In Disguise Dept.

I haven't seen the second Transformers movie yet (the first one gave me gout of the soul) but I did think about a couple of things.

1. What would have happened if the Transformers franchise had been brought to the screen by the likes of PIXAR? And I'm not even talking about the animation division; I mean the screenwriters. This is the outfit that gave us a movie (Wall·E) where there wasn't even any dialogue or human characters for more than a third of its running time, and yet I was enthralled and captivated.

2. What would happen if you gave Michael Bay a small budget — say, $300,000 — and a digital camera and told him, "Go make the movie you want to make with this money. It doesn't have to have any commercial prospects. It just has to be something you want to make. Funny, beautiful, touching, strange, whatever. Just personal." What kind of movie would you get?

I'd love to try this experiment with any number of directors, but I'm most curious, as odd as this sounds, with applying it to directors of big brainless blockbuster entertainment. It might provide some further fuel for the argument that some bad directors are really good directors at the mercy of stupid material. Or it might prove once and for all that a hack is a hack is a hack.