I Miss You More Than Michael Bay Missed The Point With Pearl Harbor

I've pretty much given up on the action genre as a whole, so I was able to dismiss Matthew Yglesias' stirring defense of Michael Bay pretty easily (by the way, that commercial he cites, where the couple fantasize about a life together and then suddenly realize the mundanity and reality of it, is based on a passage Peter DeVries wrote 20 years earlier). But I have to say that this may be the all-time comment for the record books:

The really amazing thing about that ad is that you can figure out where the characters are in relation to each other -- they're in an elevator together, the boy's on the left, the girl's on the right. That spatial coherence in itself sets this off from any of Bay's feature-length work.

Bay is not just the world's worst action director, he's actually setting back the accumulated history of cinema about 100 years. D.W. Griffith was the first one to determine film grammar, including cross cutting and screen direction continuity and insert shots and point of view. Bay is actually unspooling that. It's like giving Thomas Edison a $200 million-dollar budget.