BAY WATCH

Is it guilty conscience or merely sour grapes that I detect in Michael Bay’s assertion that “the press don’t like to say nice things because nice is boring” in the round-table discussion of action movies (“How Much Bigger Can the Bang Get?” by Amy Wallace, Aug. 9). The cheap childishness of this remark is only matched by the far more expensive childishness of his last production.

He claims to have seen The Times’ reviewer at a screening of “Armageddon” “sitting there, 600 people cheering, laughing, and he had a scowl on his face. . . . It was like, ‘I hate that they love this movie. I’m going to torture this director.’ ” After shelling out $4.50 and enduring the movie’s interminable length, I thought the review had been fairly restrained.

Does Bay resent the fact that some of us who grew up watching motion pictures in theaters instead of MTV can still tell the difference between plotless schlock and a good action picture?

Admittedly, all the racket on screen kept me from going to sleep; otherwise, I found “Armageddon” an insufferably stupid piece of filmmaking that makes unpretentious, well-made science-fiction thrillers of the 1950s such as “The Thing,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or “It Came From Outer Space” look like masterpieces of cinema art on a par with “Intolerance” or “Citizen Kane.”

“Armageddon” never manages to create as much genuine excitement as the old Republic serials I used to see on Saturday afternoons.

DAVE CLAYTON

San Diego

*

As a member of the Writers Guild of America, West, It disturbs me that directors continue to get credit for everything.

Of the five men interviewed, only one (Steven E. de Souza) is a writer, and one other (Jonathan Mostow) is a writer-director. The others are directors, yet in the mini-credit lists next to each of their pictures there is dialogue quoted from films they’ve directed, under the sub-heading “Remember this?”

Memorable dialogue is written. By a writer. Remember that.

SHARON D. JOHNSON

Burbank