The Paradox of Michael Bay

July 9, 2007 10:51 AM

You can love him or hate him but Transformers made $250,000,000 last week. To some, Michael Bay is a genius. To others he's a racist hack. Or just a hack. He may even be both a hack and a genius. Is this evidence of an auteur? Or does dude just like really big explosions? Plus: a character driven Bay film?
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth (113 comments total)

I loved The Island, even though it bombed in the US. Good commentary, too. He seems very aware of his reputation. And the checks clear.
posted by The Deej at 10:55 AM on July 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

Oops. Here's a link for the Michael Bay as a "genius."
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 10:56 AM on July 9, 2007

It's behind Bernie Mac in Transformers, yelling out "Hey Mammy!" (This is true, a black character in the movie really does call out "hey mammy").
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 11:04 AM on July 9, 2007

The guy makes my skin crawl. YMMV, as usual.
posted by miss lynnster at 11:04 AM on July 9, 2007

I paid to see Bad Boys II. Put me in the 'racist hack' line.

Not only was it awful, but there were at least 2 full-on car commercials in the movie, on top of the exceedingly blatant product placements.
posted by ninjew at 11:06 AM on July 9, 2007

What about racist hack genius?
posted by Kwine at 11:07 AM on July 9, 2007

How about the fact that anything to do with The Transformers has a built-in audience of people who fondly remember them and having a great deal of earning power? Bay could have done a stop-motion using the old skool toys and it would have made huge money. YMMV, but all this shows to me is that people are nostalgic. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make Bay a genius.
posted by SaintCynr at 11:07 AM on July 9, 2007

Another vote for racist. Also, I wouldn't say he's a hack but let's be clear: Not ruining an almost guaranteed money maker idea that one of the world's biggest producers gives you is not the work of a genius. That's just competence. No one deserves the money he makes or the opportunities he's been given simply for being competent. Especially when you use the same spinny orbiting shot in every scene of every god damn movie. I cannot stand that arrogant motherfucker. Bad Boys is a stain on human history.
posted by shmegegge at 11:10 AM on July 9, 2007

I view everything Michael Bay does in the context of his finale for Bad Boys 2:

The heroes drive a brand new H2 through a Cuban shanty town, utterly and unapologetically demolishing the hundreds of homes on their way to Guantanamo Bay.

It's the subtext equivalent of a howitzer.
posted by uri at 11:10 AM on July 9, 2007

It seems that he made this film for fans of the original series, not for film critics or for social activists.

And fans of the original series loved it.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:11 AM on July 9, 2007

From the "racist hack" link:

This list would be pretty useless if it wasn't for Se7en's most astonishingly ludicrous conceit--the film posits the that FBI keeps tabs on the public library's checkout records, so Somerset simply hands the list he's constructed to an FBI buddy of his. See, whereas most detective films kind of develop, Se7en just plods along for a while until Somerset gets the idea to use this obvious and completely implausible resource, which completely breaks open the case.

published 12/14/98


Oh, how we were.
posted by rxrfrx at 11:13 AM on July 9, 2007 [3 favorites]

This is the best review of Transformers I've read so far, and I pretty much completely agree with it. Some of its many highlights:

[...]And this is one of the great "did I really just see that?" moments when one of the robots says something along the lines of "Yo yo yo wussssUUUUUUPPPP Autobots REPRESENT!" and I don't think he was eating robotic chicken or watermelon but I swear to you on my mother's grave that he started breakdancing. And I'm sure black stereotype robot was in other parts of the movie but the next time I was sure it was the same character was at the end when Optimus Prime was casually holding his broken-in-half corpse like it was the pieces of a plate he dropped.

[...]Imagine you took apart a whole bunch of cars, mixed the parts up and welded them all together into a giant ball maybe 15 or 20 feet in diameter, then rolled it down a hill. Shoot that in closeup and you got every fight scene in this movie.
posted by Prospero at 11:18 AM on July 9, 2007

yeah, transformers had a few pretty egregious racial stereotypes... from jazz, the jive-talking robot to the crazy black car salesman with the loud and out of control mother/grandmother to the to the loud and crazy black computer hacker with the loud and out of control mother/grandmother.. it was fairly absurd. michael bay's movies are known for this stereotyping bull shit. i'm surprised he doesn't get called on it more often.
posted by modernnomad at 11:22 AM on July 9, 2007

yeah, my comment after seeing transformers: "You notice how they still managed to kill off the black guy (jazz) even though he was a robot?"
posted by slapshot57 at 11:25 AM on July 9, 2007

Why do people (Americans in particular) always equate how much money a film makes in its first week with how good it is?
posted by fungible at 11:27 AM on July 9, 2007

slapshot57 - THANK YOU - I thought the same thing.
posted by ao4047 at 11:28 AM on July 9, 2007

I'm also on board the bay is racist bandwagon. Black guys in this movie are either soldiers or fat guys who talk jive and yell at their mom. But although Jazz's "black-ness" was way over the top he is supposed to be a "black" robot. He was voice by Scatman Cruthers in the original cartoon, after all.
posted by thecjm at 11:28 AM on July 9, 2007

And this is one of the great "did I really just see that?" moments when one of the robots says something along the lines of "Yo yo yo wussssUUUUUUPPPP Autobots REPRESENT!"

Oh jesus, I think I audibly cringed at that part (though, admittedly, enjoyed the rest of the movie).
posted by kableh at 11:30 AM on July 9, 2007

"It seems that he made this film for fans of the original series, not for film critics or for social activists."

Wow, so these are mutually exclusive? Cause I'm kinda like... all three.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 11:31 AM on July 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

It may just be that I'm nostalgic for the days when action pictures were actually about something. In Die Hard, for example...

lol
posted by DU at 11:31 AM on July 9, 2007

This is the second movie I've ever walked out of. Top Gun was the first.
posted by tighttrousers at 11:34 AM on July 9, 2007

You do realize that Jazz was ORIGINALLY a racial stereotype (voiced by none other than Scatman Crothers)? This is no excuse... just sayin'*.

*Transformers don't care about hoopties.
posted by basicchannel at 11:37 AM on July 9, 2007

It seems that he made this film for fans of the original series, not for film critics or for social activists.

ObPennyArcade
posted by DU at 11:39 AM on July 9, 2007

You people are obviously jealous of the number of zeroes in Michael Bay's bank account.
posted by phaedon at 11:43 AM on July 9, 2007

I loved The Island...

I liked it too, when it was on MST3k as "Parts: The Clonus Horror".
posted by DU at 11:45 AM on July 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

[NOT A TRANSFORMIST]
posted by blue_beetle at 11:45 AM on July 9, 2007

Hi, my name is Michael Bay. Before Jerry Bruckheimer handed me my entire career on a silver platter, I directed a playboy video centerfold and a Great White video. Yeah. I'm an auteur.
posted by shmegegge at 11:45 AM on July 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

Plus, the idea that Michael Bay is a racist hack - either overtly, or subliminally - and that somehow the studios would allow (or skip over) any kind of controversy that could potentially diminish ticket sales, is ridiculous. Frankly, stereotypes are easy to digest, and while I haven't seen Transformers, I'm not going to flip my wig over a break-dancing robot.
posted by phaedon at 11:46 AM on July 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

I kind of liked the Island and I didn't think Pearl Harbor was that bad, but transformers was awful. It would have been an enjoyable experience if they had edited out all of the dialog and acting, and simply shown a bunch of giant robots fighting.

But yeah, Everything Bay does trades on a stereotype of one kind or the other, not just racial stereotypes but almost everything in that movie was a cliche. If you reference a cliche you build a character without actually doing it, but it's just really lazy film-making.
posted by delmoi at 11:46 AM on July 9, 2007

And speaking of crass, racist-y, award-winning bullshit, try Paul Haggis on for size. Crash and Million Dollar Baby make me want to throw up.
posted by phaedon at 11:49 AM on July 9, 2007

Hey phaedon -- do you remember the discussion we had in the thread about racial bias amongst NBA refs?

It's pretty funny because this sounds like a repeat performance... there it was a report that you hadn't read but you were sure it couldn't really reveal racism. Here, it's about a movie that you haven't seen, but also, you are sure it couldn't contain any racism.
posted by modernnomad at 11:52 AM on July 9, 2007 [4 favorites]

Michael Bay sucks so much. So much.
posted by chunking express at 11:57 AM on July 9, 2007

Does anyone remember Michael Bay's cameo in the Mystery Men movie? I'm of the opinion that it captured his personality, or at least his idea of his majority audience.
posted by asfuller at 11:58 AM on July 9, 2007

There was a jive-talking robot in "A.I.", and no-one complained that Steven Spielberg was a ha...oh, wait. Never mind.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:58 AM on July 9, 2007

To some, Michael Bay is a genius.

This post is an attempt at eponysterics, right? Please?
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 12:01 PM on July 9, 2007

I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that Transformers is one of the worst big budget movies I've ever seen. As a movie it fails in basically every aspect:

-terrible dialogue ("This is easilly a hundred times cooler than Armageddon... I swear to god!")
-horrible pacing (The first half of the movie jerks around in like a kid driving stick for the first time)
-constant errors (night and day are apparently interchangeable, as are locations)
-distracting, unnecessary jingoistic bullshit (everything with the marines is basically slapped on with staples and saliva)
-directorial decisions that would insult a 5-year-old's intelligence (Hottie Australian high schooler NSA analyst)
-racism (The scene where Jazz is introduced would be ham-fisted schlock if it were parody, as is it's cringeworthy)
-action scenes that are turned to chop suey by the constant, nauseating cuts

That being said, I enjoyed myself immensely. I wanted to see the Giant Robots of my youth fighting and I got my demo reel from ILM that I was very happy with. The familiarity of Optimus Prime's toy-hocking voice was rife with nostalgia despite the fact he had a *$ing mouth. All my enjoyment was in spite of, not due to, everything Michael Bay did to make it a MICHAEL BAY MOVIE ™.
posted by uri at 12:02 PM on July 9, 2007 [4 favorites]

I loved The Island...

I liked it too, when it was on MST3k as "Parts: The Clonus Horror".
posted by DU

Oh, come on! It was only 90% ripped off based on Parts: The Clonus Horror.

Which reminds me; I should try and find out whatever happened with the lawsuit. When I saw The Island, I actually thought it was a remake!
posted by The Deej at 12:02 PM on July 9, 2007

As for being a racist hack, i'm not so sure. There is some offensive (maybe?) stuff in Transformers, like the lame jab at Iranian scientists, the stereotypical portrayal of black people, etc.
posted by chunking express at 12:03 PM on July 9, 2007

phaedon, you thought Crash was racist? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, and if you are what point you're making.
posted by shmegegge at 12:03 PM on July 9, 2007

I can't stand his action sequences. Shaky hand held cameras, cutting every 10 frames, extreme closeups. I can never tell what the hell is going on! Pull back and stop shaking the damn camera! Does that mean I'm now officially an old man?
Also, I was into the whole transformers thing until they started talking and hiding from the kid's parents. Then it struck me as how utterly lame the concept of this movie is. And pretty much everything I loved from growing up in the 80's is just as lame.
posted by bstreep at 12:04 PM on July 9, 2007

I parsed those stereotypes as an intentionally over-the-top thing more than a real sign of racism. Bernie Mac's character ("Hay Mammy") is pretty obviously hamming it up for example.

Honestly I only had three gripes about Transformers:

1) Robots Don't Have Lips, Asshole.
2) I know Optimus Prime is known for this grandiose speeches, but jesus breakdancing christ, shut the fuck up.
3) His camera work makes it very difficult to watch the action scenes.

Otherwise, as a dumb, explosion-filled campy action flick, it was a lot of fun. The consensus was that it was in-jokey enough to appeal to fans from way back (me), and yet not so dependent that it alienated non-fans (my girlfriend).
posted by Skorgu at 12:08 PM on July 9, 2007

Modernnomad: I like to provide counterpoint. You can read into me any way you want, though. You might want to consider the fact that I am calling out Paul Haggis as evidence that I don't have some kind of overarching whitey agenda here. I just can't remember the last time my black friends pined over how racist Bad Boyz was. I guess your point is only white people are watching Transformers. I mean, how is anything Michael Bay produces any more "stereotypical" than a typical rap video that glamorizes crime and drug-dealing?

That being said, I will watch Transformers, and I may very well change my opinion.

shmegegge: i wasn't really being sarcastic. delmoi put words together much better than i could:

But yeah... trades on a stereotype of one kind or the other, not just racial stereotypes but almost everything in that movie was a cliche. If you reference a cliche you build a character without actually doing it, but it's just really lazy film-making.

While he wasn't talking about it, I don't think you could describe Crash any better than this. Lazy crap that people ate up like there was no tomorrow.
posted by phaedon at 12:13 PM on July 9, 2007

I can't find an online version of the awesome profile of Mr. Bay that appeared in Esquire a few years back, but here's the late, great Fametracker's take on it;

Here's what you need to know about Michael Bay: Well, since you've likely already given him three hours of your life, you won't want to give him forty minutes more by reading this piece. So we're going to condense the Inspiring Profile about the Extraordinary Life of Michael Bay down to its essential elements:

Whether Michael Bay wears his collar up: He does.

Whether Michael Bay avoids parking in the handicapped spot: He does not.

What Michael Bay tells himself when his movies get bad reviews: "It's like, sometimes, it's like, not everyone has to like my movies! Okay? I don't care if they don't like my movies!"

What Michael Bay says to critics who gave Armageddon a bad review: "It's like, dude, wake up!"

What Michael Bay remembers about the time his dog, Grace, ate a handful of rocks: "She was in the hospital. I mean, it was a lot of rocks. She had enemas and all that stuff to get them out ­- it was so funny."

What Michael Bay said when he was called by a veterinarian who was in the middle of an operation to remove foreign objects from the intestines of Bay's other dog, Mason: "Well, what does it look like? Does it look like pool equipment?"

What Michael Bay said when, as a young man, he worked as an underling on Raiders of the Lost Ark: "Wow, this movie is really going to suck."

What Michael Bay remembers about his dying father's last days: "It's sad because, you know, he said, 'One thing I want to live to see is your movie.'"
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:15 PM on July 9, 2007 [9 favorites]

"Armageddon" was unwatchable. The underlying script might have been okay, but the choppy disorienting MTV editing gave me such a headache. But, to be fair, he seems to have gotten over that phase. Of course, I haven't seen his latest.
posted by RavinDave at 12:21 PM on July 9, 2007

... he seems to have gotten over that phase....

No, he hasn't. The transformers fights are so jittery.

I said it up thread, but I just wanted to say again that Bay really sucks. He sucks so damn much.
posted by chunking express at 12:32 PM on July 9, 2007

As far as racism in Transformers goes, don't forget those wacky Indian call center guys working for the cell phone company! Oh you and your stupid accents, don't you know that Americans don't have time for your canned marketing pitch?!
posted by papakwanz at 12:36 PM on July 9, 2007

I was more upset with the fact that the movie was a big long military recruitment video interspersed with car commercials.

I'm going to risk any mefi credibility i might have and be the first one in this thread to say that despite the cheezy dialog, dizzying fight scenes, and lack of character development of the transformers themselves, i actually ENJOYED the movie.
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 12:40 PM on July 9, 2007

Transformers was one big fucking blatant GM ad. That is all.
posted by casarkos at 12:47 PM on July 9, 2007

Went to see it on Friday, and was physically restrained from leaving by a friend who insisted it would get better. True, the latter two hours (why was this movie so long, BTW?) were passable, as Michael Bay shlock goes, but my god, how does this man keep getting work? His movies have dialog that makes Episode II look like Citizen Kane, and I refuse to believe that he has some magic touch with special effects that any kid straight out of film school couldn't replicate. There's no semblance of continuity, and that camera work was enough to make you queasy even before adding in the whirlygig super spinning robots of death.

Also, the blatant misunderstanding of basic areas of technology made me cringe harder than Jeff Goldblum's ID4 Macintosh-to-alien-mainframe virus. I spent the whole trip home humming "The End of an Act" off of the Team America soundtrack, cognitive dissonance grating the whole way.

I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark... when he maaaade Pearl Harbor...
posted by Mayor West at 12:55 PM on July 9, 2007

Despite the prominence of computers in the plot and in the creation of the movie, whoever wrote it has absolutely no idea how anything about computers work.

Which really destroys this as entertainment for anyone who does know about computers - the suspension of reality is just too much. And it makes people like me sad, because I know that this movie may have entertained people for a few hours, but now they are stupider.

Take a case in point of a subplot from the movie (this might be considered to contain spoilers, but I really can't imagine knowing what happens in this sequence making any difference in your viewing experience), and count the number of impossible/incorrect things: A number of fresh-out-of-college digital signal experts, all of which are experts in the field (1), are flown in to a government lab. There they look at the waveform of a signal to determine what country would use it (2). The signal has cracked all the security systems (3) in less than two minutes (4) from an airplane (5) and has started to download gigantic sums of data from the archives (6) the only solution to which was to cut the hard lines to the servers (7). One "expert" concludes that whatever program did it must have been quantum (8) and evolutionary (9). She says it must be aliens. Nobody believes her, so she copies the signal onto a 2GB SD card (10, and with bonus irony of using a SECURE DIGITAL card) which is technically allowed but brings up a red flag on someone else's computer which will cause amusement later (11). She then exits the building in the middle of the day and jumps into her car to visit her nearby best-in-the-world genius hacker-friend (12), who lives with his mom and whose friend uses his one and only computer (13) to play DDR (14) on the one and only screen (15). The amazing hacker then reads the waveform from the card and translates it into transformers-symbols (16) which then get translated into images of pages (17) which they trace to a government system called Sector Seven (18) and a two-generation old plan called Project Iceman (19), which then leads them to eBay (20)
posted by Galt at 1:08 PM on July 9, 2007 [12 favorites]

I guess your point is only white people are watching Transformers.

What? My point was that Bay is a hack who frequently resorts to tired racial cliches and stereotypes (and not just in Transformers). The movie was awful for more than that reason though -- as others have noted, shitty dialogue, non-sensical transitions between day and night, masturbatory shots of military hardware, tonnes of product placement, the dizzying camera cuts.

But even given ALL THAT, I actually enjoyed Transformers on some weird level. The same way I enjoy fast food -- you know it's not substantial, you know it's bad for you, but on occasion, for a fleeting moment, its a little bit enjoyable. I've zero desire to sit through it again, but hey, as someone upthread said, I got to see the big robots of my childhood imagination on a big screen. That was enough for me.

I think I have fast food once or twice a year, usually when I'm on the road and have no other options. If I can keep my fast-food-for-the-brain movie quotient similar, all should be well. But I still hate that Bay is profiting off my lack of self-control. Oh well.
posted by modernnomad at 1:15 PM on July 9, 2007

I was thinking the same thing about the word 'sabot'. They kept using the word, but I don't think it meant what they thought it meant!
posted by Comrade_robot at 1:22 PM on July 9, 2007

Like I'm not actually still chapped and bleeding from Lucas' little midnight romp through my colon of nostalgia.

FUCK YOU, MICHAEL BAY! FUCK YOU VERY MUCH.
posted by loquacious at 1:29 PM on July 9, 2007

Why does every movie need this little vignette where a nerdy guy uses a computer to somehow advance the plot or fill in the backstory? Even if the rest of the movie has nothing to do with computers? Do we all, or enough of the moviegoing audience, imagine ourselves to be, or identify with, a superhacker? And if so, if so many of us are in fact wannabe hackers (or at least computer-knowledgeable) wouldn't a director expect us to come to be annoyed with the fact that these computer scenes in movies are written to be a total garble, with no relation to reality whatsoever?

(First. Post. Ever.)
posted by newdaddy at 1:49 PM on July 9, 2007

Robots Don't Have Lips, Asshole.

That's an Onion headline, isn't it?
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:50 PM on July 9, 2007

haha, speaking of raping childhood memories, can anyone here honestly say that this movie was worse than the Star Wars prequels? I'd say it's on par with Episode III. The effects were well done. The only CGI was the transformers. All the other shit blowing up was real. And even the transformers didn't look all that bad.

I thought Optimus took WAY too long to transform, tho. In the cartoon it was "CHEE CHRK CHAK" and he was done. In this movie, it took him like 30 seconds to transform. Maybe he's getting old.

Also- what's up with soundwave being the squirrel from Ice Age? That got annoying.

Of course, we cynic critics need to realize that the target audience for this movie (and star wars) is BOYS AGE 9 - 15

Also, the original series was nothing more than a 30-min TOY COMMERCIAL (The same concept was also applied to Star Wars). Thanks for relaxing those child marketing laws, Ronnie!
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 1:51 PM on July 9, 2007

I haven't seen Transformers yet, so I can't comment on how racist it may or may not be.

I have seen Bad Boys II. Many times, in fact. Not only is it one of my favorite movies, but it's also the least offensive movie Martin Lawrence has ever starred in. I wont waste any space defending bad Boys II. That would make me an idiot.

As far as the "racism" being pointed to here. I disagree on the grounds that using dumb stereotypes in mediocre movies isn't so much racist as it is just plain dumb and lazy. Most characters, regardless of race, are portrayed as broad stereotypes in mediocre movies. Uptight white guy, socially deficient nerd, dumb hot blonde, fat slob, workaholic emotionally distant dad, blah, blah, blah. It's intellectually offensive more than anything.

My personal gauge for when something is truly racist is how it makes me feel. The TV show I Love New York made me feel sad, hurt and ashamed. It was emotionally painful to watch. No Michael Bay movie has ever come close to eliciting that feeling in me. YMMV.
posted by billyfleetwood at 1:59 PM on July 9, 2007

I'm not quite so sure that the target audience for this movie is boys age 9-15.

Boys age 9-15 are a little on the young side for all those cleavage/abs shots we got.

And they certainly don't buy the fine products of the General Motors Corporation!
posted by Comrade_robot at 2:06 PM on July 9, 2007

This goes past racism. Bay is a hack and he makes hack movies full of every stereotype under the sun. Viewing it only as racism says more about you than him, I would imagine.
posted by puke & cry at 2:13 PM on July 9, 2007

Despite the prominence of computers in the plot and in the creation of the movie, whoever wrote it has absolutely no idea how anything about computers work.

Which really destroys this as entertainment for anyone who does know about computers - the suspension of reality is just too much. And it makes people like me sad, because I know that this movie may have entertained people for a few hours, but now they are stupider.

I enjoy how the real-life limitations of SD cards and computers ruin your suspension of disbelief, but giant alien (yet humanoid, conveniently!) robots who crash-landed on earth (in America, conveniently!) to find a big cube that can create life, and who can look like anything they choose by scanning it but still go through some weird transforming process to subsequently change between (only 2) shapes (and only cars for the "Autobots", conveniently!), does not, in any way, impinge on your suspension of disbelief.

There is ZERO semblance of reality in Transformers; under you view, it should "destroy it has entertainment for anyone who knows HOW THE WORLD WORKS".
posted by modernnomad at 2:14 PM on July 9, 2007 [4 favorites]

-directorial decisions that would insult a 5-year-old's intelligence (Hottie Australian high schooler NSA analyst) - uri

Actually, I know a couple of really hot female security analysts. One of them is Australian, and blonde. She's done some modeling. As for interning at the NSA at that age? Yeah, I know a ton of people who have. I know you want your security analysts to be pasty fat anglo guys, but to say that anything else in a movie insults a 5-year-old's intelligence is crass.

Feel free to bash the movie, but if you're getting your idea of who or what security analysts may be solely from the media, don't gnash your teeth when the media gives you a different view.
posted by rush at 2:14 PM on July 9, 2007

Hi, my name is Michael Bay. Before Jerry Bruckheimer handed me my entire career on a silver platter, I directed a playboy video centerfold and a Great White video. Yeah. I'm an auteur.

You mean they're not the same person? Okay, I'm gonna need a minute here...

I would just like to again voice my extreme disdain for "Bad Boys II". I've gone on record many times on this site calling it the worst movie ever made.

I saw the first one and just considered it forgettable. I certainly didn't think it was good, but it didn't seem all that bad either, just, as I said, forgettable.

As in, I can't remember a single thing from the movie except a blonde Tea Leoni. I assume she slept with either Will or Martin, but I can't even recall which one, or both, or neither. And I think a car blew up. I'm not trying to be funny, that's literally all I remember.

I haven't seen BBII. Was it really that much worse?
posted by Ynoxas at 2:20 PM on July 9, 2007

That's an Onion headline, isn't it?

No, a Grammy-award winning nerdcore band.

And, just to be clear, I enjoyed Transformers. Something about it made me ignore the fact that it was a poorly-written GM ad with bad camerawork directed by a man whose hardon for SOCOM it's visible from orbit. I couldn't tell you why, but I saw these flaws even as I was watching the movie, and I just didn't care.
posted by Skorgu at 2:24 PM on July 9, 2007

what's up with soundwave being the squirrel from Ice Age?

He's not supposed to be Soundwave, he's supposed to be Frenzy, which was one of the tapes that shot out of Soundwave. But really, what's Frenzy without Rumble?
posted by chunking express at 2:25 PM on July 9, 2007

Whoa, some mefites get offended way too easily. Didnt like the movie? Fine. Racist? Err... OK.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:26 PM on July 9, 2007

"Boys age 9-15 are a little on the young side for all those cleavage/abs shots we got."

Perhaps, but there was a little tyke 2 seats away from me with his dad. The masturbation jokes went right over his head ("we can just call it your happy time"), but i'll be damned if he didn't excitedly recite EVERY single transformer's name when they were introduced. Even the ones i didn't know, like the scorpion thing. Proof that marketing to kids works.
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 2:31 PM on July 9, 2007

This is the second movie I've ever walked out of. Top Gun was the first.
posted by tighttrousers at 1:34 PM on July 9 [+] [!]


Eponysterical.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:32 PM on July 9, 2007

Galt, please tell us you made all that up.
posted by exogenous at 2:37 PM on July 9, 2007

And speaking of crass, racist-y, award-winning bullshit, try Paul Haggis on for size. Crash and Million Dollar Baby make me want to throw up.

Haggis isn't so much racist as he is virulently anti-welfare. The boxer in Crash and the Detective in Million Dollar Baby are both children of despicable women, who happened to have raised them on Welfare. Nevermind that The mother in Million Dollar Baby had adult children and that welfare had been gone for almost a decade when the film was made.

As far as "Crash is racist" -- it's more subtle then that, it's more about how everyone's a racist so let's just not worry about it.

Also, I was into the whole transformers thing until they started talking and hiding from the kid's parents.

That scene made me want to shoot myself in the head. And it went on forever

Why does every movie need this little vignette where a nerdy guy uses a computer to somehow advance the plot or fill in the backstory? Even if the rest of the movie has nothing to do with computers?


Yeah, what could a movie about robots have to do with computers hmm... Also I don't remember the superhacking scene in Lost in Translation.
posted by delmoi at 2:39 PM on July 9, 2007

Galt, please tell us you made all that up.

Nope, that's pretty much how the movie goes.
posted by delmoi at 2:40 PM on July 9, 2007

Guilty pleasure. Stupid, yes. I mean, when the plot is so hideous that giant, transforming robots from space that happen to resemble GM products is the least unrealistic part of the movie, you're working pretty hard to suck, here. But on the other hand, I love me some transformin' robots.

Still, on the other hand, I have to agree with slapshot57: my first thought was also, 'Damn, they felt obliged to kill off the only black robot.' He didn't get killed in the series, did he?

And someone has a serious hard-on for military hardware. Every time anything happened, there would five minutes of sexy killin' technology rumbling around on screen getting everybody's ass-kicking glands all erect.
posted by umberto at 2:41 PM on July 9, 2007

At least it had one respectable black character - Optimus Prime.
posted by Durhey at 2:41 PM on July 9, 2007

I haven't seen BBII. Was it really that much worse?

It depends. Do you like more than one car blowing up? [hint: you should answer yes if you're going to see BBII]

Seriously though, I've never even noticed or thought about the racial stereotypes in BBI/II or other Bay films (I find most of his other work craptastic for other reasons). Maybe I just don't think about my movie-going experience, but I tend to go for the mindless numbing which I hope takes place over the next two or so hours. If you go into a Bay film, especially BBI/II, excepting some semblance of intelligence, I suggest you check out the AskMeFi questions about "good" movies.

PS. Bay just made a shitton of money of Transformers for himself and the others. The dream of him going away is not going to happen.
posted by jmd82 at 2:41 PM on July 9, 2007

He's not supposed to be Soundwave, he's supposed to be Frenzy, which was one of the tapes that shot out of Soundwave.

Really? That makes no sense. But according to the wiki, we're both right:

"Frenzy...takes on the stealth spy role that was originally Soundwave. The movie's creators have stated that the character design had evolved too far from being Soundwave."

I really wanted to see transforming tapes come out of him, but i guess we had to settle for CD-throwing stars...
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 2:44 PM on July 9, 2007

1. Actually, I believe Jazz first says "Hello, bitches!" when introduced. Classy.

2. WHy was Optimus Prime BLINKING? He had eyelids. WHY? WHY?!!!

3. Oh big second on the jittery camera + rumble-tumble robots fight sequence. I was not impressed and it was annoying as fuck.

4. Michael Bay ONLY EVER creates films for 15-year-old boys. Ergo, he's a hack.
posted by grubi at 2:46 PM on July 9, 2007

5. And if you think the computers premise was shit in this one, you haven't seen Live Free or Die Hard. Cripes, what a tuuuurd. Both of 'em.

YOU'VE GOT A GUI; USE THE MOUSE.
posted by grubi at 2:48 PM on July 9, 2007

The breakdancing black robot stereotype stuff sounds lame (I haven't seen the movie yet, but I cautiously want to), but there might be a bit more background to it than that.

A guy I know who works in 3D told me that he'd read somewhere that the whole movie came about because of Neill Blomkamp's famous "dancing robot" Citroen commercial. Apparently, since the commercial features a car transforming into a robot, the producers cleared it with the Transformers rights holders. Afterwards, when the Transformers people saw how it turned out (it's pretty awesome, as is most of Blomkamp's/The Embassy's stuff), they figured it might be time to try to do a live-action movie.

That's the story I was told, anyway, and if it's true, it might be one possible explanation for a breakdancing robot in the movie. Not that the racial stereotypes are less tired because of it.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:59 PM on July 9, 2007

YOU'VE GOT A GUI; USE THE MOUSE.

Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script.
posted by loquacious at 2:59 PM on July 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

rush - I know you want your security analysts to be pasty fat anglo guys, but to say that anything else in a movie insults a 5-year-old's intelligence is crass.

That's not what I said. I'm guessing you haven't seen the movie, because the character in question is so awkwardly scripted and exploitatively used that gorgeous, brilliant Australians everywhere should be writing their Prime Minister.

I can only assume Michael Bay scribbled "NEEDZ MOR HOT CHKZ" on each page when they handed him the script. Thankfully, the hapless screenwriter couldn't bring himself to slap breasts on Ironhide in an effort to comply.
posted by uri at 3:04 PM on July 9, 2007

Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script.

Don't tell me, that when movie computers have all teh COOLEST NEATEST graphical user interfaces, it doesn't bother you in teh least that they only use the keyboard. It's just WEIRD.
posted by grubi at 3:06 PM on July 9, 2007

uri, I did see the movie, and I'm not saying that she wasn't written terribly (especially if, as galt points out, you know anything about computers).

Perhaps I read your comment wrong, but it looked like you were saying that the notion of a hot high school girl from Australia who is a successful analyst was one that would insult the intelligence of a five year old.

I do get a little rankled by the idea that hot chicks can't hack it in the security field, and it's a (reverse?) stereotype that has real impact on women in engineering roles today. You're a woman? You're probably not any good. You're pretty? You're definitely not any good. What does that mean to girls interested in entering the field? That to do so is to admit that they are probably ugly, and probably not very good.

I'm influenced, on this topic, by my wife, who was that hot analyst character once, and now manages a global team that includes many of them. You think it's tough to get taken seriously as a pretty girl in a world populated largely by military jocks and adolescents? Try being from India or Eastern Europe, on top of that.

So, I think the character is not only plausible, but more common than you might think, and certainly more interesting than the usual fare. I thought it was a great decision to cast the character the way they did.

Again, no disagreement on the script or execution.
posted by rush at 3:28 PM on July 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

Like I'm not actually still chapped and bleeding from Lucas' little midnight romp through my colon of nostalgia.`

Michael Bay doesn't have shit on Lucas!
posted by phaedon at 3:32 PM on July 9, 2007

I've always found the fact that Bay studied film at Wesleyan University both bizarre and fascinating. One of the film professors there wrote an essay for the Criterion release of Armageddon that's pretty ridiculous:

"If he weren’t working in Hollywood, Bay would be the darling bad boy of the intelligentsia."
posted by Espy Gillespie at 3:35 PM on July 9, 2007

And fans of the original series loved it.

We did? I guess I didn't get the memo.

Seriously, there was a Mountain Dew vending machine Transformer that shot frosty-cold cans of Mountain Dew at people. Come on. It was a travesty.

*catches can of Mountain Dew*

Gee, thanks Mountain Dew Bot!
posted by buriednexttoyou at 3:52 PM on July 9, 2007

rush - I can see how you could misinterpret what I wrote, I should have been clearer in my earlier post.

The problem is not that an analyst at the NSA is portrayed as an attractive, Australian female high schooler. The problem is that the way Bay uses her, the only reason she gets any screen time is because she serves as an attractive vessel for various exposition. When she's not handing down plot points directly from the gods, her character is essentially zero-dimensional with no purpose other than eye candy, extending no farther than the conceit of the aforementioned description.
posted by uri at 4:01 PM on July 9, 2007

THERE'S A CRITERION EDITION OF ARMAGEDDON?! I fucking give up. God damn everybody.
posted by shmegegge at 4:20 PM on July 9, 2007 [6 favorites]

Which really destroys this as entertainment for anyone who does know about computers - the suspension of reality is just too much

And who can't suspend disbelief. I mean, I watched this movie with a large group of programmers, and we loved it. Were the computer scenes ridiculous? Of course they were. But who cares? This is a movie about watching giant robots do stuff.

Analyze it any more than that and you've already put more thought into it than Michael Bay did.

But it was still awesome. After I watched it, I went back and watched the 1986 Transformers Movie, and I can safely say that it surpassed the current movie in stupidity by a wide margin, but when I was a kid I loved that too.

I also didn't hear anyone complain about racism (despite going with a largely non-white group), probably for the same reason - we didn't take this shit seriously.

I think too many of you expected... I don't know what. Something intelligent? I can't imagine why... do you remember what the cartoon was like? It was ridiculously bad and stupid, but FUN. And to me, so was Bay's version (I too was surprised!).
posted by wildcrdj at 4:27 PM on July 9, 2007

> THERE'S A CRITERION EDITION OF ARMAGEDDON?! I fucking give up. God damn everybody.

Armageddon seems like an odd choice for a Criterion edition, but if the collection is intended to provide a representative sample of film throughout history, neglecting the late-90's studio system would be silly.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:33 PM on July 9, 2007

I was in college when Transformers was on TV.

Thank god I feel no nostalgic connection.
posted by tkchrist at 4:35 PM on July 9, 2007

I think I'm one of the few girls who watched, and loved, and still loves Transformers. I may be an adult now, but I grew up with these characters and there is a very large place in my heart for the entire Transformers universe, as do many other people, and the situation demands a bit of respect. I don't care if it's just giant alien robots on the outside, because it's not just that. "More than meets the eye", people.

I saw the original movie as a kid, and I have to admit - it ruined my life. No, seriously. Royally fucked me over. The characters I'd come to know and love all died right off of the bat (except fucking Starscream. I hated, and still HATE him). So, I was really reluctant to see this film. I remembered being really angry as a kid about the whole situation, and yes, I could very easily see myself going through that again as an adult.

Against my better judgment, I saw the movie and - nothing. I wasn't excited or upset or bitter or happy or disappointed*. There were characters which happened to share a name with an awesome television show from the 80's, but they weren't the same. I felt nothing for the characters. I didn't even hate this incarnation of Starscream. I honestly didn't care how the movie ended. Which makes the 80's, animated, crappy by today's standards movie far and away better than this million dollar "meh" from Michael Bay. He delivered a money making film; I don't know that anyone really expects more. He is Michael Bay, after all.

I enjoyed it for what it was: a night out, a fun-at-times-film, and popcorn.

*i realize we all know this is a movie about giant robots, and there's no sense in nit-picking, but I could go on for days about how the movie was by and large just wrong. it's not as if they didn't have a huge fanbase to turn to for advice. i mean Jesus fucking tapdancing Christ, LIPS?!
posted by sephira at 5:46 PM on July 9, 2007

I mean, have any of you watched the original 80s show since, you know, we were all kids in the 80s? I downloaded a season or two via bittorrent on a whim and its pretty fucking silly and hard to watch.

Off hand I don't know how anyone could make this into any type of serious (and lets be clear here - the critics of this film are overwhelmingly pissed off because it isn't serious enough) film.

Then again Robocop was pretty fucking stupid too, but somehow Paul Verhoeven made it into a perfectly badass 80s action/sci-fi movie.

And the only reason that the first Transformers The Movie was passable was because Hasbro wanted the writers to kill off as many of the old toy line as possible, so it forced them to really up the drama. As pointed out in a recent Slate article:

But in the Transformers movie, the death toll was jaw-dropping. More than a dozen marquee characters are dispatched in the film, among them one of my personal favorites, Starscream, the Decepticon malcontent always scheming to relieve Megatron of his command.

Of course, all of this bloodshed had a specific purpose—to move toys. In the commentary track on the 20th-anniversary edition of the movie, Flint Dille, one of the writers, explains he was instructed to eliminate much of the existing product line to make room for the new characters Hasbro was planning to sell me. I already owned Optimus Prime, after all.

posted by wfrgms at 6:54 PM on July 9, 2007

Paraphrasing a review I saw that I think got to the heart of it:
Transformers sucked as a movie, but was awesome as entertainment.

If you go into it with the equivalent of a 13 year old mind-set, you'll enjoy the movie. Of course things don't hang together logically, but it's no worse than Star Wars or Star Trek in that regard. Come on people, Transformers ... its less complicated than a plate of beans.
posted by forforf at 7:07 PM on July 9, 2007

This thread exposes you all as hackists.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:22 PM on July 9, 2007

Here's how un-Transformers-hip I am: when I saw the trailer, I thought "Why the heck would they make a movie based on a toy?" I had no clue there was any pre-existing storyline, or characters. I still don't know if it was a toy that became a cartoon (?) or a cartoon that became a toy, or what. I have no clue if Underwear-Drawer-Robo-Spitter would be good guy or a bad guy. What about Rice-Cooker-Ninja? And did they have to retire Eight-Track-Tape-Player-Nut-Cruncher, or did they "update" him into Blu-Ray-Star-Thrower?

I dunno. I guess it still makes more sense than talking fast food.
posted by The Deej at 7:34 PM on July 9, 2007

I'll pile on my take on Michael Bay: he's everything that's wrong with filmmaking. My #1 gripe? Editing. I have a theory I don't have the patience to prove yet. I'm pretty certain there's no single shot in a MB movie longer than 10 seconds. I may be wrong, but they're probably few and far between.

His films are so artlessly edited. Cut-cut-cut. Usually no establishing shot, and the relation of shots from cut to cut is seemingly completely random. Closeup-far away-this angle-that angle. It's done to make the film seem more exciting, but it just ends up being chaotic. Bay got his start with music videos, and this technique works okay in that medium, but with feature films...

I could go on, but I gotta go to work.
posted by zardoz at 7:47 PM on July 9, 2007

Michael Bay will insult your intelligence...regardless of how smart you are.
posted by lightweight at 8:39 PM on July 9, 2007

I know you want your security analysts to be pasty fat anglo guys

Yes! Damn straight! Like in Jurassic Park. That is exactly what I want. And I would like them to die due to their own greed, please, also. Thankyou.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:25 PM on July 9, 2007

You people are obviously jealous of the number of zeroes in Michael Bay's bank account.

posted by phaedon at 11:43 AM on July 9 [+] [!]

noooo thanks, i have one zero, i cant imagine any more than that
posted by white light at 11:37 PM on July 9, 2007

It's hard to explain, but the movie is somehow more than the sum of its parts. I was sitting there thinking that every second thing sucked ass, but by the end of the film I felt satisfied and entertained and had basically decided to upgrade to a high def disc format before Transformers comes out on video.

I also rewatched my 20th anniversary DVD of the 1986 animated feature. It actually has a more involving and coherent plot than Bay's movie.
posted by autodidact at 2:05 AM on July 10, 2007

The 1986 version of the film smokes this one. The more I think about the film the more I hate it. Saying that "fans of the original" will love this new movie is way off base. If you liked the original this new movie is a slap to the face. I said it up thread, but i'll say it again: Michael Bay sucks. If he was a transformer he'd turn into a vacuum. Because vacuum's suck. Get it?
posted by chunking express at 6:58 AM on July 10, 2007

It seems that he made this film for fans of the original series, not for film critics or for social activists.

Listen, I make my own movies. [...] I’ve quickly become one of the biggest authorities in the world about these toys, but I tried to make this movie for non-Transformers fans.

[...]

When [executive producer] Steven Spielberg called, he basically described it as a story about a boy who buys his first car, and to me that was a great hook. I wasn’t interested in doing a stupid toy movie, but I kept thinking about that hook. It was a great launching pad, this boy’s passage into manhood.

Metafilter: I audibly cringed
posted by tyro urge at 9:35 AM on July 10, 2007

So...when does Michael Bay's passage into manhood happen?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:50 AM on July 10, 2007

I guess I was just the beneficiary of my own low expectations. I told my darling girlfriend that Transformers looked big, dumb, loud and retarded and I just couldn't wait to see it. It lived up to my meager expectations and I had a good time in it.

As far as his racism, to me Bernie Mac just stuck me as doing Bernie Mac. If I'd ever seen him play any other character I might get wound up about it. Jazz being a jive-talker (aside from thecjm's point that this is a pre-existing character trait) simply struck me as a gag about how they learned the language from our media. The only stereotype matter I noticed was that the two prominent female leads were braver and smarter than the men around them.
posted by phearlez at 9:51 AM on July 10, 2007

Grubi, I believe the line is actually "S'up, little bitches!" I laughed, then cringed a bit during the dance vignette.

I agree that the nigh-pornographic representation of the military (and GM products, to a lesser extent) was a lot more worrisome than the racial caricature work. The idea that a teenaged hacker-type could jury-rig what looked like an IBM PC-XT with cobwebbed shortwave transmitters from the 50s to create an emergency Morse code transmitter that could summon the good men (and women, I presume, though I didn't see any) of the United States Air Force to supersonically lend their peacekeeping firepower to a super-secret Hoover Dam base (whose supposed EM-shielding properties had already been mentioned as a plot point) because of course they're Always Listening to frequencies that have been unused for decades...

That, I think, was a little hard to swallow. For all of the administrative ridiculosity the movie showed, the military demonstrated absolute, robotic-samurai competence. These people never appeared to rest, and only poor orders could ever prevent them from Saving the Day.

This is not to say I don't believe the military isn't chockablock full of competent, skilled, and/or dedicated folks...but a significant portion of said folks were presented as less human than the freakin' robots, and gloriously so. Kinda chilling.

I didn't expect the movie would be particularly smart, and I enjoyed it for the most part. I did tune out a bit during the parts I expected to hear about 0% financing or enlistment bonuses, but robots did, in fact, beat the mecha-crap out of each other. Optimus Prime beheaded a robot with a sword gauntlet thing!

I knew it wasn't going to be particularly deep when a shot of Megatron inspired me to think (word-for word, mind you) "My God, that's the most hateful robot of all time." I lost some IQ points for a bit, but it was a fairly fun way to do so.
posted by lumensimus at 11:13 AM on July 10, 2007

Steven C. Den Beste: And fans of the original series loved it.

Fanboys will pay for dirty cat litter if you package it with enough hype and some reasonable production values.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:02 PM on July 10, 2007

Fanboys will pay for dirty cat litter if you package it with enough hype and some reasonable production values.
posted by KirkJobSluder

*Buying second cat. Writing business plan*
posted by The Deej at 12:27 PM on July 10, 2007

The idea that a teenaged hacker-type could jury-rig what looked like an IBM PC-XT with cobwebbed shortwave transmitters from the 50s to create an emergency Morse code transmitter that could summon the good men (...) of the United States Air Force to supersonically lend their peacekeeping firepower to a super-secret Hoover Dam base (...) because of course they're Always Listening to frequencies that have been unused for decades...

It's not supposed to make sense in the real world. It's like playing Transformers brought to real life. I'm sure you've played or seen kids play with their action toys... this is how their stories evolve. [Kid Playing Megatron team] ... ha! I just jammed all your freqencies and now your stuck in a closed room in the Hoover dam as my minion comes to destroy you ... [Kid Playing Optimus team] ... Oh yeah? well I bar the door and use the old radio and computer system to send out a message to the Air Force ... [Megatron Kid] How!? I jammed the radios remember? ... [Optimus Kid] ... But I used the super short wave radio that nobody uses anymore that you didn't think to jam ... so there! [Megatron Kid] Whatever, I still burst into the room and start shooting ...
[shooting sounds erupt from Megatron kid as he thrashes his toy around attempting to destroy everything in sight]

Tranformers makes perfect sense to me ... but then I haven't grown in 20 years ...
posted by forforf at 12:33 PM on July 10, 2007

Michael Bay vs. Tony Scott*. Who would you choose to shoot? In a series of rapid cuts with techno music.

*The best review ever of a Tony Scott movie was by Vern whose review of Domino (halfway down) delved into randomly changing colours and fonts to illustrate his fully justified hatred.
posted by longbaugh at 1:35 PM on July 10, 2007

Count me in as another fan of the original series that didn't enjoy the new film.

I miss the times when ridiculous entertainment had the balls to take itself seriously.
posted by zebra3 at 1:42 PM on July 10, 2007

Tony Scott kinda sucks, but he has the occasional freak decent movie -- point me to Bay's The Hunger or True Romance and this might start to be an actual contest.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:01 PM on July 10, 2007

I always thought Transformers were Shogun Warriors knock-offs/But the movie got my rocks off...

The whole movie will shave your IQ 20 points easy for the next 48 hours.

Hey! That's the key to any Great Summer movie.

I'm dumber and harder for the next 48 hours!
posted by humannaire at 5:11 AM on July 11, 2007

Tony Scott kinda sucks, but he has the occasional freak decent movie -- point me to Bay's The Hunger or True Romance and this might start to be an actual contest.

Tony Scott's movies are terrible now (Domino, anyone?), but he has put out a few good ones. I think his best is Crimson Tide.
posted by zardoz at 6:21 PM on July 11, 2007

The movie had 187 awful flaws, and it still managed to be kinda fun.

Hey, I've got a giant nostalgia connection to the original material, and that doesn't change the fact that the original movie blows. There's maybe 7 cool minutes, the rest is hideously sucky. And I own it on DVD.

Here's another artist's take on Transformers, which I love.
posted by NortonDC at 11:13 PM on July 12, 2007 [1 favorite]