Michael Bay does not care. Not about you, not about me, not about critics. He does not care about actors or plot. He does not care about stem cells, the rainforest, or the Lost Boys of Sudan. Michael Bay does not give a fuck.
Googling "I hate Michael Bay" gets 1,950 results, with most of that vitriol spewed by Transformers geeks. "I've heard so many people say, 'Michael Bay, you've destroyed my childhood,'" Bay recently told Wired. "I urge them to watch the 1986 movie, go watch the cartoon. You'll want to shoot yourself."
Ha! Fuck you, nerds! SHOOT YOURSELF WHILE YOU'RE WATCHING YOUR STUPID ROBOT CARTOONS FOR ALL THAT MICHAEL BAY CARES!
IMDB.com lists Bay's first directorial work as 1990's Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall. His second? Great White's video for "Call it Rock 'n' Roll." From there, it was all about Martin and the Fresh Prince bickering and shooting crooks (Bad Boys), Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery bickering and shooting terrorists (The Rock), Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck bickering and blowing up asteroids (Armageddon), and Affleck and Josh Hartnett bickering and blowing up Japs (Pearl Harbor). (Their slur! Theirs! Not mine!) Bad Boys II, a Lionel Richie music video, and one box office failure (The Island) later, Bay's back: Transformers is crammed with "Bay clichés": slow-mo, blistering edits, and 538,000 explosions.
Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, characterizes Transformers as "part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns, and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts." The New Yorker's Anthony Lane notes, "In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art." Snide as they might be, critics have finally admitted what the rest of us realized long ago: Bay, our finest connoisseur of dumb, deafening, overwhelming spectacle, isn't going anywhere. At best, that's a questionable compliment, but something tells me Bay doesn't care. He's too busy prepping Transformers 2.