Scott Gives Bay A Pass…Historic!

“Live-action 3-D has been, at least since Avatar, a briar patch for filmmakers and a headache for audiences,” says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. But Michael Bay‘s Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, he says, “is one of the few recent 3-D movies that justify the upcharge. Mr. Bay clearly enjoys playing with the format, which is also to say that he takes it seriously. A lot of glass and metal comes flying at your head, and you feel surrounded, plunged into a universe governed by new and strange laws of physics.

“Nothing you see makes any sense at all, but the sensations are undeniable, and kind of fun in their vertiginous, supercaffeinated way.”

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42 thoughts on “Scott Gives Bay A Pass…Historic!”

  1. So that makes Scott another Bay-sayer like Jeannd Basinger?

    As for me, I checked out of the Michael Bay universe after THE ISLAND and haven’t looked back–though, as James Berardinelli wrote, the trailer to the latest TRANSFOMERS is quite well-edited.

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  2. Nononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononoonononononononononononononoononononononononononononononononononononononononononoonononononononononononononooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononono

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  6. This is getting almost universally good reviews. Yet few of them can actually come out any say they enjoyed it without dressing it up in some snarky sarcastic horseshit.

    Given that Transformers 1 also got good reviews, could it be that critics actually liked the trilogy as a whole, and should probably get off their high horses about Bay?

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  7. Its always been about giant fucking robots, but not as in robots attempting to fuck giants, which I would pay full price to see.

    Speaking of impossibilities, Shia is claiming that he boned the Fox. I don’t buy it.

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  9. LaBeouf banged the Fox, Isabel Lucas, Carey Mulligan…

    …yet is currently with some workaday Asian makeup chick.

    What is THAT all about?

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  10. Can’t wait for the inevitable Wells blistering review wherein he pines for a killer-robot movie in the spirit of “Drive”– “the whole play-it-cool, Zen, diners-late-at-night existential ’70s Michael Mann vibe.”

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  11. LaBeouf is great. He’s the most hated actor among internet douchebags, which means he must be doing something right. And his interviews are always funny.

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  12. Remember when Fez from That 70′s Show claimed to be have banged Lindsay when she was still not so rancid? Yeah, this seems even more offensive than that somehow. Fucking Fez for Christs sake!

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  13. Well its at 35% on the tomatometer, so I don’t think we can say “universally good reviews”. It seems to be the second best movie ever made about giant transforming robots based on a 1980s line of toys.

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  14. dino velvet: Most of those reviews seem to be “It’s a Michael Bay film so it’s shit and I hate it, but it is quite enjoyable”. None of them are actually admitting to liking it, but they all seem to be have enjoyed it. ThePlaylist’s review today was the classic example: gave it a C- or something but couldn’t really articulate why it was bad other than “the story isn’t very good,” yet appeared to enjoy it nonetheless.

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  15. Yeah some of them are a little ambiguous. Ebert flat out panned it though in a typically hilarious takedown.

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  16. From what I’ve seen, it’s one of those films that critics just intrinsically don’t like. Maybe it’s Bay, maybe it’s the 3D, maybe it’s the fact that it’s a toy cartoon from the 80′s. Whatever the reason, people don’t want to like it, yet they say that it’s a good summer film.

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  17. Shia is so overwound through the whole movie in a perplexing performance. So you’re 22, live in a Guns N Roses 90′s video mansion, where you bang the hottest girl in the world, and you act like a wronged coked-up know it all. Why should I root for you?

    People are only giving this a pass because it’s much more watchable than 2. But the 3D is not more wow than Tron, which small note, embarrasses T3 as far as CGI Bridges vs. the brief CGI JFK in T3. I’m not even sure T3, if seen, demands to be seen in 3D. Although it was an absolute joy to watch Ms. Huntington-Whitely strut around in the medium.

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  19. Well, I guess it’s finally official — I’m the only person who thought the 2nd TRANSFORMERS movie improved on the first. Don’t get me wrong, I barely remember either and I thought they were both pretty lousy… but as someone who really only goes to these to see giant robots fighting, I thought the sequel delivered on that front better than the original had.

    Of course, to confirm this impression, I’d need to watch them again. Which I have no intention of doing. So I guess I’ll never know.

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  20. Alright, if I were just looking at that still of some mecha-bore worm and a cyclops robot, knowing nothing about Bay’s style, I still wouldn’t give a shit. I wasn’t around when FANTASTIC VOYAGE hit, but didn’t people back then not confuse the shit, even if it was sincere back then, with a good kind of BIG movie — THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. We kept the former and amped it up but we have lost the latter completely today.

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  21. @ Eloi – What are you talking about? This movie has a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes somewhere in the 30% range. No, it does not have universally-positive reviews.

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  24. Keep in mind that even the dude that looks like he just stepped out of an Appleton, Wisconsin bowling alley circa 1978, who was flown halfway around the world, wined, dined, and blown by the very same studio that made this thing, could only muster some very carefully constructed, limp dicked, qualifier-laced “praise”. That speaks volumes. What I can’t understand is the collective “it still sucks, but this time its somehow…umm…okay”. It’s like society at large just finally accepted how shitty these films are and collectively embraced the stupid.

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  26. I genuinely enjoyed the last hour of it. The 90 minutes that precede it are pretty fucking awful. The 3D is pretty great.

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  27. I saw this tonight and holy shit was it amazing. And for the record, I only kinda liked the 1st one and flat out despised the 2nd one.

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  28. So it’s basically Michael Bay’s Revenge of the Sith, wherein people will say nice things about TF3, just because they don’t have to deal with the director ever again, but gradually realize the threequel wasn’t actually that good in the end?

    Zay: Amazing in what sense?

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  29. I liked the first one for what it was, so I put the second in my Netflix queue. When it showed up with the “2 hours 30 minutes” on the label, I figured there was no way I was spending that much time on it. Now I hear that the third one is even longer, and the critics are fairly consistent in saying you have to endure the first 90 minutes to get to the last hour.

    What they should do is edit all the fights from all three movies together as Transformers: Final Battles or some such thing. That would be worth the price of admission.

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  30. look I admire the craft that went into making this thing but the movie is just way too long. Bay could’ve easily chopped off a half hour and it would’ve been great. But this thing drags. I couldn’t wait to leave after the credits rolled.

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  32. The last action scene may be fun, but if I have to sit through 90 minutes (the running time of Annie Hall) of shit to get there, forget it.

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  33. Included in the initial 90 minutes: the very cool ulterior-motive Apollo 11 mission section is hardly longer than what has already been shown in the trailer. But Bay does find time for a 3-minute homage to Cocktail, and what seems like a 5-minute rant by John Malcovich to establish a new character that is inconsequential to the plot.

    Bay’s apparent philosophy is that every single shot must either be sexy, awesome, or funny, and hopefully all 3. But some shots he should learn to just be brief at the probable expense of attempted funny.

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  35. Malkovich was just there to get Shia a job, and the visual/visceral line was pretty funny. The Apollo 11 prologue went on for much longer than I thought it would.

    The movie was great, and Rosie is more charming that Fox could ever dream of. The action is definitely the best of Bay’s career. The critics who say they couldn’t understand the story have to be complete morons.

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