I think Cameron is a terrifically competent action-film craftsman, and in a way I've always seen Bay as the ugly flip side of the same coin. Cameron's movies (okay, Titanic and Avatar) have become more pompous and intellectually blunt in the last couple of decades... but I think he's still earnest, and still an absolutely solid stylistic baseline for action cinema.

I think that what bothers me most about Bay is this... it's not just that he makes terrible movies... it's that he doesn't give a shit about anything.

To me, that's what's unforgivable. There are many bad filmmakers out there, who are at least really dedicated to what they're doing. Bay's movies are actually paeans to his complete and utter contempt for his audiences. They aren't just bad... they are insulting.

But then, maybe he's got a point. Why shouldn't he be contemptuous of audiences that line up to be insulted, and pay him handsomely for the privilege? That's the bitter truth in all of this.

:lol Yeah, I get it.

I think auteurism is still a valid approach to studying film, since the director is ultimately the coordinator who sets the creative direction and whose guidance brings all the separate efforts together. All artists work within limitations... materials, time limits, financial constraints, influence from patrons... so a film director is not that different. But I agree that with that, you also have to be attentive to the collective contributions of the filmmaking process as well.

And I'm still perfectly willing to blame Bay for 99.9% of the Transformers franchise, most especially because he's the kind of successful douchebag who demands complete control of his production. As far as dictatorial blockbuster directors go, at least James Cameron has a fundamentally effective command of craftsmanship. He actually cares about what he's doing... even if what he's doing can be a bit egotistical and pandering at times. :)

I think maybe some of the discord here is the product of two different approaches or modes of critique. You seem to be looking at the film in terms of where the blame rests, while I'm just looking at the final product. I don't need to know what production issues may or may not have made the editor's life harder... the final film is just badly cut, and a lot of that seems to be based around a formula and choices in style.

Some of this is my evaluative opinion, so naturally it's subjective... but I think some of it is pretty objectively bad as well. :)

What can I say? I think the editing is terrible. I'm not saying the rest of the film isn't terrible as well, but there's also no way that the editor gets a pass just because Bay. There are just too many bad decisions and unmotivated cuts. Even the sound editing is clumsy. It's pretty staggering.

I saw a lot of similar "craftmanship" issues in Amazing Spider-Man 2. I think it's fair to say that these tentpole productions are probably rushed through the editing process, so you end up with a raw final product... but I think Bay's style encourages this too.

Oh, I know that. I just mean to say that the scope of 'editing' is more far-reaching than just the moment-to-moment narrative cuts. I'm not blaming the editing for the film being terrible. Obviously the problems run right through the work.

But that said, I still think the editing is terrible, and that it is beyond a simple question of "making the best of what you've got". All of Bay's films tend to have a similar cutting approach. Some of that is not the product of accident, but design. In AOE though, the constant dissonance is especially pronounced... and at times just feels downright slapdash.

Glad you enjoyed the doc. :)

The cutting Edge The Magic of Movie Editing (Full Documentary) - YouTube

Kind of a basic (but still quite interesting) documentary on the history and practice of film editing. Fun if you have a bit of time to kill...

On editing, I think your categorization of montage is too narrow, too mechanistic, too focused on the minute nips and tucks. Editing can be microscopic in scale, it's true, but in a very real sense, everything you just described ("what was actually shot, the decisions the director makes, what gets left in, stylistic choices, rearrangement of scenes") is all part of the editing dynamic. In a practical way, editing starts with the first shooting script.

And yes, the editing in AoE is a product of this process all the way through, a process that involves more than just the film editor, per se. That said, I think the final result is still edited with a profound gracelessness, being neither immersive nor expedient.

Which is why Bay extolling a "shoot for the edit" philosophy is so absurd, since his films seem to be completely unmindful of any ghost of coherence. "Shoot for the trailer reel" is more like it.

All I can say is that I see a lot more national flags on private buildings in the US than would be considered normal or acceptable in Canada.

But then, in Michael Bay movies, American flags are like the sunset. There's one in every direction. :wink:

And yeah... there ARE certainly a lot of american flags in that movie, aren't there? Admittedly, from my limited forays south of the border, it's not really much of a stylization. Everyone and their dog flies old glory at every opportunity. It's pretty excessive by Canuck standards. :)

I think you're being perhaps a bit uncharitable to the craft of editing. I recommend (if you're interested) digging into some of the major theories of montage, most of which can be traced right back to the groundwork of Eisenstein and Pudovkin.

I think you're familiar with Tony Zhao's Every Frame a Painting youtube series (great stuff), but David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson's blog site is also great for discussions of formal formal film analysis. Recommended! :thumb

Oh, I think Bay still deserves the blame. His motto is (apparently) after all "Shoot for the edit", which places him pretty clearly at the center of the process. Even as the old adage points out that "editing is the third writing stage of a movie", the shooting stage is certainly the draft that the editor has to work with.

My point is just that the editing in the film IS terrible... spazmodic, arbitrary, distracting, often unmotivated (or sometimes TOO obviously motivated by structural issues). Great editing probably could never make a Bayformers movie -good- ... but it could at least make it less miserable.

Calling Bay's editing "modernist" (as some apologists do) is one way of getting around its utter failure to convey the "invisible art" of classical narrative... but to that end, I don't think the editing style of these movies is actually saying anything other than "oh no, I have no idea how to knit these images together, but who the hell cares anyway??".

And yeah, formally ugly too. If you were really in the mood to concoct excuses for why a 200 million dollar film gets away with abject incompetency, you could call the editing "modernist", but I think "appalling" is more accurate. The CGI felt cheap too, as if any remote conceit of selling realism and palpable weight had been long ago abandoned.

It was nice to see that by movie 4, Bay & company had finally realized how to make coherent, visually distinctive, colourful and expressive robot modes. Too little, too late, I'd say... but can you imagine if we'd gotten character designs like Drift, Crosshairs and Hound back in 2007?

That's probably the nicest thing I can say about it.

I admire your willingness to wax reflectively on the failures of the TF movies. Perhaps I've just become too disaffected, but there is so little value in those films that even discussing them in terms of their specific failings feels futile. It's like staring at the sun. There's more awfulness present in them than anyone can reasonably expect to assimilate and analyze... and if you do, more's the pity.

The dialogue was especially bad this time around, bordering on gibberish, the vaguest suggestion of iconic platitudes and resonant speechifying, like a bag full of cliches fed into a blender. When characters (and especially poor psychotic Optimus) open their mouths, all that belches forth is a trope slurry of declamations and mad-libs of words like "freedom", "honor" and "KILL!!".

No worries, I figured as much. :)

I love the conversation, but it's also true that involved e-mail correspondence is time consuming. I try (and fail) to stay as far away from prolonged internet obligations as much as possible these days, so I definitely understand how it goes. :p

PS: I saw AOE finally. Ugh. Maybe the worst yet. Okay, probably not as bad as ROTF, but close.

Nice to hear!I'm just recovering from the last week.I'm in a strange situation lol.

Hi,how are you?

i like your views on optimus prime, buddy. movie prime is such a corruption of the character i know and love and it makes me sad.

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/761/364/4f9.jpg

*heavy breathing*

Thaks you! Again, maybe I tend to lash out in anger cause of an issue that is somewhat dear to me. If you are curoius:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estado_Novo_(Portugal)

See, why I tend to be angry about this? :p

Maybe it´s just me, but since I come from a nation where we lived under an actual dictatorship, complete with secret police, some mild racism, mysoginy and colonialism, I tend to take a bit personal when people say jackbooted thugs like fascists have a right to be heard and that I´m "intolerant" of them.