Michael Bay

Rob Mills has been egging me on to share my thoughts about Michael Bay. I got this email this morning:

"http://www.moviefill.com/Michael-Bay-By-The-Numbers-17226/ and I'm shocked - shocked! - you have yet to vomit your rage for this man upon your blog :)"

Lately I've come to the conclusion that if I was a 12 year old boy I would love Michael Bay and his 'blow the shit out of everything' style. It's visceral and kinetic. It is also void of good film grammar and basic visual geography. 'Shoot for the edit' is his mantra and you can't help but wonder if that is because he doesn't have a clear idea of what he wants. Shoot 12 cameras and a million feet of film and cut it to 20,000 feet. Then again, Coppola shot a ton of film for the Flight of the Valkyries sequence in 'Apocalypse Now'. Maybe the films are exactly what he intends them to be.

I did find this quote on his blog which put his filmmaking approach into a proper perspective:

What kind of story were you trying to tell in the first “Transformers” film?
Literally, I wanted to see if this movie could even work. Early on we did this Scorponok sequence, to make it more real and vicious and dangerous, and to make these things more lethal. All my friends, when I’m doing movies, my buddies are like, “Are you kidding me? You’re doing that movie? What is that?” Everyone was saying that and I felt like such a jerk. I’m like, “Oh, my God, this is so risky.” I kept thinking: I can make this real. I can make you believe that they are actually here. I remember showing people a few images, we finally rendered them, with the Scorponok’s images and people instantly go, “I get it now.”

What was the question again? Kind of story??

I do like his Verizon commercial.