“Girl, when I first saw you it was love at first sight.”
If you’re a fan of movies, you probably respond to the name “Michael Bay” with some combination of an eyeroll and the shouted exclamation “EXPLOSIONS!” This combination of reactions sufficiently describes Bay’s current place in our cultural consciousness.
It is extremely fitting, then, that Bay’s start as a director, before explosion-filled epics such as Armageddon and Transformers into popular culture, was as the director of music videos. Music videos and porn.
Music videos are not an unusual place for film directors to get their start. The short form allows for bold, truncated statements, and the nature of music allows for maximum creativity within an already-formed story. Hollywood Directors Brett Ratner and Antoine Fuqua as well as auteurs Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze all got their start in music videos. David Fincher might be the most famous example.
Music videos are, in many ways, pure spectacle – promotional pieces meant to generate excitement and advertise an underlying work of art created without the video in mind. And Bay, ever the man to buy-in on overblown pop-culture artifacts, got his start with none other than Vanilla Ice, compiling a video compilation of Vanilla Ice’s 1989 and 1990 music videos in a VHS collection called “Play that Funky Music.”
Take a look at this wonderful example:
I don’t want to overinterpret this, but here we have a great example of Bay’s tendencies in compact form. Crash cuts. Flashes of light. Weird camera angles. Overt Patriotic imagery. The smooth-jazzy ballad is a complete mismatch for Bay’s hectic, arrhythmic cutting which would be a better fit for a Bran flashback sequence on Game of Thrones.
This is as fitting an introduction as any to the Every Michael Bay Movie project. Enjoy.
Every Tom Cruise Movie 