POLL BOYS - Directed/Produced by Michael Bay

the rock v. bad boys 2. also this guy is the worst, those (and i guess bad boys 1) are the only movies on the list that aren't HORRIBLE.

Jesus what a sack

This poll was bought on by watching the Rock for the first time at the weekend. Has the old lady walking out in front of the humvee in the car chase ever been a gif-led internet meme? It's such a ridiculous move that it really should be.

In a way, the guy needs to be congratulated for plumbing the depths of lowest common denominator film-making. It takes dedication.

It's some kind of impressive for sure but all those shitty remakes are just depressing.

The Rock, but mostly for Clement & Le Frenais.

Bad Boys II

The Rock. Love The Rock. calumerio otm - the script is really nifty, full of fun ('losers always whine about doing their best' &c) moves v quickly (the inexplicable moments – FBI guy, why are you asking a random chem weapons specialist to come and watch the most secret criminal in the world be interviewed? – zip by), but Ed Harris also great - all that martial honour - it's his tragedy!

btw brain struggling with fact that Bay had nothing whatsoever to do with Con Air.

I thought he did too! It just seems like a Michael Bay movie.

The Rock, both for being the most watchable, and also for being the beginning of the much more interesting Nic Cage, when he became the oddest action star ever.

Yeah, it's gotta be The Rock. Looking at this list made me realize, with some horror, that I've seen everything he's directed. Not sure that the producer credits really need to be on there. Interestingly I don't think I'd consider any of them to be even close to the worst movies I've ever seen, they're just all sorta overlong (saw Transformers 2 recently, no idea why that movie had to be 150 minutes long) and schlocky. At worst he's made some pretty boring movies, but nothing that made me angry for having seen it.

poll boys?

In retrospect, BAD POLLS would have been a better title.

would've gone with revenge of the POLLen myself

They all suck but Bad Boys II just has so much shit in it, feels like the ur-Bay movie. Bonkers set pieces, non-stop race-baiting (everyone's ethnicity is mentioned so often it almost becomes "spartan dog!" "saracen pig!") and it never fucking ends. They should have found a way to fit in a half-hour of Big Willie Style musical numbers to make it a total three-hour hollywood bollywood extravaganza.

also THEY INVADE CUBA

one of my favourite bits is when they're trashing the hillside in that Humvee and every shack is exploding around them, and there's a tossed-off line "all of these are just drug factories".

BBII v Rock v Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which is actually not terrible)

also there's something hilariously over-the-top awful in the chase from the morgue with the dead bodies flying around.

and Will Smith pulls a gun on that little kid who wants to date Martin Lawrence's daughter.

really talking myself into BBII here.

When "The Haitians" start tossing cars onto the freeway

Movie also opens with Henry Rollins giving orders to a SWAT team to break up a Klan rally

I thiiiink this is the one where Martin Lawrence accidentally takes ecstasy

It's definitely the one where Peter Stormare screams "The Russian Grim Reaper is here!"

ok gonna have to sit down for BB2 one of these days

i can't believe you of all people haven't seen it

also the 'classic' scene where they're being recorded and transmitted across the TV screens in an electronics store and it sounds like they are teh gay.

michael bay must have had a checklist of cultures to piss off

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

hard to beat BBII for sheer obonoxiousness

the rock. for bits like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-pIwA-E-UY

it had a script polish by Tarantino iirc?

Both Bad Boys films were on USA yesterday. Forgot about my 90s Tea Leoni thing, and those boots played no small part in it. II is better though, because it has Peter Stormare drinking vodka and get shot by a bunch of cops.

also his girlfriend was the prom queen iirc xpost

also also when i was (briefly) watching BBII yesterday I came to the realisation that I will see every movie this guy directs. in the cinema. within two weeks of it being released. it's a disease.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

For future poll headers:

http://i2.blogs.indiewire.com/images/blogs/theplaylist/archives/michael-bay-writes-letter-to-projectionists.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aKDwLpX0Ms

the article series it's based on is a pretty incredible read

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/specialReports/pain-and-gain-from-new-times-story-to-michael-bay-film-1890864/

blimey! I hope Bay goes for full-on tackiness.

I can imagine the Coen Bros reading that story and thinking "we'll pass on the film, it's just too damn obvious for us"

Michael Bay has problems.

as a teleprompter tech, it is basically my worst nightmare to think of being the guy behind the stage when something like that happens.

someone lost their job over that, I'd wager

i've had jobs go bad (thought not THAT bad and not THAT high profile) where my company refunded the fee to the client, but yeah who knows -- often the contracts are such that the speaker can blame the prompter tech and the tech can't say anything to the contrary publicly. but the bigger the speaker, the less likely they are to show up for the rehearsal and work out the kinks before showtime, so i'm like hmmmmm what are the odds Michael Bay had the time to do the dress rehearsal.

friend whose done a lot of work for Bay says he is absolutely hellish to work for, I'm just extrapolatin from there

yeahhhh i'd imagine he made someone's day terrible over that, whether they got fired or not.

Clint Eastwood at the RNC has long been my go-to "this is what can happen if you don't use a prompter" cautionary tale, and how Bay handled this kinda encourages my impression that guys who live on film sets and get to do multiple takes of everything tend to be really out of their element at live events. the whole thing was set up like an interview and the other guy onstage kept trying to help him improv, even the most inexperienced public speaker could've bluffed their way through but he just got pissed and left.

the company brought out super-action director Michael Bay to discuss the company's new curved HDTVs

Curved HDTVs? Are they serious? What possible purpose would that serve?

I mean beyond distorting the Criterion blu rays you bought to play on your HDTV.

i guess they want a mini-IMAX experience but yeah i have no idea if or how that would work the same way on a smaller scale

THIS IS THE GREATEST FUCKING THING

I just realized I've only seen two of his movies: The Rock and The Island.

Stanley Goodspeed: Listen, I think we got started off on the wrong foot. Stan Goodspeed, FBI. Uh - Let's talk music. Do you like the Elton John song, "Rocket Man"?

Captain Darrow: I don't like soft-ass shit.

Stanley Goodspeed: Oh, you - Oh, oh. Oh. Well, I only bring it up because, uh, it's you. You're the Rocket Man.

[Goodspeed fires a rocket at him]

gets his own dossier in Senses of Cinema

http://sensesofcinema.com/category/michael-bay-dossier/

In this article, I will analyse Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a cinematic spectacle which, through its imaginating of a particular dystopian future, lays bare the machinery of spectacular visuality that is crucial to the mode of Hollywood spectacle cinema that Bay’s work is often held to exemplify. I will suggest that the formal apparatus of the utopia/dystopia, and of science fiction itself, allows for a reading of The Island as a kind of self-conscious critique of spectacle cinema within the formal apparatus of spectacle cinema, which works in part through thematising visuality and in part through making visible the very apparatus of cinematic production itself. In this, I will draw upon the work of Jonathan Beller, and in particular his book The Cinematic Mode of Production, and a mode of film theory and criticism in which cinema is foundationally implicated in the production of ideology. In Beller’s work, which draws on Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, ‘cinema’ can be understood not only as an effect of the circuits of late capital, where spectacle is an extension of ideology, but as a means by which capital extends its operations into new productive domains, into attention and the ‘work’ of spectatorship.

imaginating

i saw ambuLAnce ama

EIGHT of you fuckers voted for Bad Boys II, jfc.

"I will analyse Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a cinematic spectacle which, through its imaginating of a particular dystopian future, lays bare the machinery of spectacular visuality that is crucial to the mode of Hollywood spectacle cinema that Bay’s work is often held to exemplify."

I realise this is seven years old, but it's bad writing. It uses spectacle three times in one sentence. X is a spectacle that lays bare the machinery of spectacular visuality that is crucial to Hollywood spectacle cinema. Couldn't he have used "thrilling tale of wonder" and "dynamic" instead? "X is a thrilling tale of wonder that lays bare the machinery of dynamic visuality that is crucial to Hollywood spectacle". That would also avoid "machinery of spectacular visuality", which is clumsy. Imaginating is jargon. On a meta level Sight and Sound published an ostensibly straight-faced appraisal of Armageddon back in 1999, so the gag of writing an academic essay about a Michael Bay movie isn't even original.

"But it's unfair to pick apart a lengthy thesis just because the style is bad". It strikes me that the author actually did intend for the style to be the essay's main weapon, but it's just needlessly obtuse. This is assuming he didn't dash it off just to bulk out his CV. Academics have to do that to survive, but why not bulk out a CV with good essays instead? Why not submit essays that are informative and entertaining?

In contrast this article, from the same source, is much more readable:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2015/michael-bay-dossier/cinema-of-michael-bay-2/

"Orson Welles once recalled that his initial impression upon visiting RKO studios in the 1940s was that they were 'the biggest electric train set a boy ever had'. It seems that Bay regards the contemporary Hollywood film set similarly, as a giant playroom, but he approaches it like a destructive child, gleefully smashing and setting fire to his toys and scribbling over the walls."

The obvious counterargument is that the strength of the argument is more important than the poetry of words, but having read the essay I'm not convinced that there was a strong central thesis. It's the type of writing that exists to demonstrate that the author can write in the style of a university essay, as if it wasn't intended for public consumption.

As for Michael Bay, this poll needs the Kerri Kendall Playmate Video Calendar 1990 (1990). That's how he started out. It's like a little Michael Bay film, but with a busty woman who has a square jaw taking her clothes off while the camera pans up her legs. Does she transform into a metal monster? I have no idea. It would probably support a close reading given that Playboy circa 1990 had a strange half-in, half-out relationship with the mainstream. At this point someone's going to go through this post and point out the typos. There aren't any! Because I skimmed over it before hitting "submit post". Accommodate, see? Millennium. Philippines. I didn't have to look them up. I know how to spell them. Accommodate. I know how to spell that. I did it again. Accommodate. Even with the medication bubbling up, bubbling up, I can still spell accommodate.

I mean, have you read any of the Harry Potter books? They're hundreds of pages long and most of those pages don't have any typos on them or any clumsy writing. If J K Rowling can do it, how come this chap - apparently a university professor - how come this chap, this man, this university professor, how come he can't? How come he can't? And before you complain, right, before you complain, yes I know that "1990 (1990)" is redundant. It's a joke. And I realise that "little Michael Bay" reads as if I'm talking about a smaller version of Michael Bay. That's deliberate! It was... trompe l'oeil, or whatever the fuck that is. It was a comic device.

Why is it that when I Google "trompe l'oeil" adverts for women's tights flash up, and then go away? Is it something to do with my google searches? Why can't those adverts stay? I want to look at them.