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It's one in the morning and I just realized that I'm supposed to be producing a diary today. Lets see what I can come up with last minute.
Lets see....
Michael Bay is a classic Hollywood success story. He's made a strong of incredibly successful movies, cleaning up at the box office while movie critic cringed in horror. It's quintessential modern cinema. The maximum amount of explosions are provided per minute, without any theme complicated enough to confuse anyone.
As much as I dislike Michael Bay, I have found it interesting to break down his work, because he really is very good at certain things. Some of the best visuals produced in the last ten years were in his movies. The problem is that his movies are a string of beautiful dramatic pictures, stacked together in a way that makes no sense. You can learn something from him, but you must be careful not to learn the wrong things as well. If you fell asleep for 30 minutes during one of his movies, you would still get about the same level of enjoyment from what remained.
My favourite director is Hitchcock, and I view Michael Bay as being his complete opposite. Hitchcock constructed his stories carefully, in such a way as to build suspense. Each scene gathered momentum and heightened dramatic tension, until it was released at the conclusion.
The modern approach that Michael Bay seems to represent is that you shouldn't assume that your audience has the attention span for that. Also, because modern CGI allows you to put anything you can imagine on the screen, they do in fact put everything up on the screen. The assumption seems to be that directors once didn't show you the ghost lurking in the darkness because special effects weren't advanced enough.
What they seem to have forgotten, is that telling a story well isn't just about what you show. It's about what you choose not to show as well.
One of the classic shots in cinematic history is the moment in Psycho where a woman creeps up on the heroine taking a shower, brandishing a knife. The identity of the assailant wasn't hidden because Hitchcock couldn't afford one more light bulb. He hid her identity because it served the story, and created one of the most powerful scenes of its time.
I will now climb off my soap box. I'll try to hide it out back and produce something positive next week. Have a good morning everyone. It is now 1:35 in the morning. I'll climb out of bed in 8 hours and say hello then. This will be a fun day. The Aurora is finally going to fly.