Blog: Brian

Unlike most critics, I don't really have a problem with Michael Bay. Sure the guy is kind of a douche, sure he seems to care a little bit too much about money. But if the small art house movies are the decorative solar panels, directors like Bay are the dirty, smoggy, great-big, coal-burning beating heart. It's not pretty, but without directors like him the movie industry wouldn't be one-one-hundredth what it is now. Sure movies can be good and financially successful (it's no accident that the only man in Hollywood that can compete with Bay in gross is James Cameron) but these are rarities, and no one can predict when a movie is going to be a run-away commercial and critical success. Movie-making is a business, and the thing businesses need--above all else--is cash flow. That's what Michael Bay gives them, and it seems like he has very few illusions about what he does.

So I can't hate Transformers and I can't hate Armageddon, but as you may have guessed I drew the short straw and I'm seeing Twilight: New Moon. There are two things that will make me hate your movie: It is bad and you think its good. Or I have to hear about it every goddamn day. Out of morbid curiosity I have been tracking how many times the incipient, blank-faced, impossibly beautiful actors and actresses of Twilight are mentioned in the morning paper. In the past 30 days, there have been 29 instances--not counting the times it has popped up more than once. So here is a little bit of ire for my least favorite blatant Hollywood money-maker:

We are all used to the fluffy, drama-laced story we all have to hear about. We've all had to put up with the Gosselins, Lindsay Lohan, and the whole litany of voyeuristic snuff fantasies that are paraded about. I'll be honest, they're amusing opiates. It's like an old-fashioned freak show. But Twilight? There's nothing grotesque, morbid or strange about it. It is a completely hollow story starring expressionless actors depicting the equivalent of a vacuous teen fan-fiction. There is nothing to like, and there is nothing to hate, because there is nothing to the movies. This is lonely-women masturbatory material with all the depth you would expect from porn.