Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
* Sonny opened the show by airing his—frankly un-American—view of fireworks. On my little exurban cul-de-sac, we mark the nation’s birth with a five-hour fireworks extravaganza. This year, the celebration culminated with the lighting of a pyrotechnic called “Fast and Furious. Ad this is what it looked like from my driveway.
‘Murica.
* From there we moved on to Michael Bay and Transformers: The Last Knight (aka Transfivers). You can read Sonny’s review of it here. (It’s like “sitting through a hurricane while consuming meth.”)
Or you can skip to the good stuff and go read the 2005 Michael Bay Blog. (A parody blog, not written by the actual Michael Bay. Tag line: “Still not in movie jail.”) Only 18 posts survived the legal action and they’re not all gold and some of them really profane. But on the whole, it’s pretty great.
Not, however, as good as this “Snakes on a Plane: Platinum Dunes Pitch.” Which is unbelievable. It’s pitch-perfect, in every way. Consider it my gift to you as restitution for us taking two weeks off.
But wait—there’s more! As promised, here’s the Michael Bay script for The Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne says, “It’s simple. We hack the internet. . . . All of them.” (Again, this is not really written by Michael Bay. It’s a parody.)
* As I said during the show, I didn’t really like Transfivers. It’s either the second or third movie that I’ve walked out on. That said, there is a school of thought on what Bay does as an auteur which marks him as a different from guys like Simon West and Paul Anderson.
Sonny mentioned the little “Bayhem” video analyzing Bay’s visual style. I highly recommend it. It’s a technical exposition of what Bay does with a camera, how he uses motion and background and parallax. As I said on the show, if you had to try to distill what Bay’s modus vivendi is, you might say that he has a highly-developed theory of how the camera should move in the context of a modern action film.
He’s no Scorsese, of course. But it’s not nothing.
* We’ll be back next week. Probably on Monday, even, with a micro-episode.
