![]() ![]() It just tells a compelling and difficult story. It asks the question, “what constitutes a religion?” but doesn’t answer it. It has evolved into a hugely wealthy mega-church that does no social good at all but is so horrifying to deal with that even the IRS is afraid to take them on. The religion was invented by a severely troubled man who was both looking for an answer to his problems and also for a way to swindle people out of their money without paying taxes. It plays out both horrifyingly and not-at-all as a surprise. Going Clear, for those of you unfamiliar, is a movie adaptation of a book of the same name which chronicles the lives of members of the Church of Scientology, told mostly through stories from ex-church members. I watched Going Clear this past weekend and I thought it was a fitting wrap-up to the Tom Cruise movie-watching saga I’ve been on for several months. And Bay, ever the man to buy-in on overblown pop-culture artifacts, got his start with none other than Vanilla Ice, compiling a video compilation of Vanilla Ice’s 19 music videos in a VHS collection called “Play that Funky Music.” Music videos are, in many ways, pure spectacle – promotional pieces meant to generate excitement and advertise an underlying work of art created without the video in mind. David Fincher might be the most famous example. Hollywood Directors Brett Ratner and Antoine Fuqua as well as auteurs Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze all got their start in music videos. The short form allows for bold, truncated statements, and the nature of music allows for maximum creativity within an already-formed story. Music videos are not an unusual place for film directors to get their start. It is extremely fitting, then, that Bay’s start as a director, before explosion-filled epics such as Armageddon and Transformers into popular culture, was as the director of music videos. If you’re a fan of movies, you probably respond to the name “Michael Bay” with some combination of an eyeroll and the shouted exclamation “EXPLOSIONS!” This combination of reactions sufficiently describes Bay’s current place in our cultural consciousness. “Girl, when I first saw you it was love at first sight.” Isn’t that ridiculous? The guy was running around shooting 4 minute music videos and 30 second commercials and at some point someone had to sell Jerry Bruckheimer on using an unknown filmmaker in a production starring Will Smith and a selling point had to have been that Bay directed a softcore porn in 1990. This is Michael Bay’s first and only foray into feature film length directing prior to his first Hollywood release, Bad Boys (1995). But here’s the thing: The movie is 50 minutes long. I felt awkward watching this, and I feel awkward writing about it. Or depending on who you talk to, maybe a dramatic re-enactment form. ![]() And porn is, in a lot of ways, a documentary form. The camera angle, the zoom, and distance. This also would make Bay a pretty bad documentarian. ![]() This makes him an excellent director of action pieces. One of the things Michael Bay does really well is balancing close-ups with wide shots to convey place, action, and emotion all at the same time. The video features several interviews with Kendall mixed in with music-video style set-pieces featuring Michael Bay’s favorite things – soldiers, muscles, muscle cars, hot weather, and babes. Isn’t that weird? I watched it purely out of scientific curiosity. However, he is credited in this Playboy video. However most of these don’t show up on IMDB because Bay is only credited on a compiled collection of videos that were released in a special record release, or through different means than feature or even short films usually are. Bay’s early 1990s are full of music video and even some television commercial examples. It’s difficult to chart the early career of a film director. ![]()
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