Virtues for the Vicious

The Notably Unenthusiastic Return of the Michael Bay Retrospective is here, and you guys thought that I'd forgotten all about it. No, I just chose to pretend it didn't exist for a while. Michael Bay Retrospective, you are the troll that lives under my stairs. You know how to twist my loves into something awful and irrational that haunts me for days and your eyes are two pools of terror and rabies. However, you can't slam a Michael Bay retrospective closed in a hardcover book and expect it to turn into cocaine, so instead of being afraid for the rest of my life, I'm going to stand up to this retrospective and finish the shit out of it. At least that's how I felt until I watched Pearl Harbor.

I'd like you guys to know that I'm plunging my face into a bowl made of scalding hot hot sauce and filled with scalding hot lime juice for YOU, even if I consider my ego a reader of my blog. I'll accept your girlfriends as payment.

So I'm pretty over Michael Bay at this point; his movies are just bad. His action is pretty pedestrian and his editors, brave though they may be for working on a Michael Bay film, don't seem to be able to keep up with him. Furthermore, he's now given me two movies in a row with such unabashed sentimentality that it's like being punched in the face by a man made of sugar. Armageddon had that totally unearned death scene with Bruce Willis, and I thought that was bad. On the plus side, there isn't any weird fetishism in this film, but Michael Bay still doesn't seem to get sex.

Pearl Harbor is a controlled, committee-branded attempt to cash in on the real-life events of Pearl Harbor and the flag-waving and country-singing that the phrase itself instigates. That sounds like something any grouchy critic might say, but I stand by it.

That it's artificially lengthened by about two hours, and includes enough flag-waving to bolster the flag industry and push us out of this recession is enough proof to me. The constant speech-making and the indecent amount of patriotism are like the steel bolts in the USS Arizona.

Frankly the scope is just too big. You can't create two characters meant to be heroes and put them in the center of Pearl Harbor and have them continue to be the center of the film without making them single-handedly turn back the Jap invasion and win the war. Bay opts to create an ensemble of characters and follow them around during the attack, which is a common enough trick (but one that rarely works out - see: Bobby). That's okay, but for my taste I'd rather follow one character or one group and get a feel for them and their character and how they react to the situation than getting flashes of 2-dimensional characters doing heroic things and then disappearing into the ether.

But that's just me. Instead of saying what I would like to have seen, I'll just poke holes in what the film did do. For one, the ground-level view of battle, seen through the eyes of our three leads, their friends and squadmates and commanding officers is sort of gimped by us constantly going back to FDR making profound speeches to the Joint Chiefs. Oh, then we quantum leap into the Japanese military and listen to them talk about how America just can't be beat because they've got so much heart and baseball is fun. That sucked, too.

The general thrust of the story is "into the heart of modern Japan, who we will never let live down the events of Pearl Harbor, even though we stole their military and are at their robotic mercy" via Rafe McCawley, played by apple pie (I'm just joking, it's Ben Affleck. But seriously. Apple pie. America. Heart disease. Corporations.) and his best bud Danny Walker. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, they're the stereotypical American fighter pilots/best buds that you would see in any movie made during World War II, and we even get introduced to Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) in the manner of any one of those wartime romances. Unfortunately, this mildly successful portion of the film is at odds with everything else in the movie, with its camp and lite tone against the rest of the film's devout seriousness. We spend a lot of time following Evelyn and her group of girls, who I think are nurses but are shown getting Purple Hearts at the end, so maybe they were secret agents who were putting bombs in the bodies of the wounded and throwing them at the Japanese.

It doesn't take long for Rafe to be presumed dead and for Danny to fuck Evelyn, setting into motion a mindfuck of contrived romantic triangularity and soap opera buttfucking. This in the middle of a fucking (PG-13) war movie that constantly cuts to FDR (portrayed not as the crippled socialist we all love, but as the brash, invincible and still pretty crippled ideal leader by the insane Jon Voight, in full repentance for his hippie days). It's no wonder that when this movie came out, when I was eleven, my image of it was a man-man-lady threesome in the water during the attack. I didn't know what a train was then, but now I think that's a funny image.

I just don't see how all these pieces fit together. It reeks of a script given a checklist by a studio for maximum emotional manipulation. If you're a communist, you'll still get sucked in by the love story, if you're black you'll be crying at the sight of the first black man to ever win the Medal of Honor, if you love water you'll be devastated by all the splashing and boat sinking. It really does have something for everyone, as long as you don't like things that are good.

As for Michael Bay, his filmmaking is as gaudy as ever, but I don't think his evil has really shown its true form yet. He's still pretending like he's a patriot that isn't planning the downfall of Western civilization.

My favorite of his directorial flourishes in this movie had something to do with Ewen Bremner. Ewen Bremner plays the goofy, stuttering squadmate of our two heroes, and at the beginning he sparks a romance with the hottest bitch in that group of nurses (I think it's Jaime King but don't hold me to that). They eventually get married and are happy and idyllic while Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett fight over the somewhat less attractive Kate Beckinsale. It's pretty nice of Bay to give Ewen Bremner a better, more successful romance than Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, but then Bay unceremoniously blows up Bremner's wife. A lot of people die in this movie, but none of them get the same joyously enthusiastic sadism aimed towards Bremner for being goofy, ugly and stuttery. It's like a cut scene from In the Company of Men.

Michael Bay's fingerprints seem sort of drowned out here; it's so obvious that the film had a billion people working on it during the conceptual stages. The worst crime that the film commits isn't even really Bay's fault. As director, he's liable for the content of his film, but the absurd padding is the fault of the screenwriter(s), first and foremost. First of all, it's an hour of bullshit before the attack even starts, and then that goes on for an hour, and then there's an hour of getting back at the Japs by showing the Doolittle Raid. Meanwhile, we get about ten thousand disconnected sub-plots, like Cuba Gooding Jr. saving the world. He never even meets the heroes. He's only there to get affluent blacks into the audience (a tap-worthy demo if those Madea films are any indication), but is a trainwreck from a story point of view. And there's about fifteen minutes dedicated to Evelyn convincing an officer who she saved earlier in the film to let her listen in on the radios while Rafe and Danny bomb the Japs back, and it adds nothing to the story. It's just more padding to make the movie three hours long. It's embarrassing how badly this film wants to be epic.

One last thing because this is getting much too long. The jignostic attitude the film takes isn't uncommon for war films, but I was really turned off by the way the film refuses to acknowledge that, yes, we got fucked at Pearl Harbor. Instead of offering an ending where America is shaken and disturbed by certain events, it tacks on an hour of Danny and Rafe going back to Japan to get them back and wave the shit out of some flags.

In short, this is a horrible, horrible movie that bored me punch-drunk. I can't believe I have four more movies in this series.

2/10

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see

Armageddon tapped into a fear like no other. What if the last hope for humanity were fucking OIL DERRICK WORKERS? What if they survived the apocalypse and were solely responsible for repopulating the Earth? What if, 100 years from now, everyone is a descendant of Ben Affleck?

Maybe it's my liberal, bourgeois upbringing, but I don't trust oil derrick workers to successfully harvest enough crude to keep my Camry running year after year, let alone drill a hole into a pissed off meteor and tactically insert a nuke. I know I spent my formidable years bathing in Merlot and if you gave me a heavy oil harvesting device it would probably just make me fall over, but I pride myself on my ability to walk into a room and immediately spot the people who would be able to stop a world-threatening catastrophe. And maybe it's because I hang around theoretical physicists with suspicious amounts of weapons training and my kindergarten teacher was an undercover cop, but I can think of several people in this room right now who I would trust more to stop that meteor, and the only ones in this room right now are cats.

Instead of being a love letter to cats (which it should have been), Armageddon is a love letter to filthy proles, and the greasy sub-humans who man the grills at McDonalds.

Chief among these grumpy, drunk blue collar workers that have somehow acquired gun licenses is Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner (maybe; he never puts on a suit the whole movie) of an oil derrick whose daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), is currently being mauled by A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's just not havin' it. If it were up to him (Although it never occurs to him to arrange a marriage. Just goes to show you the value of education.) she would marry a big city type. Instead she's stuck in what might be the creepiest romance ever passed off as romantic.

When we're first introduced to these little lovebirds, they're fucking like golems in Ben Affleck's dirty little oil derrick shack. When Bruce Willis discovers them he gets angry at Affleck for exposing his daughter to so much tetanus, but they're interrupted by the red phone flashing. Apparently a meteor is on a collision course with Earth and the only ones who can save it is a group of plucky, mismatched oil derrick workers, a bill that Willis' crew fits to the letter.

The working class heroes are to be sent into space to turn on a big drill, because astronauts don't know how to flip an "on" switch. But before they go, we're treated to more nightmare romance as Ben Affleck stuffs animal crackers into Liv Tyler's underwear and then eats them. I wish I could make up something like that, but that's a scene that plays as Liv Tyler's real-life father serenades them over the soundtrack. Unfortunately, this all matches my preconceived stereotypes about the unwashed masses and I was able to hate them even more for it. I was supposed to be rooting for these dickweeds, instead I was hoping that they'd die and Liv Tyler could spend the last few hours of her life making her peace with God and attempting to regain some dignity by having sex with a complete stranger in the bathroom stall at a TGI Friday's.

Now, I'm no scientist (2012 made perfect sense to me), but if we're going to blow a Texas-sized meteor in two with a thermonuclear device don't we have to drill to the fucking center? Their objective is to drill 800 feet, then drop a nuclear device into the center and blow it up, and when they finally blow the meteor up (spoiler alert for a few seconds ago), the explosion is right in the center, as if the meteor was 1600 feet wide. I know I got a D in physics, but I'm pretty sure we have enough nuclear devices under just the court house in my shitty Indiana town to turn the Earth into a jar of Parmesan cheese; a nuclear cough should do the trick against a meteor, or maybe everyone in my county could get their rifles and shoot at it for a few minutes. Accounting for amount of PBR consumed beforehand, the hillfolks' bullets will dishearten the meteor and it'll bugger off back to Meteor Town after about five minutes. Or maybe we could strap some rockets to the side of the moon and put it in the way. I have never had any use for the moon anyway. All it does is illuminate me when I'm trying to escape with the diamonds.

The film somehow ended up in the Criterion Collection along with The Rock. I get that Criterion wants to represent all genres and movements, but Armageddon is a film that does not need representation and the movement it belongs to has far better examples to represent it. But we all know what's really going on here: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma doesn't move that many copies. I'm a huge fan of the Criterion Collection, so whatever they have to do to stay profitable is fine by me, but I'll send them a video of my birth if they're really hard up for weird garbage that no one wants to spend $40 on. They've even issued statements like:

"Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion."

But you don't have to us, Criterion. Your eye for avant-garde anti-art is keen and your representation of the film movement that gave power to the man who would one day destroy civilization is smart. I'll be on your side at the End of Times when you shout from the mountain tops that you called it.

I know, I know, I've been avoiding the actual review section of this film. You know why? Because it was boring. It was way too long, the entire first hour could have been cut with zero-to-minimal impact on the finished product (except it would be less punishing), defending Ben Affleck (I'm talking Comeback Ben Affleck) just got so much harder and I no longer find Liv Tyler attractive. Normally I picture Michael Bay on the sets of his movies foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsense while a scribe translates his ramblings into hieroglyphics that are then handed to the actors, but in this case I imagine he was asleep most of the time, or maybe doing his hair. For all its explosions and utter chaos, most of the film is pretty asleep at the wheel. Despite its questionable content, most of Bay's films are just overly busy and poorly scripted. So rarely are they uneventful.

But who gives a shit. It's a movie that celebrates people that'll be made into glue when they retire. My noble hands may not be cut out for work in that environment, but I'm still not going to concede any amount of respect for the Sudras.

3/10

Actor's Director

Pre-review huddle: The Rock was the first R-Rated film I ever saw. At the same time, my generation considers it a minor classic. As such, I have some affection for it that is surely going to stain my review with prejudice.

The Rock falls into an elite category of films known as "things that give away how Michael Bay's brain works". These are fun things, usually. For example, The Rock tells us that Michael Bay thinks trolleys are every morning filled with mercury fulminate and launched down the street (presumably out of a giant slingshot) and into oncoming traffic. They don't have any passengers who aren't token black conductors or mannequins made of mercury fulminate.

Like all passable movies, though, not that much can be interpreted about Michael Bay's brain chemistry from this film. Unlike in Bad Boys, where it was revealed that Michael Bay thinks cops are rich, it seems like the studio executives were able to get him filled with downers every morning so that his brain would react at least somewhat normally to his surroundings for a few months.

The Rock is an action thrill-ride (I expect to see that on the DVD case) about US General Edward Hummel (Ed Harris), who, having seen the deaths of his covert troops marginalized and ignored by the US government, takes it upon himself to steal some poisonous gas rockets and take hostages on Alcatraz in the hopes of extorting a modest $100 million for the purpose of reparations to the families of the dead soldiers. It's up to the best rag-tag duo the Pentagon could throw together to stop him: chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) and former MI6 agent John Mason (Sean Connery).

Mason was a convict at Alcatraz back in the 60's, imprisoned for some shady espionage stuff, and he's the only person to have successfully escaped. Blah blah blah. Bring on the shootouts.

This film is shockingly, painfully...explosively average. Everything about it is as average as I could possibly imagine and this is a film that came out in the 90's, a time when mediocrity in action movies held sway. It even has the aesthetic that I associate with mediocrity: lights shown through colored mist.

The only reason that this film has any kind of reputation is its three central performances.

Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris are fantastic in the way that so few actors were in action films released in the 90's (the only other film that immediately leaps to mind is Air Force One).

That's no surprise coming from Sean Connery. Sean Connery is known to make crazy motherfucking yogurt ads into 15-second rollercoaster thrill rides. Sean Connery thinks that the list of ingredients on the back of a cereal box are a terrorist plot. Sean Connery thinks that any sentence longer than five words is a ransom note. Sean Connery drives a gun to work every day. Sean Connery makes his own beef jerky out of Barbara Walters' disapproval.

So because it's not a bad film, it's made an awesome film just because of Sean Connery's presence. We could call Connery's presence in mediocre action movies "The Rock Effect", meaning just because of his charisma and perfection of the action movie performance, he elevates the movie.

As I mentioned before, Nicolas Cage also acquits himself nicely. I've made no secret of my dislike for Cage. The only time he's ever good is when he's working with immensley talented directors, and that never happens because he spends all his time making Next and Ghost Rider. But this is one of the very, very few times that his presence in an action film makes any sense at all. His character is a nerdy chemist inexperienced in combat, which makes plenty of sense for Cage. Nicolas Cage has two looks: nerd and professional creep. He never looks like he has any reason to be holding a gun, unless he's robbing a teenage girl of her innocence.

And Ed Harris, who is always great no matter what he's in, simply because he's a great, great actor (as opposed to Connery, who's only great because he's spent the last forty years defining the modern action hero).

The rest of the movie is bog-fucking-standard. All the pieces just sit there in a pile waiting to be put together into something cohesive. Aside from the performances, the script is okay, peppered with some amusing jests, although the amateurish editing does more to derail the comedic aspects of the film than I've thought editing capable of (I've been told that comedy is as much in the hands of an editor as an actor or writer, and I believe it now).

And...Alcatraz looks pretty cool in a few scenes. And that's it. Like all of Bay's films, it's too goddamn long with a lengthy chase scene stuffed into the middle of the film for no reason at all, and it's forty minutes before we even get to Alcatraz, and even longer before our two heroes engage the bad guys. But for an action film, the action has surprisingly little appeal. It's all about those three guys.

7/10

Cops!

One movie in and I'm ready to just agree with everything everyone has said about Michael Bay. Not out of anger, or because I really hated Bad Boys, but because I can't remember anything about the movie and I watched it two hours ago.

Let's see if I can recount the plot. Will Smith is Mike something, and Martin Lawrence is someone else. Mike and ? are narcotics officers in Miami (I think) and best buds. Every day they get into some wacky predicament that they have to shoot their way out of, because due process is for squares.

Actually, while I'm here, I'd like to comment on a scene that could have been really cool. Why is Mike such a loose-cannon cop who doesn't play by the rules? Because he has a trust fund and, thus, nothing to lose. I'm just joking, the film doesn't make that connection. They just use it as a device to show how dedicated Mike is, but it would have been more interesting if he really WAS an adrenalline junkie who got off on violence and didn't have to play by the rules because if he got fired, whatever. No, that would have been too interesting.

Anyway, one day the Miami (I think) police department has a Mt. Fuji of heroin stolen out of the evidence room and Mike & ? are brought in to get it back. Do they shuffle out of bed, take twelve Asprins and a shot of Jack Daniels, pin their badge to their bathrobe and hop on the city bus? No, they hop into their stylish sports cars and have their clothing robots put on their designer suits, speed on down to the police station where the no-nonsense police chief wags his finger at them for being too stylish and sexually desirable.

Argh, fuck. I keep forgetting what I was talking about. So a bunch of heroin gets stolen. Yawn. There's nothing more boring than a villain who's just trying to make a deal and get paid. There are no fucking stakes. No one gives a shit about some dude selling some heroin, he just wants to be as stylish as the main characters. I sympathized with the guy. He's trying to scrape together a living, and here come the cops with their gold-plated Ferraris and diamond-encrusted handguns to bust a silver bullet in his ass for selling something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Not to mention he's characterized as a villain because he's European, clearly having had his world domination plot ignored by James Bond and sulking off to sell some heroin and buy a new Moon Laser.

Shit, what was I talking about? Some guy gets shot, I think he's a cop. Some hookers see it, one of them gets shot, the other gets away. ? has to pretend he's Mike so that the girl will talk to him for some convoluted reason (a simple explanation would have cleared the whole situation up in about fourteen seconds, but then we wouldn't get to see an episode of Family Matters where Carl Winslow shoots forty people). There's some sexual tension between ? and the Hooker Witness, but oh no! ? is married!

So the whole plot makes no sense, is boring as shit and then they drive around shooting stuff and talking jive. Every thing about this film is pre-packaged and boring. Every joke is a joke you've heard before. This is at least half comedy and I didn't crack a smile once. The villain is the same as every Bond villain in the 80's. The score sounds like ever score from the 1980's. Even the formula was a joke by then. Maybe it's because my heart is a little black hole of despair, but I derived next to no pleasure from watching this film. It's a thin, dated retread of things we've seen a million times before, and it belongs on cable TV, not on a DVD.

3/10

The Mindscape of Michael Bay

Behold, cinema's whipping boy, Michael Bay. Everyone who pretends they know anything about film likes to slag the poor old billionaire creepmaster. They all note that he sacrifices story for explosions, and character development for bullet-ridden characters. Due to some unfortunate setbacks in my Star Trek marathon and my sudden acquisition of a copy of Bad Boys, I'll be pushing my adventure through the architecture of Michael Bay's brain ahead a few weeks.


During this probably ill-advised quest into the unknown, I'll be watching every single Michael Bay film in order:

- Bad Boys
- The Rock
- Armageddon
- Pearl Harbor
- Bad Boys II
- The Island
- Transformers

Does Michael Bay deserve his astoundingly negative reputation among film scholars and the completely separate, yet often overlapping, group of intellectually vapid 20-somethings? Does he deserve his legacy as a sure-fire box office success? If not, does he deserve any legacy, and if so, what should it be?

Join me in what is sure to be an unbearable ride through hell as I try to answer some of these questions that honestly don't need answering.