+2
Justin Lin is actually a very talented, accomplished director. Fast 5 and Furious 6 are very well-crafted, have well conveyed senses of space and movement, expert timing and pacing and structure to their set pieces. Lin knows how to choreograph, film, and edit action so that it’s exciting and always coherent. He’s no Bergman with his actors (though gets suitably fine performances out of them), but he has as classical an understanding of directing action as Ford or Keaton or Spielberg. His F&F movies are very, very smart about being very dumb. One need only look at the last two Fast movies made by directors who don’t know how to direct action - not how to stage it, where to put the camera, or when to cut for maximum effect - to see Lin’s impressive contributions. He also made a name for himself with the very good indie drama Better Luck Tomorrow about a group of Asian high school students in California so hell-bent on succeeding and getting into the Ivy Leagues that they start with some light cheating and end up murderers. It did well at Sundance, Toronto, the Independent Spirit Awards, etc. Lin is a real director.
Michael Bay on the other hand has seemingly no sense of where to put the camera, how to stage and film action, when to cut for maximum effect, etc. He is a maximalist who avoids making decisions (which is the heart of directing) by placing cameras ****ing everywhere and cutting between them seemingly at random. He has no respect for spatial geography, no understanding of something as basic as how to convey movement, and is miserable at maintaining or juggling tones and usually gets abysmal work out of even very talented actors. His work is visually, spatially, temporally incoherent. Armageddon and Transformers 2 are some of the most incompetently directed studio films in Hollywood history. He’s a genuine and repeat failure as a narrative filmmaker and would be best suited to commercials where his empty flashiness is well suited and all that’s typically needed. Pain & Gain is something of an exception where I think his idiocy was the perfect match for the material, a movie about Michael Bay’s biggest fans essentially (or Burn After Reading as written and directed by Brad Pitt’s character) and his mindless excess worked for the material, but that movie is more set apart by its increased quality in writing and acting compared to the rest of his ouevre than by a grand leap forward in Bay’s direction. I think he’s genuinely an idiot manchild blessed with an endless budget, hard to distinguish from simply inviting a 9-year-old boy obsessed with fire trucks and explosions to take over a movie set and bark orders. He deserves the **** he gets and the small contingent of cinephiles who think he’s a vulgar auteur genius, like Paul W.S. Anderson and Uwe Boll, I think are just being contrary or seeing something that simply isn’t there in the work.