If Burbanked doesn’t stop Michael Bay from taking over the world, who will?
By Burbanked on Jun 1, 2006 in Geekformers, Movies, Views and Reviews | 933 views |
You may not believe this, but I’ve been struggling - desperately fighting - NOT to devote another pixel in this space to the buzz surrounding Michael Bay’s upcoming Transformers movie.
Only I’ve given up. Clearly, I’m weak. Defenseless against the onslaught of Internet hoopla. A pawn in the blogosphere of life.
But apparently what motivates me is the rising, amazed dumb-struckedness that I feel when I read how excited people are about this dopey, idiotic, worst-excuse-ever for a movie property to be directed by cinema’s King of Bombastic Crapola Michael Bay.
I desperately ask: Is anyone with me on this? Or have movie standards sunk so low that this kind of thing truly appeals to our inner movie geeks? Let’s take a look at the recent explosion of Michael! Bay! News!, after the jump.
When Bay himself recently blogged about the completion of his first week of Transformers shooting (hmm. 250 shots in the can? That’s about 6 minutes of hyperedited BayScreenTime), it was as if the Internet had collectively put on an old jacket, reached into the pocket and pulled out not a lost $5 bill, but the freaking Ark of the Covenant:
- “The movie I’ve been waiting my whole life to see…” writes the ordinarily balanced John Campea at The Movie Blog.
- “Still waiting on news of my beloved robots in disguise, but this is good to hear in the meantime.” - writes Mark Beall at the usually intelligent Cinematical.
- “It’s no big deal if the movie messes with the size of someone like Megatron or Soundwave. I never liked in the cartoon that they would switch from a small gun or tape recorder to huge robots. It never made sense.” - reality-sensitive forum member toddly6666 from an excerpt on the SuperHeroHype boards.
- “For me, the idea of the filmmaker of THE ROCK and ARMAGEDDON directing a giant fighting robots movie is a perfect match.” - Quint at AICN, writing
a love letteran account of his visit to Michael Bay’s office earlier this year.
I’m sorry, but the whole thing sounds like one massive irony to me. Michael Bay’s last movie The Island was supposedly created as a thinking man’s sci fi adventure - “I want people to think, ‘If you could, would you have a clone?”’ [Bay] says. ”We all want to extend our lives. How far would you go?” - and it miserably flopped. So when you’re a self-important director and NO ONE took your existential cinematic exercise seriously, what’s your next move?
Simple. An existential cinematic exercise about trucks and cars that turn into robots and shoot at each other.
Previous Burbanked Michael Bay rants:
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
(
because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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