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