> I like big budget action stuff, provided the story is based of good ideas and has good writing. ID4 and Stargate are faovrites of mine.

Independence Day was pretty decent, given what it was, but only on a low level, and it doesn't make good repeat viewing. Looking back on it after the first viewing, it doesn't look very good either. So while I maintain an affection for it and stand in defense of it in the face of its overreactive critics (who disliked it mostly because they had too high expectations going in, I suspect), it's not my favorite action movie.

And I hated Stargate, and didn't think Godzilla was really any better.

Overlooked in this thread, perhaps, is the producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (now just Jerry Bruckheimer) that, IMHO, are far better at producing entertaining "big" action movies, in spite of "Armageddon," which I thought was worse than anything Devlin and Emmerich ever did and in fact probably the worst $200+ million grosser ever made, for reasons I couldn't possibly explain without exceeding the hard disk space allotted to me by my web hosting service. Other than that, look at their resume: Crimson Tide, their best, a fantastic thriller that's tense, intelligent, with outstanding performances. The Rock, an admittedly mindless action thriller, yet one where all the pieces seem to work and are held together by a charismatic cast. Con Air, again a dazzling action movie that may not be the most cerebral of films, yet one that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. "The Enemy of the State," ditto much of the above. Earlier works include Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and Flashdance, but we're straying outside the topic genre now.

I just think Michael Bay shouldn't ever be allowed to direct again. I attribute practically all of The Rock's flaws to his disgustingly inappropriate editing style, and many of Armageddon's problems were either that editing style or directly caused by them. (For those not aware, Michael Bay does not believe half a second of film should pass without at least four cuts. Since I'm fired up on this rant already, I'll elaborate below, when I'm done with my original point.) So Bruckheimer (and Joel Silver, for that matter, who produced the Lethal Weapon movies, among others) is, IMHO, usually much better at producing these kinds of insanely huge action movies than Devlin and Emmerich have ever proven themselves capable of.

I'm tired of the recent surge of ninety minute explosion flicks, but I remain cognizant that the genre *can* be done just fine -- these days, alas, Hollywood doesn't seem to be much motivated to try, thinking that the number and outrageousness of the action scenes is all it takes to make a good blockbuster.

Ok, I'm done now. I'll talk about Michael Bay and his curse in more detail. As I said, he can't put a film together with a cut that lasts longer than half a second. I'm exaggerating, of course, but the average length of a shot in Armageddon really is in the 3-5 second range. He thinks he's directing a music video or something, and there are a ton of reasons why this editing style is actively destructive in a narrative movie. One, every cut is a lie. This is basic filmmaking theory. If you make a cut, anywhere, you're enhancing the feeling, possibly conscious but mostly subconscious in the mind of the viewer, that this is "just a movie." That none of it is real. Cuts are like that intrinsically, because there are no cuts in real life, and that inherent quality is enhanced further by the public knowledge of how films are made. In those old cheesy monster movies, you see the monster, then you cut to some guy cowering away from it, then you cut back to the monster -- and you know exactly what's going on. You know that on the film set, that monster isn't *really* chasing after that guy. You know it's a guy in a sound studio and a model in a special effects lab, and that the shots are interwoven together. The early silent comedians understood this, and, hence, when Harold Lloyd wandered into a room without realizing there was a lion on the loose there, Lloyd made sure the camera caught both him and the lion on film together, in the same shot. It's funnier, because the lack of a cut makes it more real. (There's also the enhanced perception of close proximity, but that's irrelevant at the moment.)

So gratuitous cuts are bad. Alfred Hitchcock, inarguably one of the greatest directors of all time, understood that. "Rope" was shot with ten minute takes (all a reel of film could hold at the time), and the cuts are almost all hidden. Brian de Palma's brilliantly flawed "Snake Eyes," a great movie made terrible by its last half hour, opens with an utterly amazing twenty minute seemingly single take shot, and it's simply stunning. Cut a lot, you just get a piece of glitz.

The thing is, the problem with Armageddon's fast cut editing doesn't end with the intrinsic nastiness of rapid cutting. With such fast takes, it also prevents plot development from progressing beyond a certain superficial level. With fast takes, what can you do besides use fast lines to build fast characters and a fast plot? A great artist might be able to work around such an obstacle, but a great artist wouldn't use fast cuts anyway, and a great artist Michael Bay is not. Indeed, Armageddon is filled to the brim with one-liners -- not just one line jokes, but one line plot developments, and one line character definitions. Everything in that movie was one line after one line. Hence why many thought it wasn't so much a movie but a two and a half hour trailer. Hey, if it were, and it was advertising the *real* five hour movie, that five hour movie may well have been utterly awesome. With actual character development (not just for character development's sake but also so we actually cared what happened) and some intellectual and moral substance, Armageddon might have been one heck of a suspenseful, exciting film.

But I'm still not done. There's more. With wall to wall rapid-cut editing, the properties of rapid cuts that might actually make it an appropriate choice in certain circumstances are completely nullified. If rapid cuts were used during the action scenes to give the impression of chaos, that might have been an effective artistic choice. But when even the slow scenes are cut fast, too, there's no juxtaposition of calm and frenzy, and therefore nothing that accentuates either. If it's all frenzy, frenzy, frenzy, there is no possible way to build and release tension in the patterns that stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. (Don't think that's important? I dare you to find one single pleasureable pursuit that doesn't follow a pattern of building tension over time, peaking, and releasing. Every successful form of storytelling follows that pattern in an obvious way, but it's not even limited to art. A simple satisfying *yawn* follows that pattern!)

So basically Michael Bay is a big hack, and I shudder at his current attempt to become Steven Spielberg and James Cameron both with his next flick, "Tennessee," a Titanic-esque story set around Pearl Harbor. Heaven help us for what dignity he's bound to strip away from that. I'll gladly eat my words if he's successful, and I'll be happy to do so -- but the likely outcome is grim indeed.