I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and blog space to Uwe Boll, but when the guy manages to say something hilarious or interesting every other day, what else am I to do? Write about serious issues like the future of film criticism? Karina’s got that covered quite sufficiently and efficiently, so I might as well stick to the fluff.
Of course, I can still relate the fluff to film theory, as in the case of Boll’s latest peer slamming, located at MTV Movies Blog. After criticizing the uneven work of Tom Tykwer (sorry, Uwe, but Perfume is a far better film than Run Lola Run), Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, he goes off again on his favorite nemesis, Michael Bay:
“I think he’s really bad. And I think the point is, if you get $250 million for every movie you do, how you gonna make a bad looking movie, with bad sound, bad special effects, whatever?” Boll criticized. “But everything dependent on directing is bad in his movies. And so I think it’s kind of absurd, how some people are getting counted like they are geniuses or whatever. But the reality is that in a lot of these $150 million movies, the real credit deserves to the special effects people. Or the second unit crew.”
As Shawn Adler points out, Bay has probably never been called a genius, but I get what Boll is saying. Each of the moviemaker’s blockbusters opens with the title “a Michael Bay film,” insinuating the guy is at least some kind of auteur. Of course, Bay might be a bad example considering he has enough of a unique signature with his movies that his style has been aped and parodied. But what about Hollywood’s other hired hacks, the ones who would be nothing without their special effects teams?
Unfortunately, there are a few too many technicians and artists involved in these sorts of movies to be able to label them “a ______ film,” or the alternate “a film by ______”. And there are a few too few technicians and artists who have successfully transitioned from effects to directing to validate Boll’s theory that movies like Transformers and perhaps the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy are really authored by FX people. Then again, how many of us consider the term “a Ray Harryhausen film” not in reference to one of the few movies he actually directed but to those he worked on as an FX artist?
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