Hello and welcome to Survival of the Fittest. This is a "blog" in which I study why certain people are better than others through the miracles of natural selection.
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Over here at the offices of Natural Selection research we’ve been taking a closer look at this summer’s list of blockbusters coming out. This season’s arrival of Battleship has us scratching our heads about whether or not the movie based on a children’s board game is going to actually be goodt. Our instinct tells us that it will not. It will crash and burn, showing the studios that we as an American population can see beyond quick cash grabs with flashy effects and mindless explosions. Well, that’s what we initially thought. Then one of our lowly interns brought up a name; a name that built a franchise around a line of popular action figures. This man took small pieces of plastic entertainment and turned it into a three picture Academy Award nominated behemoth. We’ve chosen this man as this week’s study. His films are featured in the prestigious Criterion Collection, a line of home videos that release only the highest quality of art. This man has grossed nearly two billion dollars (a closer number would be $1,847,000,000. Wowee Zowee!) for his artistic endeavors in celluloid. He has been the recipient of a Saturn Award, an achievement in directing from the DGA and a SFX Award. Yes, sirs and ma’ams! You’ve guessed it! The man who was able to prove the marketability of the toy-to-film adaptation with his haunting human dramas. Please join me in a round of applause for Mr. Michael Bay.
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| Cool jacket!
Michael Benjamin Bay was born on February 17th 1965. His middle name is fitting what with Benjamin Franklin being the pioneer in finding electricity and The Bay being the pioneer in finding the deep flow of cash hidden underneath the guise of toys. Unlike Mr. Franklin, The Bay started his career in the film business as a maker of commercials and music videos. He was so good at making these micro-films that he was able to win a few awards. Let us list them: a number of MTV awards (we all know that MTV is continually on the forefront of discovering the up and coming talent), the Grand Prix Clio of the year for his work on the “Got Milk/Aaron Burr” ad, and at the Cannes he won the Gold Lion for his Miller Lite commercial. The man won for the Best Beer campaign! So, basically this guy is a great director. He made a few ads and then shot Bad Boys and whammo! he is the new hott shot in Hollywood. Thing is, usually the hott shots fizzle out after a few pictures and people stop caring. Not for The Bay. He just kept upping his game until he hit the Transformers trilogy. I think we can all safely say that The Bay is finally hitting his stride. What other directors have the power to make three movies and decide to reboot it? That’s usually what the studios decide. It wasn’t Sam Raimi’s idea to fire Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Mcquire and hire the newest and hottest stars. It was the studio’s decision. So what does that make The Bay? He is an entity that can create power from nothing. He has the wisdom and skills to take a very successful run of films, and just do it again. No one will be the wiser because it’s going to be a completely different story. This time a girl will find the robot cars and they’ll be thrown into a series of wacky misadventures. It’s going to be like the best installment in the normally stale Karate Kid saga. The only thing cooler than rebooting his already popular movies was when he made a cameo in Bad Boys II. And the only thing cooler than that is the car he was driving was was his actual car, meaning he let his car have its own cameo in the greatest story ever told!
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Now, we can all agree that keeping the original cast would benefit the Transformers movies. Or can we? Megan Fox was fired (FIRED!) from the third film and that was the one that grossed the most. This is really what showed The Bay what he needed to do to make a more successful robot movie. But back to Fox, we’ve got to assume that there was a reason she was brutally kicked out of the series. Reports say that she called The Bay a Nazi. Well, he is no such thing! Has she not seen his emotionally moving pieces, Armageddon, The Rock and Pearl Harbor? I couldn’t think of a more American filmmaker other than Mr. Sam Raimi (because Quick and the Dead is the only accurate portrayal of the American roots). So Fox made the mistake of calling an ultra-American a Nazi. Makes sense, but what makes more sense is the covered secret that The Bay and Fox have had sexual relations! That’s how he picks all his sex symbols. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? How would a sea of young men want to have sexual intercourse with a woman that the maker wouldn’t want to also have sexual intercourse with? So he made a sweet love motion to the body of Megan Fox. Was it when they first met? Yes. Wouldn’t that have made her approximately sixteen years of age? Yes. But you know what, that’s what artists have to do. They have to have the sex with the young girls. Polanski did it! Serious artists are allowed to act above the normal, run-of-the-mill American, and the sooner all us Joe Blows realize this fact, the happier we’re all going to be.
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| Power couple. Fay! Box! |
He’s got the hair. He’s got the car. He’s got the style. This is the moment when I usually recap what in this person’s life have transcended them to the level of surviving above the rest, but The Bay is the antithesis of surviving. He hasn’t changed his hairstyle in forty years because it looks great on him. He doesn’t need to change the way he makes movies because that is the highest artistic peak that anyone will obtain. His car will always be the best car in the world. If I were to pay one trillion dollars for the car he drives now, I’ll only have the second best car in the world because he’d be bound to replace the old with the new, leaving his seconds with that fitting classification. No one will ever be as good as this man. He’s like Kevin Bacon from X-Men: First Class, taking the power around him and absorbing it to make himself more powerful. If anyone gets close to being a better selection, The Bay will take the best qualities and add them to his own. There are no cracks.
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| 1996 |
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| 2012 |
And now, a quote from this week’s NS:
“There are tons of people who hate me. They hate my movies and whatnot. But you know, hey, my films have made a lot of money around the world. 2-something billion dollars, that's a lot of tickets. They said that I wrecked cinema. They said that my, uh...cutting style. They say I cut too fast. And yet now you see it in movies everywhere. Do I take pride in people knowing my style? I think it's nice people know a director has a style. And you can reinvent yourself too.”
They only say they hate you because they really love you, but know they can never be as great as you, The Bay. Don’t let it get you down. Just let it lift you higher.
