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’13 Hours’ is Michael Bay at his Bay-est

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi Written by Chuck Hogan Directed by Michael Bay U.S., 2016 After the box-office success of Lone Survivor and American Sniper, the cottage industry of military themed January releases continues to go strong. Whereas those films came from Peter Berg and Clint Eastwood, directors known for taking a backseat …

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Michael Bay Hears You, He’s Just Not Listening: In Defense of the 6.4 Billion Dollar Man

There’s a scene just before the third act climax in Michael Bay’s magnum opus Bad Boys II where Marcus and Mike are about to head out on a suicide mission, against strict orders, to rescue Marcus’s sister/Mike’s girlfriend Syd. Suddenly, some SWAT members walk in and one says, “I don’t know you, but you look like you’re …

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New Projects: Clint Eastwood to direct biopic of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger

Following the success of American Sniper, Clint Eastwood has found his next project, which will once again be a biopic. Eastwood has signed on to direct a movie focusing on airline pilot Captain Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger. Captain Sullenberger rose to prominence in 2009, when he managed to land a plane on the Hudson River following …

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Two Left Feet: How “El Tango de Roxanne” Represents Everything Wrong with Baz Luhrmann

Moulin Rouge! is a mixed bag. It’s an idea that looks good on paper, but looks horrendous in execution. It’s a film where it should have the ability to make all the right emotional pivots, but succumbs to an ostentation that exists in its final product, making this a hallmark for director Baz Lurhmann’s career. …

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Auteur of Action: Michael Bay in the Criterion Collection

The Criterion Collection has a pedigree that few other media distribution outlets can match. Widely respected for bringing consumers the highest possible quality editions of landmark, respected, and exemplary films, their only peer is perhaps the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (an audiophile-focused line of remastered classic albums), and the MFSL doesn’t have nearly the same …

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Ninja Turtles and Facebook Buyout’s Cause an Internet Rift

Hey You Geeks!! This marks the return of the Hey You Geeks column, a weekly deconstruction of the best and sometimes worst that geek culture has to offer. A companion to the Hey You Geeks podcast, each week, the column will examine the news and rumors of the previous week with opinions, predictions and new …

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Vulgar Auteurism Needs to Drop the “Vulgar”

There’s a current trend in critical circles that’s been taking the internet by storm in the last few weeks, creating the sort of clicks-driven feedback loop these things tend to when they catch on. The term “vulgar auteurism” is coming into vogue (you can read one very good piece on it here, and by clicking …

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‘The Rock’ a revealing window into Project 007

The idea of a Michael Bay film being open to interpretive scrutiny is, quite frankly, so fanciful that it practically defies the laws of our known universe. As his champions are so fond of adamantly stating, his flicks are popcorn movies designed purely for entertainment and occasional pre-pubescent escapist wish fulfillment. But it is a …

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‘Pain & Gain’ a first for director Michael Bay: mostly gain, little pain

If cinema has anything to say about it, the modern American dream is best typified by a grandiose level of entitlement in those who covet it most of all. Just a month ago, we saw Spring Breakers, a nightmarish, neon piece of grotesquerie, compelling experimental art about nubile young women trying to attain their hedonistic Western utopia by stealing from and killing people who dared get in their way, consequences be damned.

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‘Battleship’ carbon-copies Michael Bay in a monotonous action nightmare

Battleship Written by Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber Directed by Peter Berg USA, 2012 Mix together bits and pieces of the last 20 years of American action filmmaking, throw in a heaping helping of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and sprinkle in some overplayed rock songs. What you get from this brew is the muddled, middling …

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‘Transformers 3 – Dark of the Moon’ – Gratuitously overlong, ridiculously stupid

Transformers 3 – Dark of the Moon Directed by Michael Bay Written by Ehren Kruger 2011, USA It’s the obnoxious pomposity of it all that really grates. Or rather the bewildering (off-)balance of tedious sincerity and bumbling idiocy. Almost three hours of bewilderingly awful nonsense, perforated with occasional flashes of overtly machoist invention and all …

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The Rise And Fall Of The Hollywood Auteur Part II

By the late 1970s, the tremendous creative license the major studios under a new generation of production chiefs had granted the young tyros of the 1960s – Coppola, Scorsese, et al – had expired as each managed to deliver at least one, major, back-breaking flop.  For Scorsese, it had been the grim musical New York, …

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