michael bay

‘Ambulance’ is fun enough at times to justify its existence, yet remains tonally inconsistent with a dash of thematic schizophrenia.

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Some movies this summer and every summer manage to rise above some silly source material to be something that is genuinely compelling or at the very least interesting. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not one of them.

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Transformers: Age of Extinction isn’t so much a movie as it is a 165-minute propaganda film made to appeal to the widest demographic possible — but mainly for China.

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The Kansas City Art Institute and Alamo Drafthouse have joined forces to bring you Film School, a weekly student curated film series. This week – Armageddon (1998) – Saturday, July 6th at 2:00 p.m.

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It is good for all film snobs, when they want to dismiss Bay as thoughtless and utterly lowbrow, to remember that Criterion put out versions of both The Rock (spine #108) and Armageddon (spine #40). They had good reason to do so.

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His slow-motion prowess and action-film chops add a surreal element, but Bay’s camera leers at the world the same way his characters do. He wants to celebrate his “heroes” at the same time he’s making fun of them, but his over-the-top delivery gives him away. On top of that, the constant narration gives away too much of the mystery of their motives and it ends up trying way too hard to be funny.

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This week, Eric, Trey, and Trevan welcome Matt Lloyd, a confessed Bay-o-phile to talk about Pain & Gain, the stranger-than-fiction pet project from Michael Bay. The film stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and a huge supporting cast and follows body builder bank robbers as they extort millions from some rich businessman or something. If you don’t […]

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The trio return in full this week, as Eric reviews Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator and Trevan takes on the newest offering from Hasbro, Battleship. Trey finally gets to have his say regarding Avengers. Check out Eric’s other project U.S. Air Guitar. Subscribe to The Scene-Stealers Podcast on iTunes or our RSS.

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Surprise, surprise, Battleship, a movie based on a board game turned out to be an empty, underwhelming mess. Director Peter Berg has had to suffer comparisons to Michael Bay and that other movie franchise based on a Hasbro board game, but in this case, it’s an accurate comparison. Berg-favorite Taylor Kitsch stars in another misplaced, big-budget Sci-Fi movie […]

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This movie review of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” appears on KTKA-49. The first “Transformers” movie was basically an absurdist teen sex comedy featuring sentient cars that turn into robots and some silly go-for-broke rewriting of American history. Its 2009 sequel was a more serious, more ridiculous, less fun version that lasted 2 ½ hours […]

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I’ll begin with an analogy. Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS) is a medical condition, which is marked by consistent unwanted sexual arousal and orgasm. Those of us who don’t have the disease may grin or chuckle and think that PSAS might not be so bad. Those with the disease often describe it as distracting to […]

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Michael Bay is the producer that brought us remakes of “Friday the 13th” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (spun off into “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning”). He’s a smart businessman because horror is a profitable genre, made especially more profitable when a recognizable icon like Jason or Leatherface is attached to it. So it’s only […]

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I was just complaining to a friend of mine how they don’t make nerdy teenage fantasy movies like they did in the ’80s, and then along comes director Michael Bay‘s Transformers. A flawed, frenzied, and ultimately fun affair, Bay’s big screen adaptation of the Hasbro toy line (that itself spun into a TV series and […]

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