high revelations on michael bay [movies]

bad boys II

misunderstood genius or totally understood hack?

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so the other night i had the rather alarming urge to watch bad boys II. don't know why, something in my head was just telling me "watch bad boys II.....oooooooo...." so me and the lady got blazed and fired up the ol' dvd player. i should say first that in general, i love the action genre, i like will smith, i like martin lawrence...i'm not always a fan of the movies they make, but in general, they're both relatively funny, genuine and likable. i was never a fan of the bad boys movies though. just not really my thing, but recently i've been having a little bit of a philosophical dilemma regarding michael bay. i just can't figure him out. part of me wants to dismiss him as a simple hack who has very little control over his own movies (resulting in them being a mish-mash of other people's opinions on what a movie should be rather than being the cohesive vision of a director with an ultimate goal), but another part of me sees something just below the surface of his movies that is very abstract, innovative and perhaps a little brilliant. i dunno.

anyway, i was watching bad boys II, i was high and spacing out, looking at the visuals, but not really paying attention to the sound and i was really blown away by what i saw. every frame of that movie is put together meticulously in terms of moving compositions, shapes, colors, etc. almost in the way that an experimental abstract art film would. it was really strange. almost every shot in the film contains movement of abstract shapes across the screen and the beginning of each shot is just as beautifully composed as the ending of each shot. i found that if i looked passed the flashiness, the product placement and the one-liners, what i saw was actually a really artsy action film. most of the film relies on implication to determine what is going on - you piece together a cohesive idea of what's taking place based on an amalgam of abstract images shown in rapid succession. if you start to really discect the action scenes, you see that very rarely are you getting a true representation of what your mind believes is taking place on screen. you'll see a tight shot of will smith and martin lawrence in a car, then a shot of a car swerving from one side of the screen to the other, then an abstract frame of various automobiles criss-crossing around the screen, then a shot of smoke and from all those rapidly sequential images you infer that a high speed car chase is taking place with cars crashing left and right, but you don't see that many shots that actually show one vehicle chasing another. when you look at things like this out of the context of how these kinds of movies are perceived in society, its really quite a brilliant achievement.

i've always given credit to michael bay for his immeasurable influence on the action movie genre, but i've also written him off as a filmmaker because i've typically seen him more as an industry guy that happened to fall into the role of director than a true artist. lately i think i may be wrong though.
the thing is, i don't really know how much of the brilliance that occasionally shines through his films is actually michael bay's brilliance as opposed to the brilliance of whoever the director of photography happens to be or art director, etc. its hard to gauge. on one hand, i understand having to dumb your films down to appeal to the widest possible demographic and i understand that hollywood filmmaking is a business first and foremost before its an artform, but like the brilliant directors of the 30s, 40s and 50s, perhaps it is how the director chooses to work within and secretly against those confines that truly defines their artistic merit. all of michael bay's movies are disasters in their own special ways, whether it be because they are over-the-top cornball, ridiculously implausible or just helplessly middle-of-the-road perspective wise, but they each have their hidden, mysteriously profound moments as well.

let me break it down like this - transformers was all in all an awful movie, but it had a very strong theme of political commentary running through it that you don't usually see in films made for that wide an audience pool (probably more than just that, but i've only seen it once in the theater, so its hard to judge just based on that). the island fell flat in a lot of respects, but it was also a very strange concept for a film...it was an action film that had absolutely no action for 50% of the running time. the first hour of the movie has more in common with THX 1138 or logan's run than it does with bad boys. it may not have been completely successful, but it was definitely a different approach conceptually. i haven't seen his other movies in a long time, so i can't really comment on those, but i plan to rewatch them with fresh eyes soon.

so, now on to the discussion. michael bay, misunderstood genius or occasionally profound hack? do you think he has an artistic vision or do you think his movies reflect purely the muddling of producers, studio execs and people who generally have no idea what the general public truly wants to see on screen? i don't think there's going to be any debate that the scripts in all his films are formulaic and most likely written by committee, so i'm talking more about the other stuff. how much of a michael bay film is actually michael bay and how much is the combined effort of people much wiser than him?