Michael Bay Sucks

I couldn't think of a more clever way to put it. Okay, I love Transformers as much as anybody (actually less, I think it's great but overrated. Why was Sam the one to kill Megatron? Optimus should've stabbed him in the face!) but the man is a terrible director. It would be difficult to not make an awesome movie about Transformers. I mean, it's about robots in disguise that transform and beat the crap out of each other with high tech weaponry that happens to be an appendage on their mechanical bodies. A chimp could make an enjoyable summer flick about that (a theory I'm not discounting). But since he recruited Megan Fox solely because "she has a great stomach" (a true statement, but so do lots of people who can actually act) this tells me maybe he's not the best filmmaker. He also put the song "What I've Done" which is very Lex Luthor esque, over a scene where the main characters make out and Optimus states his mantra to protect Earth. This makes no sense.

Interlude: Michael Bay is an action film director who, unlike real directors such as Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) doesn't know how to mix action with anything relatively worthwhile. Or really even how to do action correctly. Or really anything.

In fact, has anyone seen the Bad Boys films? Let me rephrase, has anyone seen the Bad Boys failed attempts at filmmaking? They're enjoyable solely for the reason that you keep thinking someone is going to get shot, or something will blow up, but it never happens. All that happens is Martin Lawrence making jokes that are stupid, Will Smith making jokes that are awesome, and people pulling their guns (in an action movie!) without firing them. And yet, Michael Bay is allowed to keep on making movies. I also enjoy his film The Rock but once again, it's a movie with Sean Connery fighting people and cracking jokes where Ed Harris is the bad guy. Pretty tough to screw that up. Although Nicolas Cage is in it too, and it's somehow good despite this fact.

Now here's where the real enraging part of this story comes from: there are any number of innovative and awesome TV shows that get shafted, and people like Michael Bay get to keep on making movies. Studios keep backing (and yes, lots of times they're the same studios that back TV. Mostly it's Disney, they own basically everything. They're the major shareholder in childhood happiness itself) stupid horror films for the first four months of the year. How many House of Wax movies do we really need? I mean, if you want to put Elisha Cuthbert on screen so we can all stare at her, fine with me! (Paris Hilton was in it too though, shudder) But how about in a real movie? So here studios are backing crap like that, but what about when shows like Pushing Daisies could use about three more episodes after they've been cancelled to bring closure to the storyline? Out of luck I'm afraid, they spent all of their money on a remake of the Spanish horror film Manos: The Hands of Fate.

This brings me to another point, very soon I may very well be losing two of my favorite shows: Dollhouse and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Both of which have low ratings because (shocker!) they're on Friday nights. When your main audience is men aged 18-25 like myself, and the only one of them that's home watching TV on a Friday night is me, you won't get too many viewers. And yet, they refuse to count online viewing and in some case, DVR/Tivo recordings when making their final decision. Even though this would multiply the aforementioned shows' ratings by about 5. Terminator just finale-ed (a new word I invented just now) on a huge cliffhanger, which may well either fly in the face of Terminator mythos or create it or I DON'T KNOW AND I MAY NEVER KNOW!

Very frustrating.

And as for Dollhouse, it's a Joss Whedon show (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly for those of you not privileged enough to have watched them) so of course it's awesome! As my friend Andrew mentioned, "It keeps getting better but its ratings keep going down!" This is all quite infuriating, especially considering that when Michael Bay picks up the phone and says, "Hey (insert movie studio here) I was thinking, can we spend 10 million dollars to change all of Megan Fox's clothes in the movie from purple to yellow? Why? Because yellow is the new purple!" they give him his money! (fake situation, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was accidentally accurate)

The entertainment industry brings me the most joy, but also the most frustration. So as usual, I've come up with the perfect solution:

The way they should run their shows is this, when a show gets picked up they should automatically have as part of their contract, a post cancellation clause that states that they can have five episodes or so to sum things up. If a show is able to get a second half of their season, they should automatically get a bit of the next season. This way, the studios can see how the DVD sales measure up (which should also be released way earlier than they usually are, summer is a good time to get caught up on a show) and decide how much they want to promote it for the fall season. Or if ratings turned out to be low and sales low, then just stick it on Saturday nights for the die hard fans. Or, people like me could "commit to buy" a show on DVD so that they have some idea ahead of time who all will buy the DVD, and thus give the show more of a chance. Or here's another idea: how about leave Megan Fox's color scheme alone and use that money to bring me some more Terminator!

We should have charities for failing TV shows. "Walk to Save the Viewerless." Why not? It's more worthwhile than Alec Baldwin's charity for retired circus animals (Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire, check the tapes). TV is what brings us all together, and it's worth saving for morale purposes as much as anything else. Know what I'd talk to my friends about without it? Trick question, I wouldn't have any friends.