National Post (National Edition)
DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY IS AN IDIOT, SAYS CALUM MARSH.
Tell us how you really feel about Michael Bay
Michael Bay has several important qualifications for a successful career as a film director in Hollywood, chief among them that he is an idiot.
A boorish, tasteless movie jock, a philistine filmmaker and vulgar auteur, he is the cinema’s anti-artist, its dim-witted blockbuster buffoon: he makes movies not to amuse or entertain but to help the bored squander time and fritter away a few dollars. His oeuvre has amassed nearly $8 billion worldwide and counting — a testament to the movie-going public’s appetite for imbecilic excess. Godard said that “at the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” At the cinema of Michael Bay that’s only halftrue.
Bay has achieved this commercial super-success without the crutch of talent. He doesn’t need it: these movies, absent wit, charm, or skill, do just fine anyway, appealing not to thirst for artistic merit but to the baser shared enthusiasms — for mechanical carnage, colourful pantomime, cutting-edge special-effects — fundamental to human nature. Well-accustomed is the world to this praxis. So familiar are audiences with Bay’s crude kitsch-epics by now that the director’s very name has become bad-movie shorthand, instantly synonymous with atom-bomb inanity and screeching, senseless car-wreck clamour.
It is difficult for any filmmaker’s identity to penetrate the public consciousness. Bay’s has. And it screams vapid.
Of course in this business no figure of such monumental renown escapes critical scrutiny, and many critics, discerning through the miasma of raucous lunacy the singular and nobly uncompromising voice of a visionary, have challenged the long-popular assumption of Bay’s incompetence by advancing a counter theory of Bay’s genius.
Just this week, Richard Brody, The New Yorker’s most reliable contrarian, committed the sentence “Michael Bay is some kind of genius” to paper, and went on to say that his latest picture, the fifth instalment in the Transformers franchise, “offers more to see and more to startle than do many films by auteurs of overt artistic ambition and accomplishment.” Bay’s “highest inspirations,” Brody concludes, “are those of a virtually experimental filmmaker of pure sensation.”
Yes, well, that is one way of describing the extravagant riot of computer-generated drivel that is a Transformers sequel — and it is a satisfied critic who assigns mistakes of dramaturgy or characterization to a totalizing focus on form. However, there’s something pretty dubious in all this: the attitude of the art critic who wills meaning into a random splatter on the canvas.
Certainly there is a tradition of unconventional technique in the avantgarde, but one ought to be careful not to look too hard for “higher inspirations” where there aren’t any. Far too tempting is it for the restless critic to locate in the dunderheaded paroxysms of a guy like Michael Bay some barely concealed brilliance — and far too easy. That great flair for big-budget abstract expressionism is much more likely an inept stylist’s blockbuster flailing.
Some kind of genius Michael Bay may not be. Still, there is perhaps a dimension of the man’s work unaccounted for by the prevailing dismissal. The unapologetic decadence of a film like Bad Boys II — a $130-million, 147-minute buddy action-comedy of ludicrously prodigal scope, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink extravaganza that could tire a marathon runner — is in the very least an interesting fiasco, if albeit also an exhausting, irritating, and ultimately unconscionable one. And I should say that “interesting” in film is a quality not without value.
Suffer through enough anodyne Hollywood trifles and, indeed, one yearns for interesting: the gaudy, garish mess of another Transformers promises at least a break from the uniform mediocrity of, say, Marvel’s Expanded Superhero Universe Part Ninety-Two. Sometimes the idiotic is preferable to the merely mediocre.
You have to take intrigue where you can find it.