By Matt Zoller Seitz
This is the first in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. To read other entries in the series, click here.
Go! Go! Go!" "Incoming!" "Hit the deck!" WwwwwsshhhhhhhhSSHSHSHSHSH---KER-BLOOOOOM! "Lock and load!" 'Get some!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! Bleee-OWWW! BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! "Aim for the gas tank!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA! Ker-BLANG! Splut! Gooooooshhh -- KER-BLOOOOOOM! "Yeahhhh!" "Woooo-hoooo!"
What Michael Bay movie is that from?
In spirit, all of them. But to truly experience the above you'd need to read it while riding a roller coaster. The car would have to be equipped with strobe lights, sparklers, a half-dozen monkeys battering you about the head and shoulders with ping-pong paddles and a boombox blasting the "Here comes the cavalry!" orchestral stylings of Bay's court composer, Hans Zimmer. The director of Pearl Harbor (2001), Bad Boys II (2003), The Island (2005), Transformers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) doesn't make movies, he makes rides. He's the filmmaker every studio boss dreams of -- the director as adrenaline pusher. He has a facile eye, staging terrific one-off sight gags (transfusion blood stored in Coke bottles in Pearl Harbor; the mini-droids morphing from kitchen appliances and Sam's brief trip to robot heaven in Transformers 2) and tossing off dozens, even hundreds of gorgeous widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would be lucky to compose once in a career.
Yet Bay never respects the rhythmic integrity of any image, rarely holding a shot, any shot, no matter how lovely or functional or potentially powerful, for longer than three seconds, dicing hundreds of thousands of feet of 35mm film into celluloid shrapnel and firing it at the audience's face. One is tempted to say that you can't fast-forward through Bay's films because they're already on fast forward, but that's not accurate. They don't so much leave out what immature viewers call the "boring parts" (characterization, exposition, atmosphere) as destabilize and disorient the viewer by investing the "boring parts" with the same trashy momentousness as Bay's set pieces. The apple-pie-scented flashbacks to the heroes' childhoods in Pearl Harbor are staged and edited with the same apocalyptic brio as the titular act of infamy -- hyped-up orchestral cues, jumpy editing, swooping crane shots, lens-against-the-tonsils mega-close-ups. The first quarter of Transformers, which establishes the hero and his dull suburban existence, recalls the analog era, Cheerios-and-Huffy bikes Steven Spielberg for about two minutes, after which point the charm vanishes and Bay brings in the editing WeedEater, the bathroom humor and the eardrum-rattling Dolby FX (not just for the noise of robots transforming, but for such ostensibly mundane sounds as doors closing and feet running up stairs).The film theorist David Bordwell classified these tics as aspects of "intensified continuity," a type of commercial filmmaking that sacrifices classical Hollywood values -- meticulously staged camera moves, judicious edits, a build-and-release approach to pacing -- on the studio-hallowed altar of "energy." But such academic classifications, however accurate, don't capture Bay's relentlessness. The man doesn't do intensified continuity; he does pregnant-women-and-people-with-pacemakers-shouldn't-ride-this-ride continuity. His films go to 11.
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2 comments:
11?
11's for pussies.
The irony here is that if Michael Bay (or most of his fans for that matter) read this, they probably wouldn't realize you essentially panned his entire body of work.
I had to reread this to get over the shock of the headline but I generally agree with everything you've written except this: "[Bay] has a facile eye, staging terrific one-off sight gags...and tossing off dozens, even hundreds of gorgeous widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would be lucky to compose once in a career."
I'm sorry, Matt, I know you're trying to be kind but Michael Bay wouldn't know cinematic composition if it bit him in the ass. His films are nicely lit and airbrushed like a Playboy centerfold, but that's about the extent of any attention to art, ever. I've contended repeatedly that while Bay is massively successful at the box office, all the credit goes to his lighting techs, his EFX houses, his production designers, and his makeup artists. They paint everything to a high gloss sheen and it looks gorgeous, but like a Ferrari poster it's all overpriced surface gloss designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
Some folks like to argue that Michael Bay is somehow responsible for making audiences more idiotic, that his confuso-vision filmmaking is dumbing down audiences. Audiences were dumb long before Michael Bay showed up, he simply works (thrives) on their basest wavelength. People generally do go to movies to escape and in some sort of sensory-pummeling way, Bay delivers escape.
I suggest (and you might agree) that while Michael Bay is relevant to the decade for his effect on blockbuster filmmaking, in 20 years he'll be another Irwin Allen: a footnote of a specific time period whose films only play to nostalgic fan boys.
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