Bay is a Schlockmeister

Rating: 1/10 (10 July 2007)

Dogme 95, with some exceptions, hasn't been a smashing success, but it's not hard to see how it developed, why Danish directors Lars von Trier, Thomas Winterberg and others waged open revolt over the theatre of the stupid that Michael Bay and too many other Hollywood schlockmeisters have been specializing in for far too long.
I read in a Toronto newspaper a few weeks ago that the wildly deluded Bay considers himself an 'artist'. It was an amazing thing to say, and underlined how far his ego has been insulated from reality in that California dreamland from which he produces his consistently dreadful exercises in self-absorption. This guy specializes in ear-splitingly loud and obnoxious movies and promotes them with ear-splitingly loud and obnoxious comments, and then carries on, hopelessly oblivious to his legion of naysayers.
If a cinematic 'artist' is defined by box-office receipts, by super-aggressive global marketing, Bay and his computer artists are Michelangelos. He makes mountains of dough, which might explain why actors want to work with him.
Bay is no artist; he's a big-screen video game cartoonist whose narrative skills depend almost exclusively on computer wizardry and special effects. His knowledge of character, plot or anything else is all but non-existent, and these essential features of art are always sublimated -- worse, simply ignored -- in all his 'films'.
In Armageddon, Bay's believability and credibility are non-existent. His redundancy quotient is a thing to behold. He batters you into submission, over and over again. If you don't get his 'point' the first time, wait five minutes and he'll come back again. His movies appeal to children and adult children who became addicted to video games 20 years ago and avoided the painful withdrawal of rehab.
Almost 10 years after Armageddon, in 2007, Bay is offering us another pile of shlock called Transformers, yet another insult to anyone who sincerely believes in cinematic art. This same pile of schlock is, predictably, breaking all box-office records. Sad.
Bay has made about seven or eight bloated, pretentious, pompous, self-important exercises in overkill, and not one of them is worth a serious review. Armageddon fits very well into his questionable canon. Warts and all, give me von Trier and gimmick-free artistic filmmakers anytime.
Every time I see these kinds of non-films (and there are far too many of them), I look with even greater awe and appreciation at the cinematic work of Welles's Citizen Kane, completed 56 years before Armageddon hit the bobbleheaded, popcorn-munching masses. Bunuel, Murnau, Lang, Keaton, Chaplin, and many others were all making far greater magic with film 80 years ago, without a computer in sight. To have Bay insinuate himself as an 'artist' in this same company goes beyond insult.