How does one begin to define an appreciation for the magnificent oeuvre of Michael Bay? It’s like trying to describe your love for the sun: any attempt to capture in words the overwhelming sensory and emotional impact of all that warmth and radiant glory seems doomed to failure. The irony of this, of course, lies in the fact that virtually the entire library of BayFilm focuses on motley crües crews tasked with dauntingly impossible challenges who appear doomed to failure… but who nonetheless, through a dynamic and deeply moving combination of happenstance, dumb luck and intrinsic awesomeness, manage to triumph in the end. It’s like the story of America, only with more ‘splosions.
Bay graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1986 and quickly launched a successful career as a director of music videos (for such luminaries as Donny Osmond and Richard Marx) and award-winning commercials, before effortlessly seguing into the life for which he was born: creator, genius, and prophet of what the French call la cinema awesometastique:
1995: BAD BOYS
They’re cops! They’re friends! They’re enemies! They’re frenemies! They’re like The Odd Couple, only they’re narcs and they’re black and instead of sitting around an apartment being all divorced and sad they drive around Miami and blow shit up. The intricate and carefully nuanced plot demonstrates Bay’s impeccable grasp of story: Will Smith (fresh off being the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) and Martin Lawrence (remember when he had a career?) are detectives in Miami’s Narcotics division, only someone steals eleventy million dollars worth of drugs from the Narco storage room and they’re told they have, like, a week to get the drugs back or else the Narcotics division will be shut down. Which is probably just as well, because fortunately Miami’s not a city with a narcotics problem and shutting it down would probably yield substantial budgetary savings. Anyhow, some bad guys and some hookers get killed, and there are some other bad guys who do the killing and some other other slightly less bad bad guys who kind of help out our cop friends (including Michael Imperioli, killing time between being stomped to death by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and being smothered to death by Tony in the last episode of The Sopranos), and then there’s a crazy car chase with a Shelby Mustang and a bitchin’ Camero Porsche and then the main bad guy gets caught and then dead and then our frenemy cop narcs express love for one another but not the kind of love that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence might be uncomfortable expressing (fast-forward to the 8:30 mark…). The end.
“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”
You’re welcome for that earworm.
The film made $150 billion dollars and immediately established Bay as the awesomest film director of all time. But it was only a hint of the glories to come.
1996: THE ROCK
In 1995, I moved to San Francisco. Not long thereafter, I was walking through North Beach (not far from the City Lights bookstore, now that I think of it) when suddenly several black army helicopters buzzed just overhead at about a zillion miles an hour, scaring the bejeezus out of me. The next day, I learned that this was because Michael Bay was in town filming what would ultimately become The Rock. And while it’s entirely possible that this apparent copter attack on North Beach might have caused me to instinctively run away — and possibly into traffic, where I might’ve been struck and killed by someone looking for a parking spot – it’s gratifying to think now that my death would not have been in vain, because The Rock is generally acknowledged to be the awesomest film ever made about breaking into Alcatraz with black copters and Navy SEALs and rockets and chemical weapons and Sean Connery.
Watching the film now, it’s almost hard to remember how odd it was to see Nicholas Cage in a big-budget action film. At the time, he was the Raising Arizona and Wild At Heart dude, and fresh off his devastating, Academy Award-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas. In retrospect, his role in Leaving Las Vegas might’ve burned him out — because his action film debut in The Rock became a gateway drug to Con Air, Face/Off, National Treasure and… uh… Ghost Rider. Still: we cannot blame The Rock for those missteps, because The Rock rocks! (I wish I’d been writing for MamaPop back in the day, because “The Rock rocks!’ is just begging to be one of those craptastic interweb raves that movies like Ghost Rider put in their TV ads to make you think that spending $10 to see it would be smarter than, say, just setting the $10 bill on fire.) It offers the flawlessly conceptualized, told and executed story of Ed Harris as a pissed-off General who decides to express his displeasure at US military types being badly treated by the government by stealing a bunch of horrible chemical weapons and then invading Alcatraz and taking a lot of tourist hostages and putting the chemical weapons (which are called VX weapons, which is a pretty badass name for a nasty green gas that more or less melts you on the spot) on rockets that he threatens to shoot into San Francisco if the government doesn’t give him eleventy million dollars. Fight the power!
Sean Connery: The Definition of Film Badassery Since 1962
The government has all kinds of ways to deal with this – including Navy SEAL incursions and jets with super-napalm and nukes and whatnot – but it turns out that the only way to stop him (besides, y’know, paying him) is to send in Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery. But we already knew that. Cage is an FBI chemical weapons dude, which gives him an excuse to act kind of nerdy and somewhat put out by having to run around Alcatraz and shoot people. Connery? He plays James Bond a mysterious British secret agent who the US government imprisoned 30+ years ago (including on Alcatraz, from which he successfully escaped) and then pretended never even existed. But now they need him! To save San Francisco!
Fuck, this is an awesome movie. And what’s more, it’s a movie designed to make you say, “Fuck, this is an awesome movie.” Which makes it a success on every conceivable level. It also made $150 billion dollars, thereby enabling Michael Bay to create his masterpiece…
1998: ARMAGEDDON
I don’t even know where to begin here. It’s like trying to summarize the Old Testament: God creates the earth, makes animals and people, gets pissed off and makes a flood that kills almost everything, and then Charlton Heston leads the Jews out of Egypt because Soylent Green is people. It’s people! You get the overall idea, but there’s something lost in the summary that can’t be recaptured without experiencing the original masterwork in its true form.
Still: I’ll try. Billy Bob Thornton plays the king of NASA and he and a bunch of other genius NASA types (including the wonderful Jason Isaacs, better known to you as Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter films) figure out that an asteroid the size of Texas is going to hit the earth and kill everything, and the only way to stop it is to blow it to hell. That’s right: the only way to save the earth is to create the biggest fucking ‘splosion of all tiiiiiiiiiiiime! So the government decides to team up a bunch of NASA astronaut types (including the invaluable William Fichtner) with a ragtag team of deep-sea drilling misfits, who somehow possess the unique combination of skills, determination and balls-out awesomeness to go up to the asteroid and drill a hole and drop some nukes into it and then blow the fuck out of it and save the earth.
The misfit drillers? Greatest bunch ever. Bruce Willis as smart tough hardass drilling king. Ben Affleck as the hot-headed young upstart driller, who also happens to be drilling his hot daughter Liv Tyler. (See what I did there? That’s awesome cleverness. This movie inspires me.) Steve Buscemi as a creepy Steve Buscemi type. Michael Clarke Duncan Clarke Michael as the hugest fucking guy of all time. Owen Wilson as the doomed goofball. The wonderful Will Patton as the tormented right-hand man to Bruce. Some dude as Max, the big white guy who drives the Armadillo humvee thing in outer space. It’s a fucking cavalcade of acting brilliance.
Harry Stamper: The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived
Anyhow. In true Shakespearean tradition, the movie is split into three acts. The first is the set-up, in which we discover the earth is doomed and only our misfit heroes can save it. The second is the goofy fun part, where our misfits meet the NASA tight-asses and hilarity ensues. The third act is after they fly into space on modified super-Space Shuttles, where they first dock at a Russian Space Station and hook up with a goofy Russian astronaut (Peter Stormare, temporarily not feeding Steve Buscemi into a woodchipper and/or doing voice-overs for Volkswagen) and then blow up the space shuttle and then fly out to the asteroid, where one of the shuttles blows the fuck up and lots of cast members (some of whom we care about) die and then the other shuttle lands and they start drilling while Billy Bob walks nervously around Mission Control back in Houston and says things like “We’re running out of fucking time!” and then some of the other cast members die and more things explode in interesting ways and then finally Bruce Willis sacrifices his life to save the world, and we all pretend we’re not crying a little bit because it’s really fucking sad but we’re too tough to show it and The End.
Armageddon is the unofficial MamaPop Awesomest Movie of All Time. You must go see it. Now.
2001: PEARL HARBOR
Nothing I can say about this movie can possibly top the first lines of Roger Ebert’s brilliant review: “Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.” That’s why the guy is the best, people. It’s basically the 1940s version of Titanic: an amazing 40-minute action sequence surrounded by 2:20 of incredibly boring love triangling with characters you (and by you, I mean me) couldn’t care less about. It also repurposes Hans Zimmer’s incredible “Journey to the Line” from the soundtrack to The Thin Red Line (which is, btw, possibly the greatest war film ever made) and applies it to the sinking of the Arizona, which is a completely minor point in terms of the grand scope of Pearl Harbor but which also provides me with an opportunity to tell you how much I love Hans Zimmer’s “Journey to The Line.” In addition, it also features Ben Affleck back in the days before he realized that his greatest strength was behind the camera (seriously: Gone Baby Gone? Genius.), Kate Beckinsale not being a vampire, Josh Hartnett trying to justify the hype of being the Next Hot Thing in Hollywood, Alec Baldwin treading water between his days as a totally legit leading man and his brilliant reinvention on 30 Rock, Jon Voight not being eaten by an anaconda, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. reminding us that not everyone involved in WWII was, in fact, a pretty white person. I think there may be some Japanese actors, too, but they’re mostly flying in airplanes and blowing things up. And really, that’s the best part of the film and the truest expression of Michael Bay’s awesometasticness: nobody blows shit up more awesomely than Bay. Nobody.
2003: BAD BOYS II
Can we pretend this never happened? I’ll put it this way: Gigli was released the same year… and Bad Boys II made it look good by comparison. Urk.
2005: THE ISLAND
The least successful and least well-known of Bay’s films is, ironically, one of his more ambitious undertakings. Not that there’s a lack of pretty people (including Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor) and awesome fast chase scenes and ‘splosions, but there’s also an interesting plotline that we spend the first half of the film uncovering in really interesting fashion. Most of the second half, of course, devolves into chases and explosions and… whatever. But overall, this is an underrated film that deserves rediscovery. Shall we consider this the hidden gem of Michael Bay’s oeuvre? We shall indeed.
2007: TRANSFORMERS
This should have been the cherry on top of the Michael Bay sundae: a modern remake of the cheesy-but-beloved 80′s cartoon about alien robots that turn into cars and trucks and airplanes and guns and run all over the earth fighting each other and blowing stuff up. Does Michael Bay have a wheelhouse? Yes. Is this subject matter in Michael Bay’s wheelhouse? Yes. So what happened? He whiffed. Completely. Missed it by a fucking mile, and transformed (see? this is me being clever again) what should have been a loud, stupid and awesomely fun film about fighting robots and fast cars and jet planes into an absolute mess that defies adult viewing. It’s ironic that one of the two major modes of transportation not subject to robot transforming in Transformers is trains, because the movie is a goddamn train wreck. Thanks to 24/7 showings on HBO/Showtime/whatever, I’ve probably managed to see the entirety of the film — but that’s spread across probably a half-dozen different times when I’ve tried to watch it but have turned it off after 20-30 minutes because the relentless jump cuts, incomprehensible visuals and “story,” and WAYTOOMUCHFUCKINGSHIALABEOUF make me want to die.
Shia and a banana friend.
2009: TRANSFORMERS 2 – ELECTRIC BUGALOO
I can’t do it. God help me, but I just can’t do it. And the knowledge that at this very moment Bay is preparing Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is tremendously disheartening.
You can do better, Michael. We know you can.
• • •
Do we know he can? I know he can, but do you know he can? Can you tell me how he can, or can’t can? Answer below in the form of a comment.
About TwoBusy
