"Shit just got real."
Michael Bay is a pretty big deal.
A director with style instantly identifiable, even by the normie-ist of film-goers.
A reckless tangle of pixel-fucking CGI, vrooming cameras and ADHD editing.
All together forming something there's subjectively dynamic and epic.
This odd mix has made in one of the biggest directors in Hollywood
but not the most critically acclaimed.
Mega-directors don't just render into existence.
They need to start somewhere
and Bay comes from the same place that Spike Jonze,
Michel Gondry and David Fincher was spawned:
MTV.
Bay initially made his name with a Donny Osmond relaunch video
before moving on to making notable videos for Divinyls
#"Ooo, I touch myself"
and Vanilla Ice's "I Love You".
#"'Cause I love you."
But his music video high-point was for
Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)".
This was a video with an actual budget, helicopters,
wall-exploding motorbikes and something alike to an actual narrative.
It's over seven minutes long.
Epic and dynamic in all the ways that Bay would soon make his own.
So what makes anything for love so Bay?
Straight off, there's a lot less giant fighting robots so not a good start for comparison
but helpfully the essence of the video is sexy Beauty and the Beast with motorbike/helicopter chases
which helps to ramp up this ballad to Bay levels.
Motorbikes have been a Meat Loaf staple since day one
but Bay doesn't film the bike like he does cars now:
as aspiration objects.
The bike here represents escape in the same way it has done
for Meat Loaf since Bat Out of Hell.
Symbolism in the Bay project?
You're goddamn right.
Needless sex appeal is Bay's bread and butter,
as can be seen in pretty much everything he's directed.
His women are often nothing but sexualized props
to momentarily distract from the CGI onslaught,
shot in a way to emphasize the T and A.
"...Anything for love" has this in spades.
Not just with the lingering shots of the Beauty surrogate,
but also more explicitly in the unexplained lesbian vampires
that caressed and lick Beauty but no good reason
apart from because Mr. Bay said so.
Classic.
"...Anything for Love" has approximately 320 cuts
within the seven-minute-plus runtime,
giving an average shot length of 1.3 seconds.
This is actually even more rapid than manages today,
Transformers having an ASL of three seconds.
Film simply being longer than music videos cannot keep that high a pace.
Too many cuts for too long creates information overload.
But Bay's ASL is half the rate of Spielberg
and a touch faster than Nolan.
There are moments in the video where "...Anything for Love"
visually references Fincher's works on Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun"
Both are adept technical directors but Fincher's technique has purpose to its usage
while Bay's technical skills only extend to making everything dynamic and epic all the time.
Bay has not shown a Fincher influence since.
The original treatment for the video was actually dreamt up by David Fincher,
but a disagreement over money stopped Fincher from directing video himself.
In the book "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution", Meat Loaf recalled:
The video was eventually made with Bay for a mere seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
and it kickstarted his career.
After "...Anything for Love", Bay directed two more overblown, sexed-up Meat Loaf videos
with one featuring a young Angelina Jolie.
Next came Bad Boys
and his rise the better or worse has continued unabated ever since
Thanks Meat Loaf.
Thanks a lot.
[Maniacal laughter]