What a load of shit. How do you explain most reviewers' fondness for Steven Spielberg then? Do you think Oscar nominations for Jaws and E.T. were acquired without critical support? How does Alfred Hitchcock continue to top critics' polls of best filmmakers of all time? He pioneered the populist, spectacular approach.

This whole article is complete crap. It simply repeats the Pauline Kael ploy of pointing out one error of judgment, in order to use it as a cover to perpetrate another. Kael liked to ridicule, rightly, most reviewers' tendencies to overrated obvious message movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. But she used that criticism merely to exalt trashy spectacles that ALSO turned out to be lousy films. And who cares if Bay's movies are “beautiful”? Most kitsch IS beautiful in that way. That's what kitsch is. It isn't the professional critic's job to validate kitsch. The artworks of Nazi Germany carried that exact same sort of surface beauty. Leni Riefenstahl's films are among the most “beautiful” ever made, if by “beauty” you simply mean a sort of surface gorgeousness and slickness, and clever editing. It isn't an either/or choice between The English Patient and Michael Bay, because neither one of them is great or even good art. Each kind of movie merely appeals to a different sort of middlebrow.

This is Pauline Kael's lazy argumentation repeated yet again. Somehow the people who employ it never notice the flimsiness of their argument. Kael pointed out, correctly, how often well-intentioned middlebrow film critics exalted tedious liberal message movies like “Guess Who's Coming To Dinner,” then used that as a cover for her to exalt trashy spectacle instead. So while most reviewers in her day were busy overpraising Stanley Kramer Oscar bait, Kael praised nakedly obvious trash instead. The majority of critics praise alleged “substance” without style, whereas Kael praised style without substance. It's simply a slightly different form of obtuseness.

“The truth is that most film critics hate movies. The type of cinema that most critics love is, essentially, a kind of anti-cinema. It is a cinema that hates itself, that cannot abide being cinema, and wants desperately to be something else.”

Oh really? Then how does Hitchcock continue to top critics' polls of greatest filmmakers? He pioneered the “spectacular” and “populist” approaches. Why is Steven Spielberg so popular among reviewers? It is true that a lot of bad “message” movies win Oscars, just as lot of bad, politically correct “artsy” novels win literary prizes. It does NOT thereby follow, however, that John Grisham is a better writer than Michael Ondaatje. He's simply a different sort of bad.

His images look cool, but they do not grab me the way the action scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark do. I find myself texting and checking the time on my phone during his movies, even when the exciting stuff is happening.

It is food for thought, though; and you make a good case.

http://jewworldorder2008.blogspot.com/

If I was ten years old (maybe even thirteen), I'd probably enjoy Bay's movies quite a lot, but my standards have changed a bit since then (strange, I know). It's great that so many have been able to find ways to rationalize their love of emotionless, thoughtless, meaningless spectacle though, and it's truly admirable that Mr. Kerstein has decided to embrace his complete lack of taste instead of getting all defensive and angry about it like those snooty, movie-hating critics.

Thanks in large part to the tireless efforts and continuing contributions of undiscriminating fans like you, we shall most certainly be blessed with countless more patriotic masterpieces from this master of cinema cinema. Perhaps in a future article you will discuss the talents of those unjustifiably maligned practitioners of music music, The Jonas Brothers? (I hear they love America too James…you should definitely check them out)

That's the other commonality with all of the critics you mentioned – they're all liberal Blame-America types who probably loved “Stop-Loss” and “In The Valley of Elah” (I'd be surprised if anyone reading this even remembers those two God-awful crapfests). Not a single one of them would know a patriotic moment if it set off a firecracker in their pants.

Michael Bay is successful because his films embrace all that is awesome about America. It's because of his track record with his films that the Armed Forces worked together with him on the first Transformers film (outside of wartime engagement, the Armed Forces rarely work together on anything, and even in the few things they do work well on, it's usually one-to-one, not all Armed Forces working together, which was the case with Transformers).

Watch any of his films and tell me you can walk away without being full of pride at being American. I double-dog-dare you.