Michael Bay, now respected auteur filmmaker, started his career as a commercial Hollywood director making iconic summer blockbusters. He sat down to record a video introduction to the 25th Anniversary DVD of Transformers.

I can’t believe it! Has it really been 25 years since the first Transformers was released? I guess I’ve been so caught up in preparing my new film, Paul’s Senses, for the festivals that I forgot about this big anniversary! It really is amazing to see how far I’ve come. Transformers astounds me to this day, no matter how I feel like I’ve evolved, artistically.

I’ve read Kubrick got to burn much of his early work. For some reason I took it for granted that Transformers would endure. There are a lot of universal themes, allusions, leitmotifs, et cetera, in the film, and looking back with kinder eyes I definitely see some of the forerunners of my career as a real auteur. Themes I cling to to this day, such as loss of innocence and the dynamic nature of the parent-child relationship. In the scene where Sam, Shia’s character, is confronted by his parents about masturbating, that’s a great example. And much like Transformers, Paul’s Senses deals a lot with race. In Tranformers I had the opportunity to shove the White man’s stereotype of Black America into their faces and make them witness their crimes. In Paul’s Senses a lot of the racial tension comes, actually, from the interesting casting decisions I made. Since Mos Def’s hair started going grey I saw an opportunity to make him a contemporary Morgan Freeman figure. These Transformers films were integral to my development, you see. There was a lot of to psychic issues I had to wade through before I could move on to something like Paul’s Senses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Bay sat down for an interview with The Daily Beast recently, and there were a few interesting bits, like that his first movie was a Playboy video with Kerri Kendall, that he called Ebert “to the mat” on inaccuracies in his reviews, and that Shia LaBeouf “trashed every movie he’s ever been in”, among other things. But let’s be honest, what we really want to hear about are the stolen sex toys.

There was plenty of testosterone on the set of Pain and Gain. What’s the craziest thing that happened while filming?
We bought $75,000 worth of sex toys to stock the sex-toy warehouse. I could have filmed the crew coming in that day because they’d stop and see these things—anatomically correct vajayjays and this butt (everyone would touch the butt because it felt real)—and it was hysterical. We were going to return all the sex toys to get three-quarters of our money back, but they started disappearing. We were like, “Who is taking the sex toys?”

Okay, a few things:

1. I don’t trust any man who uses the word “vajayjay.”

2. You can return sex toys for three quarters of a refund? Do people who buy sex toys know about this?

In any case, it appears we have a mystery on our hands, a real whodildonnit (I’m sorry). Right off the bat, I’m going to rule out Marky Mark. For one thing, he abstains from masturbating in order to be prepared for the next 9/11. For another, with those little t-rex arms of his, he’d never be able to reach his groin with a pocket vagina without some kind of extending arm. I don’t see it. That leaves Tony Shalhoub, The Rock, Anthony Mackie, assorted dwarves, and the crew. Personally, I think the smart money’s on a horny teamster. I don’t doubt that Michael Bay demands nothing but the finest in hand-crafted vajayjays, but still, $75,000 worth of sex toys sounds like a haul that requires a truck.

UPDATE: I have to give David Ehrlich credit for putting this news in the proper context: “PRIMER cost 1/10th of PAIN & GAIN’s dildo budget.”

Mahky Mahk gawt notawriously ripped fa ris new movie, no doubt aided by the fact that he’s gawt shawt little ahms like a T-Rex – all the bettah to rip you da fack apaht wit, GO SAWX. But then at the Pain & Gain premiere (as pictured in this image, courtesy of TheSuperficial) it seems the Wahlburgers co-financier finally found a way to make his arms look longer.

Wait, there are dwarves in Pain & Gain? I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I had to know more, so I asked intern Zeke, who I sent to see the film. Here is a brief transcript of our conversation:

ZEKE: So what happens: The three dudes want to break into Tony Shaloub’s motel room. They threaten to kill the snobby teen clerk who we see reading a book, so he just gives them the key. The three are followed to the room by the dwarf dude. The Rock f*cks him up, strangles him, totally brutalizes him, and then they leave.

ME: Wait, so the hotel owner is a dwarf?

ZEKE: No, no, the clerk was reading a book and being snobby until the three threatened him. The dwarf thought he could out tough them. But they are body builders so The Rock proved him wrong instantly by picking the dwarf up by his throat and holding him there and strangling him and throwing him around.

ME Yeah, but where did the dwarf come from?

ZEKE: The dwarf has already been established as working at the motel. The dwarf comes out of nowhere in this scene though.

I’m glad I could take you all on this journey with me. Meanwhile, this scene is actually Michael Bay’s world in a nutshell. I sent my intern because after seeing a 30-second trailer for Pain & Gain, I was pretty sure I knew everything there was to know about that movie. See, once upon a time, Michael Bay was a commercial director (that Aaron Burr commercial? That was him), and he’s still a commercial director at heart. The skill of a commercial director is being able to communicate a message in as little time as possible, sometimes with a shot that lasts less than a second. That philosophy still guides Michael Bay, even when he’s making a two-hour movie. Thus, there’s nothing in a Michael Bay film that can’t be easily communicated in a few seconds. Let’s recap:

- The hotel clerk is snobby. Why is he snobby? Because he reads books. And what do snobby book readers do? They act like pussies.

- The dwarf is too big for his britches. Why is he too big for his britches? Because he’s a dwarf. And what do too-big-for-his-britches dwarves do? They pick fights with big dudes and get beat up.

- The Rock is big and tough. How do we know he’s big and tough? Because he’s a pro wrestling bodybuilder playing a bodybuilder. And what do big, tough, bodybuilders do? They scare pussies and beat up punks who challenge them to get what they want because they’re awesome.

This is how you write a Michael Bay movie.

Opening Everywhere: Pain and Gain, The Big Wedding

Opening Somewhere: Mud

FilmDrunk Suggests: I don’t know. I can’t stop singing, “My name is Mud…” to myself. And it’s not the whole song. It’s just, “My name is Mud…” and then I mumble what I remember of Les Claypool’s bass line.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the word going around was that Michael Bay had apologized for Armageddon, and that sparked a small-scale fan outcry that their hero would dare apologize for one of his greatest triumphs, because let’s be honest, people have a lot of time on their hands. Here’s the original quote, from the Miami Herald, which was widely cited:

“I will apologize for Armageddon, because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.”

But context is important, because what he was actually talking about was specific to editing – which someone else did – and not the movie as a whole. As you’d know if you’d read the previous paragraph:

“It’s really funny,” he says. “People have always given me a hard time on my editing. But if you could do a graph on my movies, you would see how my editing has slowed down over the years. Bad Boys was my first movie, and we cut that quite fast. Back then it was very new for action. Now you see a lot of that imitated. Call it what you will. Yes, critics have given me s–t about it. But when you watch the Bourne Identity movies, they are cut way faster.

You really think Michael Bay would apologize for an entire movie? As a wise Michael Bay fan named Michael Bay once said, “I don’t change my style for anybody. Pussies do that.” But because of all the busybodies in the lamestream media, Michael Bay was forced to clarify his comments, which he did on his forum:

Read the rest of this entry »