But I will never forget the review in FilmComment from several years back -- did he do Pearl Harbor? Maybe that was it. -- in which the reviewer said that Bay deserves a production budget that is at least as large as the US GDP. He backed up his thesis well, too.

Edit: Bingo: here's the relevant paragraph:

As I watched the sorry spectacle of Pearl Harbor, I kept longing to get back to the asteroid, where Michael Bay has enjoyed his greatest triumph thus far. Like Tony Scott, who stumbled into a fascinating, strangely disquieting form of airlessness with his long-lens doodlings in Revenge or The Fan (watching those films feels like being whiplashed through a series of vacuums), Bay has bullied, hectored, and assaulted his way into something exciting: a singular, abstract mental image buried deep within all of those colliding images and sounds, some kind of digitally generated, platinum-lined gateway to nirvana. I look forward to much, much more of the same. Some have complained that Bay's budgets are too high. I think they're too low. Just imagine what this guy could do with a billion dollars, NASA at his beck and call, and the state of Arizona at his disposal.

and a link: http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/7-8-2001/bay.htm