64 - Disney's Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor
The lads hop into their fighter planes and get trapped in the world’s most boring love triangle as they are suddenly and deliberately attacked by Michael Bay’s much-maligned historical epic: Pearl Harbor. Topics include Bay’s deeply uncurious filmmaking, the interminable three-hour run time, and the responsibilities of artists when tackling historical fiction.
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Media Referenced in this Episode:
Pearl Harbor (2001): TMDB / Amazon Prime / Disney+ / AppleTV
“An Oral History of Michael Bay, the Most Explosive Director of All Time” by Sean Fennessey, GQ (June 27, 2011).
“‘Pearl Harbor’ at 20: Kate Beckinsale says she didn’t make sense to Michael Bay ‘because I wasn’t blond and my boobs weren’t bigger than my head’” by Kevin Polowy, Yahoo! Entertainment (May 22, 2021).
“How Racism, Arrogance, and Incompetence Led to Pearl Harbor” by Simon Worrall, National Geographic (December 4, 2016).
“Disney’s Pearl Harbor: National Memory at the Movies” by Geoffrey M. White,The Public Historian, Vol. 24, No.4, pp. 97-115. Accessed via JSTOR.
TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton:
brendan-dalton.com / brendandalton.bandcamp.com
Featuring Eleanor Philips as Michael Bay
Comments (9)
Still going through the backlog and y'all said that Secretariat is only important to the guy who wrote it. It's also important to Craig Ferguson. If you've never seen the weird ongoing secretariat gag from when he ran the late show please look it up it's very strange
"The Himbo Auteur" will forever be part of my lexicon
Episode's two years old, I know, so maybe you've gotten this correction before, but the Rape of Nanjing occurred four years before Pear Harbor, not as retaliation for the Doolittle raid. I don't normally like to point out errors, especially when they are tossed out offhanded, but I think it's important since the Empire of Japan had slaughtered millions of Chinese civilians, Japanese citizens of Korean descent, and many others they considered inferior for decades proceeding the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Rape of Nanjing needs to be understood as a chapter of a genocide rather than as an incident of reprisal. To suggest that it was the latter is not only factually incorrect, but obscures this part of history and, to an extent, absolves the perpetrators of their agency. Great episode otherwise, I'm serious, just that one bit got under my skin.
this is a good point and we edited a small snippet accordingly
I love it when you say “who is this for“ and it’s for me!
Also the bad Midway remale reset the clock on Pearl Harbour films too
I watched this far too many times are a pre teen on a family holiday where this was one of the only DVD. My main memory now is (I think) Bay shouting at an extra to be respectful for laughing on set.
Pearl Harbor was the 9/11 of movies
sorry to be the absolute worst version of myself, but your chat about commercial directors vs everyone else reminded me of this interview with (of course) godard. he goes big into the problem of american directors and their commercial style, tho he's infinitely way less forgiving of spielberg. kinda fun: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jean-luc-godard-interview-nouvelle-vague-histoires-du-cinema-helas-pour-moi/