25 June 2009

The shouting auteur

New York Times movie reviewer Manohla Dargis gets stuck in to Michael Bay, the director of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -

[...] And make no mistake: Mr. Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies, as conspicuously as that of Lars von Trier, and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview and moral sensibility. Mr. Bay’s subject — overwhelming violent conquest — is as blatant and consistent as his cluttered mise-en-scène. His images, particularly during the frequent action sequences, can be difficult to visually track, but they are also consistently disjointed. (And proudly self-referential: the only director he overtly cites is himself, with a shot of the poster for his movie “Bad Boys II.”) The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once described an auteur as someone who speaks in the first person. Mr. Bay prefers to shout.


- New York Times, 24 June 2009

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Roger Ebert was also not a fan. In fact, he gave it a one-star review, which is always the sign of an entertaining Ebert review.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090623/REVIEWS/906239997

He even wrote a follow-up post on his blog, in which he suggests the film will be studied in film classes as marking the end of the era of bloated CGI epics.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/06/the_fall_of_the_revengers.html