Frankly, neither of this week's wide releases -- Horrible Bosses and Zookeeper -- compelled me to see them in advance, and in the case of the latter, I can't imagine ever allowing it to enter my brain. So I don't know how much the words of Francois Truffaut, quoted above, apply to either of the directors behind those two Hollywood studio projects.
However, I think it's clear that Michael Bay and Tom Hanks had the public in mind when they conceived and made their latest projects, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Larry Crowne, respectively. The box office returns indicate that Transformers 3 is exactly what the public wanted to see over the 4th of July weekend, setting aside any reservations that may have been held over from the second installment of the series.
While it's true that Bay did not conceive of the first Transformers movie -- that "honor" belongs to toy company Hasbro and producer Don Murphy -- he was not simply a hired gun, even if Steven Spielberg was the one who did the hiring. Bay wanted the film "to be cool for teenagers and fun for adults." Transformers reflected what Bay thought the public wanted, and the same has been true for the sequels.
That has also been the pattern that Bay established from his feature debut, Bad Boys in 1995, onward through The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, and The Island. It's difficult to recall the characters who were portrayed in those films, but it's easy to remember the wisecracking cops / criminals / deep core drillers / soldiers / clones, as well as resolute heroes and nasty villains; the stereotypes are the same, with minor variations for period and location. What comes to mind even more readily are the spectacularly excessive action sequences, filled with explosions, flying bodies and vehicles, all intended to tickle the fancy of an increasingly jaded moviegoing public.
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