Top Three Thursday: Michael Bay

Stop lying. Yes, we all know Michael Bay movies are hilariously crappy and that he is questionable at best as a director. But you like him. You might not want to admit it, you might not even have realized it yet. But you have fun with his movies. Even his very very worst movies have a campiness and such a prominent sense of bravado that you can’t help but get really into it while you watch. I’m gonna drop the pretentious act. They’re terrible movies, but I have my fun with Michael Bay. So in honor of his new movie “Transformers: Age of Extinction”, here are my Top Three Favorite Michael Bay Movies. 

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers as series isn’t very good at all. But the first Transformers movie was one of my favorite movies in high school. I knew it wasn’t good, but it had this awesome sense of adventure and exploration that really pulled me in, and the robots were flashy enough and cool enough to keep my interest level up pretty damn high the entire movie. Transformers 2 was crap. Complete and utter crap. But I really did enjoy the third installment of the series, Dark of the Moon. Again, it’s not good. But unlike the first two, I really felt the immediate danger closing in on the planet. I felt the urgency and the need to quickly fix the problem. I also loved the departure of Megan Fox, who was just an absolute burden on the previous movies. Granted, I didn’t love her replacement, but I was at least cheering to see her live rather than hoping she was off screen for the rest of the damn movie. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is just a lot of fun to watch, and it really got my adrenaline up during the final action scenes. 

Armageddon

This is, strangely enough, one of my earlier memories watching a movie. I had watched some of this at a friends house when I was a kid, and thought it was so cool then. Now….yeah. I see how ridiculous it is. But honestly, you gotta hand it to the movie, despite all of its flaws it still manages to be really exciting and really tense. The acting his hilariously bad (sorry Ben Affleck,  this was NOT your day), but I also can’t help but feel that it’s genuine in its own weird way. The science of this movie is bullshit (did you know NASA actually uses this film to text astronauts knowledge of space physics? The more problems they find, the higher their score), but it’s all mostly just beyond the point of obvious, enough that I buy it for what it is and let it move the story forward as it needs to. Then there’s obviously the huge action scenes, the shots of the asteroids blasting through building sides and crashing through streets, meteor showers on the asteroid making an absurd light show and the rest of the cast screaming and fighting to finish the job and save the world. All of it is kind of infectious. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. 

Pain and Gain

Pain and Gain was a pretty great basis for a movie - a heist that was run by a bunch of gym rats who really had no idea what they were doing, based on a true story. If there’s a true story for Bay to tackle, this has to be it. And then he manages to book great actors, like Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie, to tackle these roles. And they absolutely nail it. Sure, the pace is definitely weird, and I definitely don’t understand the point of the random voice overs (granted I didn’t get them in oddly the same context watching American Hustle), but I did enjoy the glorification of the stupidity of these characters. It’s been said this movie glorifies violence, but I actually disagree. If it did glorify violence we would be seeing  a lot worse. No, this movie glorifies the dumb actions of our main characters. And that leads to one brilliant part of the movie. I won’t give the context away, but there’s an absolutely brilliantly timed moment where on screen we see in big letters, “THIS IS STILL A TRUE STORY”. And that’s definitely a defining moment of Michael Bay’s timing. Why can’t all of his movies be as brilliant as that joke?!

That's all I wrote! Here's a trailer for Bay's new movie Transformers: Age of Extinction!