One positive, one negative thing about... Michael Bay movies.

[Candlelight]

Bad Boys
Positive: Great Will Smith vehicle.
Negative: Not really that memorable.

The Rock
Positive: Great action flick.
Negative: Sean Connery plays the same character just like every other movie he's ever been in.

Armageddon
Positive: My favourite Bay film. Lots of splosions, mindless fun throughout.
Negative: Too many American flags.

Pearl Harbour
Positive: Brilliant battle scenes and great sense of nostalgia.
Negative: Waaaay too long, and the Doolittle raids shouldn't have been included. Plus historically inaccurate in parts.

Bad Boys II
Positive: Not seen it, although the car chase looked ok.
Negative: Not seen it.

The Island
Positive: Well filmed, great music score and Scarlett Johanssen.
Negative: Sean Bean is a walking characature of a bad guy so casting him was pretty bloody obvious.

Transformers
Positive: My favourite cartoon as a live action film - what's not positive?
Negative: The stupid scene with the Autobots 'hiding' at Sam's parent's house.

 

[Mr Light]

I like Michael Bay movies, they're certainly the high point for expensive looking action movies nowadays.

TRANSFORMERS: great huge nostalgic action movie // Not enough robot!

PEARL HARBOR: one hour of a great war movie // two hours of a horrible hackneyed romance

 

[Goliath]

PEARL HARBOR: one hour of a great war movie // two hours of a horrible hackneyed romance

Someone once described Pearl Harbor as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours."

 

[God Magnus]

Bad Boys
Positive: Martin Lawrence and Will Smith had a good chemistry.
Negative: The action (while fun) could have been better.

The Rock
Positive: Loved Sean Connery's performance as the "what if Bond had gone bad" type role.
Negative: Nicholas Cage.

Armageddon
Positive: Fun special effects.
Negative: The movie's premise falls apart if you think about it longer than five seconds.

Pearl Harbor
Positive: The attack sequence visuals are stunningly well done.
Negative: The rest of the movie almost put me to sleep.

Transformers
Positive: Amazing CGI work. The transformations were stunning.
Negative: Too many squishies.

 

[FordSVT]

I'll just repeat what I've said about Michael Bay in the past.

The good: Michael Bay is a talented director.
The bad: Michael Bay uses his talents for evil instead of good.

The good: Michael Bay is very good at what he does.
The bad: Adolf Eichmann was also very good at what he did. Being good at what you do is not necessarily a good thing.

The good: Michael Bay can polish a turd until it gleams like gold.
The bad: A polished turd is still a turd.

Perhaps you have less of a problem with Micheal Bay than the scripts and screenplays the studios saddle him with?

One thing I like about Bay that others seem to hate is his use of the camera. While I have some issues with the editing of his movies being too frenetic sometimes, I admire the man for not being afraid of making a shot from every and any angle he can dream up. He has done things with cameras no one has attempted before, and he doesn't get enough credit for it. Not every angle is a success, but better some failures than framing shots of rain running down windows like you just graduated from film school your entire career.

He's extremely enthusiastic about making movies, to the point of being obnoxious at times, so that's a positive that can be a liability. But his crew seems to love him, he's worked with largely the same group of people for years now, and that's rare too.

And he is a good director/manager, there are not that many people working in Hollywood who can consistently run large-budget motion pictures on the scale he does and not run over-time, over-budget, and under-performing at the box office for so long. Like it or not, that's important in the movie business.

Some people have very particular standards for dialogue and plot and direction and are disappointed when every movie doesn't live up to their expectations. Sometimes it can be hard to pack a lot of dialogue and complication into a big-budget movie that isn't 3-4 hours long when you're at the whim of a multitude of PTB and you've got to dedicate at least 40% of your screen time to action shots. A lot of people complain that Transformers, for instance, wasn't as complex as the comics, but what did they expect? That a 2 hour movie would be as complex as a hundred issues of comics? And a lot of complexity in books and novels comes from the introspection and internal narration of the characters, which can be very hard to put to screen.

 

[firehawk12]

Pearl Harbor:

Good (in a bad way) - he managed to turn the attack on Pearl Harbor into a classic buddy action cop movie car chase. It's so insane that it's hilarious.

Bad - ummm... the love triangle?