, fantastic car chase though. Transformers is great fun, TF2 not so much, I quite like The Island, Pearl Harbour is crap but its beautifully shot and the attack scene itself is a stunning achievement.


Bay does get a lot of flack, but he doesnt pretend to be anything hes not, he makes movies that look great, have loads of action and you can switch your brain off for a while and be entertained. cinema needs him as much as the intellectual filmmakers, sometimes I want to watch something soulful and quiet, but sometimes I just wanna watch sh1t blow up

Hes also got massive sway with the US military and goverment, as he says himself on the Transformers dvd commentary about Die Hard 4 "they had to use a cgi plane, I had a real one, because I've got the pentagon on speed dial"

Richard Dower

krudler wrote: »

Well The Rock is an action classic and I wont hear a bad word said about it, Bad Boys is loads of fun,Armageddon has a fantastic first half but falls apart once they land on the asteroid, Bad Boys 2 is just bloaty excess, fantastic car chase though. Transformers is great fun, TF2 not so much, I quite like The Island, Pearl Harbour is crap but its beautifully shot and the attack scene itself is a stunning achievement.


Bay does get a lot of flack, but he doesnt pretend to be anything hes not, he makes movies that look great, have loads of action and you can switch your brain off for a while and be entertained. cinema needs him as much as the intellectual filmmakers, sometimes I want to watch something soulful and quiet, but sometimes I just wanna watch sh1t blow up

Hes also got massive sway with the US military and goverment, as he says himself on the Transformers dvd commentary about Die Hard 4 "they had to use a cgi plane, I had a real one, because I've got the pentagon on speed dial"

That's awesome! ...yeah he used real planes and sh*t on TF....i also think The Rock is a terrific action flick, highly entertaining.

indough

die hard would be way too toned down for him

Overheal

For a second there I wondered if he actually DID direct die hard... but no seriously, his movies are at least more theatrical than those. I think Die Hard I think VTOL jet fight scenes that have no bearing on reality in even the remotest hollywood sense. At least with Transformers its like OK they're bad ass alien robots and OK theres too many explosions drug out for 45 minutes longer than necessary but somehow it's more plausible than a fist fight on a Harrier Jet in Manhattan.... or, I'm thinking of that True Lies film. Either way, there have been some absolutely terrible action films to come out of hollywood. But the last die hard movie with the fcuking raptor/JSF and all that? Still ludicrous. Bay is far from the worst director in hollywood, though not in my top 10 by a good bit.

krudler

Anyone ever seen the outtakes of The Rock? utter brilliance, Ed Harris is a fcuking lunatic. oh and you get to hear Sean Connery call an elevator door a cnut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYN6t5xt0ps

edit: NSFW, Harris swears....a lot

indough

i dunno about that, anyway, in relation to the die hard family the fourth installment is like the ugly child that nobody talks about and spends his days and nights locked in the basement

fonecrusher1

To be fair look at his core audience these day? 6 - 12 year olds. Big explosions are the main attraction.:D

indough

i like the fact that they ar honest about what they are though, if that makes any sense, no pretensions

most arent to my taste but cant hate on them

johnny_ultimate

While the man knows how to frame an explosion, he genuinely is a poor film-maker on a number of other levels. I think his major problem is storytelling: all of his recent films contain the same absurd military propaganda (drop kicking Obama's - or simply 'new President' in a dodgy attempt to disguise it - off a plane for suggesting a non-military solution is a new extreme), cheesy storytelling (the man has a dreadful taste in music) and, in the Transformers films, something bordering on racism & sexism. Sure, he can frame an action scene when he wants to, but as time goes on the harmless fun of his earlier films has become something that leaves a far bitterer taste in my mouth. Successfully churning out money makers is no measure of cinematic competence or success, unfortunately, and as someone who has churned out two of the out-and-out worst films of the last five years (three if you count the Island, which I haven't seen), well he largely deserves the roasting he gets.

indough

i dont think i was ever so embarrassed in a cinema as i was watching the tf2 scenes with the two minstrel show robots

krudler

The Island is worth a watch, its glossy to the point of looking like a perfume ad, and theres an obscene amount of product placement in it, but its still a decent thriller/action film, and Scarlet is in it, looking ridiculously hot throughout

indough

yeah shes damn fine in that movie haha! i thought it was alright but im into a lot of sci-fi films most people wouldnt even consider watching

Goldstein

krudler wrote: »

The Island is worth a watch, its glossy to the point of looking like a perfume ad, and theres an obscene amount of product placement in it, but its still a decent thriller/action film, and Scarlet is in it, looking ridiculously hot throughout

...Urge to buy an x-box growing
...Urge to drink coca-cola & Miller Light growing
...Urge to get a nokia phone growing

SugarHigh

Richard Dower wrote: »

That's awesome! ...yeah he used real planes and sh*t on TF....i also think The Rock is a terrific action flick, highly entertaining.

Being able to get the army involved in your movie isn't a big achievement. They will pretty much work with anyone who is willing to give control of their movie over to the army so they can out out whatever message they want to get across. I've even heard that they will provide military equipment at no cost to the film makers if they are given enough control.


If you want to know more watch The Passionate Eye - Operation Hollywood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHQqfyy__wY

I couldn't find a better quality version you're probably better off searching on torrent sites.

I never understood all the hate Bay gets for using product placement yet noone ever says a word about someone like Judd Aatow filling his films with the most blatant product placement imaginable. Funny People had absolutly no shame in placing numerous products and companies front and center for no inherent reason other than to get them in shot. At least Bay incorporates the products into the film.

bonerm

fonecrusher1 wrote: »

To be fair look at his core audience these day? 6 - 12 year olds. Big explosions are the main attraction.:D

That's not fair! :mad: I know 6 year olds who find his work derivative.

krudler

Deleted User wrote: »

I never understood all the hate Bay gets for using product placement yet noone ever says a word about someone like Judd Aatow filling his films with the most blatant product placement imaginable. Funny People had absolutly no shame in placing numerous products and companies front and center for no inherent reason other than to get them in shot. At least Bay incorporates the products into the film.

Thats true, and the Bond movies have been doing it for decades with the cars, watches, suits, sunglasses, briefcases, pens,Casino Royale was like one big advert for Sony Vaio laptops and Sony Ericsson phones etc etc etc. Yet thats accepted, Bay puts some real world products into the movie and everyone calls him a shill, that shilling helps pay for the movie and it gives it a real world feel so I dont really have a problem with it in that sense.

Karl Hungus

Michael Bay is a director who's really lost all sense of scale. I will say that The Rock was a thoroughly entertaining action film, and probably the best of his career, but as the budgets of his movies increased, the coherence decreased. Each one is bigger, filled with more elaborate CGI and special effects, to the point of Transformers 2 which was one of the worst piles of drivel I ever had the misfortune to sit through in my life.

I would love to see what he'd be capable of if they scaled back the production, because I think that a Michael Bay film on a smaller budget could actually have the potential to be quite decent.

krudler

I'd love to live in the Bayverse though, where getting out of my car means doing it in slow motion, getting out of bed means a camera will revolve around me at an upward angle, every room will have a massive, slowly spinning fan with a huge beam of light coming through it and everything will have an orange or blue tint to it. Oh and there will be no ugly women, anywhere :pac:

Goldstein

Deleted User wrote: »

I never understood all the hate Bay gets for using product placement yet noone ever says a word about someone like Judd Aatow filling his films with the most blatant product placement imaginable. Funny People had absolutly no shame in placing numerous products and companies front and center for no inherent reason other than to get them in shot. At least Bay incorporates the products into the film.

krudler wrote: »

Thats true, and the Bond movies have been doing it for decades with the cars, watches, suits, sunglasses, briefcases, pens,Casino Royale was like one big advert for Sony Vaio laptops and Sony Ericsson phones etc etc etc. Yet thats accepted, Bay puts some real world products into the movie and everyone calls him a shill, that shilling helps pay for the movie and it gives it a real world feel so I dont really have a problem with it in that sense.

I think if the placements are inserted well, appear in a logical context and are integrated properly like in Minority Report I don't think anyone minds - in that scenario they can even add to the realism sometimes.

But in The Island or the movie they called iRobot, the ads were so blatent, shameless, numerous and so unnecessary that intrusive ads is the first thing I remember about both of those movies. The Protagonists, and to a large extent the movie itself, were little more than walking billboards.

I haven't seen Funny People so I can't comment on that (I saw Adam Sandler on the cover and thought it was being being oxy-moronic)

Well, I'm off to buy myself some red converse and fight robots...unless it rains...in which case I'll just have wet feet and the Robots will take over the world.

Galvasean

I'll never understand why Bay gets so much more flak than Joe Johnston who is just like Bay, except without the good stuff.

bonerm

Galvasean wrote: »

I'll never understand why Bay gets so much more flak than Joe Johnston who is just like Bay, except without the good stuff.

Joe Johnston did effects work on 3x Star Wars movies and 2x Indiana Jones before going to direct excellent Rocketeer and some other well received family movies. Basically he's contributed something to the world of film.

Michael Bay has from day1 cynically directed one steaming pile of shít after another in an attempt to find the largest mass market, lowest-common-denominator movie that can be made. He has contributed nothing of worth to film imho.

Galvasean

bonerm wrote: »

Joe Johnston did effects work on 3x Star Wars movies and 2x Indiana Jones before going to direct excellent Rocketeer and some other well received family movies. Basically he's contributed something to the world of film.

Michael Bay has from day1 cynically directed one steaming pile of shít after another in an attempt to find the largest mass market, lowest-common-denominator movie that can be made. He has contributed nothing of worth to film imho.

What's he done since the turn of the century? Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo and the Wolfman. All thoroughly awful.
I'd much rather watch Bad Boys 2, The Island and Transformers than that tripe.

bonerm

Galvasean wrote: »

What's he done since the turn of the century? Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo and the Wolfman. All thoroughly awful.
I'd much rather watch Bad Boys 2, The Island and Transformers than that tripe.

That's fair enough. I'd rather watch neither. I'm just saying if either of them should get a pass (which was the root of your original questio) then it should be Johnston for what he has achieved in his career.

norrie rugger

Galvasean wrote: »

What's he done since the turn of the century? Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo and the Wolfman. All thoroughly awful.
I'd much rather watch Bad Boys 2, The Island and Transformers than that tripe.

I liked Hidalgo

krudler

bonerm wrote: »

Joe Johnston did effects work on 3x Star Wars movies and 2x Indiana Jones before going to direct excellent Rocketeer and some other well received family movies. Basically he's contributed something to the world of film.

Michael Bay has from day1 cynically directed one steaming pile of shít after another in an attempt to find the largest mass market, lowest-common-denominator movie that can be made. He has contributed nothing of worth to film imho.

The Rock is not a steaming pile of sh1t :eek:

norrie rugger

krudler wrote: »

The Rock is not a steaming pile of sh1t :eek:

Ah it is really but still great fun

bnt

In my opinion, you can see what went wrong if you compare Bad Boys with Bad Boys II. The first one had its share of explosions and chase, but also a strong female character (Tea Leoni), and Bay had the sense to let Smith and Lawrence improvise much of their dialogue. The second one ... lost me.

But since Bay knows what sells, and has made a metric ____load of money in the process, so I don't imagine he wants or needs our sympathy.

Fysh

Galvasean wrote: »

What's he done since the turn of the century? Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo and the Wolfman. All thoroughly awful.
I'd much rather watch Bad Boys 2, The Island and Transformers than that tripe.

Really?

Really?

I confess to not having seen Jurassic Park 3 (high probability of it being awful meant I avoided it), Hidalgo (ditto) and The Island (every review I could find suggested that as a fan of good sci-fi I'd hate it), but choosing between the likes of Bad Boys 2 & Transformers and The Wolfman is like choosing between having a sweetcorn-laden brown ingot in your gob and having diarrhoe ladled into it. You're welcome to have a preference but at the end of the day it's still fecal matter going down your gullet.

None of which stops the Rock from being a fantastic action film. If someone could travel back in time, kidnap the Michael Bay from that era, and bring him forward so that he could work with restricted budgets and decent scripts, we might get more decent films out of him. Hell, get him teamed up with the guys who did District 13, I'm sure they could cook up something fantastic between 'em

ChopShop

indough wrote: »

i dont think i was ever so embarrassed in a cinema as i was watching the tf2 scenes with the two minstrel show robots

Apparently Bay gets a percentage of every movie TF sold.

*absolutely does not own multiple versions of Skids and Mudflap - honest*

norrie rugger wrote: »

I liked Hidalgo

I liked and still like JP3.


*hides*

norrie rugger

wernstrom! wrote: »

I liked and still like JP3.


*hides*

I still think that it was far better than JP2

johnny_ultimate

Yeah, JP3 is fairly harmless entertainment: it doesn't do anything new or fresh, but hey at least they stick to an island in it.

Mostly though, Joe Johnson tends to direct films so bland they're barely worth mentioning. Bay, on the other hand, is on another level of obnoxious crap: crass, pointless and (as I pointed out earlier) occasionally outright offensively Republican.

Just watch JJ Abrams films instead and we can all be happy.

norrie rugger

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Yeah, JP3 is fairly harmless entertainment: it doesn't do anything new or fresh, but hey at least they stick to an island in it.

To me JP2 completely falls apart, once they leave the island.
They tried to make it a Godzilla homage or something but it becomes ridiculous very quickly. Never mind that there is not even a police helicopter tracking the T-Rex, there are plenty of sniper rifle carrying police, that could easily have killed the dino. The tension of the first one (and of raptor in high grass/abandoned base within the second movie) is completely absent from the entire city scene. Also Jeff Goldblum's kid doing super gymnastics on a raptor was piss poor, compared to the danger to the kids in the first movie.

JP3, while inferior to the 1st, sticks to the island formula. It is a bit overly slapstick and the bit with the pterosaurs/parachute was OTT but still has a sustained level of events/action/tension throughout. JP2 should have lost the last act and would, to me, have been better than the first

krudler

I like JP3 as well, only watch all 3 of them the other week, the first is still a classic, the 2nd has some good moments but its like Spielberg only directed those and someone else made the rest of it. The cliffside Rex attack, the Raptors in the grass, all that stuff was great. Then theres the notion that a T-Rex can tiptoe around a suburban neighbourhood without waking anyone up. JP3 does have some great moments too, the Pterodactyl or whatever it is slowly walking out of the fog on the bridge is very creepy, but the fact they kill the T-Rex to replace it with something bigger is annoying, and the ending feels like they just ran out of script ideas so have the raptors bully them into getting their eggs back.

Galvasean

People like JP3? *twitch*

*leaves internet forever*

johnny_ultimate

Galvasean wrote: »

People like JP3? *twitch*

*leaves internet forever*

In the way that I prefer mugging to murder.

Dempsey

What has JP3 got to do with Michael Bay?

I've no problem with Bay's style, I think he's made alot of good action films that will keep you entertained.

Handsome Bob

I'll forgive Johnston for all his misdeeds if he does a good job on Captain America.

As for Bay, good old mindless entertaining crap, though I would be moreso a fan of the likes of Armageddon and The Rock (there's a fantastic instrumental in The Rock called Jade, so kudos to Bay) than I would be of his Transformers efforts. For some strange reason though, I have TF2 on DVD. :pac:

Galvasean

SugarHigh wrote: »

you're probably better off searching on torrent sites.

Please read the Film Forum Charter before making a statement like that again.

Mackman

LZ5by5 wrote: »

As for Bay, good old mindless entertaining crap, though I would be moreso a fan of the likes of Armageddon and The Rock (there's a fantastic instrumental in The Rock called Jade, so kudos to Bay) than I would be of his Transformers efforts.

I actually have the Rock soundtrack, some good stuff on it

For the most part, I like Michael Bay's movies. The Rock, Armageddon and Bad Boys were amoung my favourite movies as a teenager.
He has slid into the more mindless action movie area since then though. But i still enjoy his movies, for entirely different reasons. Mainly explosions and good looking women :cool:
I will admit, Bad boys 2 and TF2 are pretty bad though. Too long IMO. if they cut an hour out of each, they would have been much better