Kevin Macdonald more often dons the cap of documentarian than fiction filmmaker, and his Black Sea shows it. He brings a grimy, festering, “you are there” realism to this lean, efficient work. This story of a deep, dark sea revealing mankind’s darker heart puts Jude Law in the position of a beleaguered, disgruntled, Scottish workaday ship captain unceremoniously fired from his day job. He takes it upon himself to seek a personal form of revenge and get rich quick in a damp, deep excursion into the crumpled, blistered quarters of a worn out submarine, surrounding himself with a crew of unsavory, functional types and the hopes and dreams of a treasure of gold deep within the hard-lost depths of the Black Sea. Troubles abound, from tension within the men, to physical difficulties in actually procuring the gold, to corporate lies and deceit, but all of them filter through and debate with the darkest secret of all: man’s worst enemy in his own unquiet self. If it sounds like a story out of the rough-and-tumble mid-’60s, a Sam (Fuller or Peckinpah, take your pick) or John Sturges dude-picaresque “picture” (as opposed to a film or a movie), you’d be right. It’s an ode to a style of film lost today, a sort of rivetingly adult, high-concept entertainment as scruffy and chiseled as a machine after a hard day’s work, and, for what its worth, it earns the comparison. Continue reading
Review: Black Sea
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I am not supposed to like Blackhat, or so I am told. I am told it has a poorly focused narrative, that it is messy, and that it is reckless. I am told that it is emotionally inert. If this is so, then my conception of emotion is very different from the majority of the modern viewing public. It seems as though people have forgotten that most Michael Mann films boast questionable screenplays and know not emotion in their narrative. It seems viewers have misplaced their understanding of who Michael Mann is, for Blackhat boasts the same strengths and weaknesses of any Mann film, and in some ways its successes are even greater than anything he has made since the turn of the century. Blackhat is, at the level of narrative, poorly focused, messy, reckless, and perhaps emotionally inert, but it is not artistically anything of these, and the same can arguably be said of any of Mann’s films. 
Just when I’d gotten over using “new” films for the weekly Midnight Screenings column, a film had to come along that would have been unethical to put anywhere but in the halls of the Midnight Screening. Next week we’ll return to older films, with an especially fitting two-fer of classic ’70s efforts important to the development of the Midnight Screening idea in real life and not simply on the internet. It promises fun, but in the meantime just check out that movie poster to the left. Seriously, even if you don’t read the review (which you absolutely should, if I have anything to say about it), just bask in the look of that poster. It speaks for itself. 
Update late 2018:
It is not a new claim to compare Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida to the works of Ingmar Bergman. The inner psychosis, washed out black-and-white cinematography, quiet, haunted feel of the air around the film, and the contemplative characters are all Bergman down pat. Even better, the film’s clinical, dry exterior, carefully modulated framing, and highly static camera meant to box off characters at a distance for observation are all patented art-house techniques used piercingly well in Ida. 
In a nearly dialogue-free sequence blanketed together by long-shots that cut only when absolutely necessary, capturing feeling and physical space with stunning, sparing clarity, we learn just about everything we could possibly need to know about the state of Wall-E‘s world with an awe-inducing elegance that casts its gaze on inspired little moments of action and (mostly) inaction. We are also treated to the finest cinematic homage to bright, feeling, humanist silent cinema snark this side of …well, the heyday of silent cinema. While Pixar’s follow-up film, Up, pulled out all the stops for a life (or two) in a minute, Wall-E is wonderfully content to just chill and explore its world a little in the most wonderfully non-narrative fashion, invested less in “arc” than in the little visual moments that define character. The opening scenes of the film are, quite literally, just a slice-of-life drama, except there’s nothing alive to be found. There’s just a robot, and his name is Wall-E.
Once upon a time there was a genre of film called the Bible Epic. More devourers of money than movies proper, they went the way all such genres eventually do: imploding on their own gluttonous mass and dragged kicking and screaming into a hell of their own making. The rise of European cinema in America had a lot to do with it. The American New Wave had much more. But the Bible Epic was doomed just like its dear bedfellow, the sword-and-sandal film, both with nowhere to go but the way of the Romans so often depicted with a curious confusion in both genres: self-immolation, a death from inside attempts to fly closer and closer to the sun without any sense of themselves. If the Bible Epic needed a few extraneous factors circling like vultures to truly crash-and-burn, that’s only insofar as reacting to these outside influences caused a need for even more strained, draggy, self-indulgent screenplays that insisted all the louder and prouder that they were just hot shit to increasingly deaf ears. 
The Long Take 