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This is Michael Bay the action film director. The Rock, Bad Boys, Pearl Harbor, The Island, Armageddon, Transformers*, et cetera.

*Even in a movie about giant transforming alien robots, Bay still managed to have all his standard cliches.

Well, my first reaction was "Who the fuck is Michael Bay?", so I looked him up on Wikipedia.

Mercifully, I have never seen any of his films.

OTOH, he has made a piss-pot full of money.

Please don't regard this as a dig on action movies. I just hate Bay's cheesy style and more explosions = better approach to things. I think maybe The Island was the best movie of his, but it had starlet Scarlett, who, as I've previously noted, makes my brain shut down almost entirely in a pleasant haze. Pretty ...

Wha? Sorry. Anyway, if you liked The Rock, we will not come to a meeting of the minds on this.

Okay, so I think I get what Jason's saying...

...and now I think I understand what that E*Trade commercial was doing:

And yes, I think that is Sulu as the evil super villain.

Tell me you don't wanna see "Machete". Go ahead.

I'll call you a wussy. I will. I'll do it.

You're a wussy, J sub. You're a wussy.

I'm a big art movie guy. Chances are you can't name an art house film that I haven't seen and don't have an opinion on.

90% of everything else out there is trash. And if I want to see trash, why settle for the big budget, general audience variety?

Rodriguez, by the way, is known for burying a bigger message in all that trash. That was certainly the case in "Desperado", the movie from which the Machete character was extracted.

Try to think of it as like "Family Guy" but live action.

*I was just kiddin' about being a wussy.

I'd rather see Werewolf Women of the SS, especially if Nicholas Cage played Fu Manchu.

But they're actually making "Machete".

No kidding. Look at the wiki link.

...and my second vote would be "Thanksgiving".

I looked into the backstory, 'cause it was hard to tell what you were seeing in the "Thanksgiving" trailer...

Apparently, story goes, there's a kid who's kinda weird, and his parents bought a live turkey to raise fresh for Thanksgiving. So the weird kid, all the other kids pick on him and he doesn't have any friends, and so he becomes attached to the turkey in a really big way. When Thanksgiving rolls around, and his dad slaughters the turkey, the kid freaks out and slaughters his father in revenge and dresses him up like a big turkey. His senile grandmother doesn't realize what's happened, so she bastes and cooks the weird kid's father just like a turkey...

...so that happened years ago, and they took the kid and they sent him off to the psychiatric prison, and now he's escaped and he's come back to take revenge on the whole town for killing his turkey and sending him away.

Apparently, the guy who directed that segment was from Plymouth, and you know there was a string of holiday slasher films after "Halloween", all with more or less the same back story, and he said being from Plymouth, or somewhere similar, he always assumed they'd make a "Thanksgiving" slasher film but never did.

Speaking of being a wussy, by the way, unless they're Troma films, I always watch slasher films the same way, with my hand over my face peeking through my fingers. ...and that's only when my eyes aren't closed.

The only Michael Bay movie I have ever seen is Armaggedon, in the theater (1998) and it annoyed the hell out of me.

I still remember these three things that bothered me:

A) You don't launch 3 space shuttles from the ground at the same time, about 50 feet apart from each other.

B) When they docked at the Russian space station. Apparently this station can spin to simulate gravity. But apparently most of the time it doesn't. Except when a space shuttle comes a-dockin' -- then they spin it up so that the special effects people are spared the effort of trying to show people floating in weightlessness.

Except that if a real space station could spin to simulate gravity, they'd do it all the time so the occupants wouldn't suffer the health effects of zero gee. Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point of making weightlessness SOP (so people's muscle's and bones are atrophying) all the time but also making the station able to spin? Doesn't go together, is what I'm saying.

Oh, and if they are gonna go to the trouble of spinning up the station sometimes and taking the spin off sometimes, if anything they would make spinning SOP and might take the spin off when a ship came to dock, to avoid the difficulty of the shuttle having to match the station's spin. In other words, if spinning and unspinning a station makes any sense at all, it would be just the opposite of the way they did it in the movie.

Yes, this is the kind of stuff that irritates me.

C) When they were chasing the comet down to rendezvous with it, the comet should not have had all kinds of rubble and junk flying out the back of it. Yes, comets can come apart as they approach the sun. Yes, light pressure from the sun can push boiled-off gases and tiny particles away from the comet, which is what causes the comet's tail. But aside from what's pushed back by light pressure -- which isn't exactly a heavy push and visibly affects only the smallest particles -- all the rubble and stuff from the comet would be flying all at about the same speed. The rocks wouldn't be "left behind" the main mass to slam into the ship coming up from behind.

If my meaning isn't clear, try this experiment.

1) Fill a box full of bowling balls, baseballs, softballs, steel ball bearings, and rubber balls.

2) Take the box to the top of a 100-story tower.

3) Dump the box of balls over the side.

4) Wait one or two seconds, then jump after them.

You will observe that the pack of balls are all falling at about the same speed. (As are you.) You won't have any balls mysteriously breaking (or more to the point, braking) off from the main pack and slamming you in the face at a high rate of speed (relative to you) which is basically what was portrayed in the movie. If any of the lighter balls do fall relatively more slowly and hit you as you are falling behind the main mass, that would be due to wind resistance, and that would not apply in the near-vacuum* conditions of space as portrayed in movie.

*You might count the vapor being boiled off the comet as a very thin and tenuous atmosphere, so I hedged.

See all the words I wrote? See how much that movie annoyed me?

It wasn't a true story, Stevo.

This is like what I wrote over at Urkobold about simians being enough like us to empathize with and little people being too much like us to empathize with...

When you get a low budget movie, sometimes the effects are sort of unrealistic, and we don't expect much of them. They don't challenge our willingness to suspend disbelief. But maybe as the effects cross some critical threshold of realistic, they become too realistic in appearance to forgive incongruities.

I think animation may suffer from that too. There was a Christmas film that came out a few years ago that had great reviews, it had Tom Hanks doing the voice work, it had something to do with a magic train to the North Pole--and it completely flopped, as I recall. And I think it was because the animation was too realistic for people to buy in to. I've noticed that many of the animated features I've seen since have featured less realistic animation.

Take "The Incredibles" for instance, objects and people were realistically three dimensional, but not realistic representations of people.

Ken, I wanna see Machete!!!!
Freakin' Danny Trejo is about as close as guys my age will get to a Charles Bronson-type action star (ie ugly as sin, but kicks much ass), so yes, I WILL be seeing Machete.

Nice catch, Shem!

I can add that to the list of things I've independently reinvented. ...which includes the omelet incidentally.

ken, come to new york and we will go see machete and drink much patron.

how did bay ruin transformers? it was an extended product placement tie-in disguised as a children's cartoon. or did he MESSAGE it up?

Bingo. I'm still annoyed that all Michael Bay had to do was deliver a movie of robots fighting (which seems right up his LOTS OF 'SPLOSIONS style), and he managed to screw it up.

If I can get there, it's a deal.

In Michael Bay's defense, he did direct my favorite of the "Got Milk?" commercials. It's the one with the guy straining to say "Aaron Burr" over the phone to win a contest, only to be stymied by a mouth full of peanut butter.

I'd find it on YouTube, but I'm at work, and YouTube is frowned upon.

David, dude, they split the giant freaking asteroid in half with a single nuke. :D

Not only that, that explosion manages to push the two neatly-cut halves of the Texas-sized rock far enough apart to separate them enough to whiz by opposite sides of the Earth in the mere seconds left before impact. That would require a bomb big enough to at least sterilize the facing side of the Earth from that distance, if not boil off some ocean water, at a sensible WAG.

Oh, I know. I'm more willing to forgive the big handwaves if they get the little ones approximately right. Or if they don't even try to make anything plausible, e.g. Star Wars. It's the in-between shit that bothers me. If you want to make your spaceship fuelled by unobtanium, great; more power to ya. If you make it a chemical rocket with impossible performance, that bothers me.

i felt the same way after watching capote, sorta.

I found that milk commercial, in case anyone hasn't already seen it:

why does the midichlooriuns bother people so much. before, when it was magical powers it's ok, but magical powers caused by bacteria is somehow unreasonable?

I don't hate on the new Star Wars movie as much as some but I think most people don't like it because it seems internally inconsistent with what was presented before.

This kind of fits in with the whole anti-science thread and the issues with "paranormal" in fiction in general. People can buy and/or like wacky supernatural stuff in many different forms but it can be jarring and damage the all important suspension of disbelief if it seems like the writers are suddenly no longer playing the implied rules of the fictional universe.

It's a matter of continuity and internal consistency. We'd spent three movies and two decades seeing the force as a sort of ki, channel-your-inner-power kind of thing, with no pseudoscientific bullshit. We were expected to accept it on its own terms. Then they come along and put in some bullshit biological explanation that doesn't technically contradict the previous canon, but certainly undermines the cultural context of the thing. It goes from eastern philosophy to Star Trek technobabble.

EDITED: Posted in wrong thread.

the boobicon, as i call it, is omnipresent. i usually blamed it on the chicks in chainmail legacy of d&d and maybe comic books but frankly it's pretty much that plus japan plus everyone else in the world x50.

i find it tiring. maybe i'm just getting old. and i love boobs as a general rule. they're just about the best things ever made by dna/xenu.

at least it's nearly defensible in fighting games. but in stuff like this:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/07/07/damnation-fashion-advice/

wtf?

actually skimming the box art in a games store is a better, if more depressing, survey of what i mean.

1) Don't they mostly have magic powers in such games?

2) Isn't there at least one male character in any given game that has a trim to downright slender build and doesn't look like he could do any better against a squad of mooks? :)

EDIT: and for the purposes of argument, which should we count Bridget as? ;)

Heck, even the wrong tech would tend to throw people. If Palatine had ordered newly-enDarthed Vader to take down the Jedi Temple and murder all the kids inside by releasing a vial of self-reproducing hunter-killer nanotech that dissolved everyone inside where they stood, it just wouldn't fit, either setting-wise or stylistically.

It's even true for magic - the Hellraiser movies have magic and demons, but it just wouldn't do to have a kid fly in on a broomstick and fend off Pinhead with a wand and some fake Latin. :)

Besides, it was an odd, tacked-on thing that didn't make sense. After all, there's no mention of Obi Wan giving Luke any blood tests. :)

Of course, it did make for a good laugh in Darths and Droids:

(The premise of the comic is that The Phantom Menace is a pen-and-paper role-playing game being run in a world where Star Wars was never made. Funny stuff, and they manage to make Jar-Jar actually very tolerable...)