When I wrote my post “Understanding Michael Bay’s Cruel Joke,” I completely forgot that I had bookmarked this fantastic video essay about Bay’s directorial tropes from Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou, posted to YouTube earlier this month. Zhou, a wonderfully literate and accessibly articulate film thinker, dissects Bay’s staging and gets at the heart of how “Bayhem”—his name for the director’s specific blend of action, choreography, cinematography and editing—is constructed. It’s a very revealing, entertaining watch.
In the end, Zhou comes to the same conclusion that many critics seem to have arrived at this month, on the occasion of Bay’s newest feature film “Transformers: Age of Extinction” and its outsized success: Michael Bay’s work is important, though probably for all the wrong reasons.
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