Do you like watching an entire film through a tiny pinprick of light? Then boy do I have the film for you.
The Blair Witch Project comparisons are obvious - a bunch of young people head off into the wilderness with video cameras and go slowly insane - but the second half goes off in such a weird hallucinogenic, experimental cosmic horror tangent that it suffers slightly in the comparison. People expecting a straightforward found footage horror will be disappointed.
A better point of comparison is The Evil Dead (there are a couple of shots toward the end that seem to directly reference this as an influence). And this is what unlocked the film for me. Once I realised this film was just a bunch of genre sickos armed with a microbudget, a camera and buckets of caro syrup and having lots of fun, I vibed with the film a lot more. Unfortunately the many, many (way too many) frustrating torch scenes meant I’d already semi-checked out by the time I saw what they were actually trying to do and it wasn’t enough to fully save the film for me.
It’s a testament to Noah Hathaway’s performance that multiple generations have been so deeply traumatised by something that happens to a horse that we’re introduced to barely one scene before.
Oof this is a hard one to score. On the one hand, my kids absolutely loved it and it was everything they wanted from a Minecraft movie. There’s a reunion late in the film that had my son slapping both his knees with relief and delight and he was fully invested. For kids, this film is absolutely delivering the goods.
On the other hand, “kids like it” isn’t an excuse for a film to not really try. What we’re left with is a film about creativity that demonstrates almost no creativity in itself. Jack Black’s entire direction appears to have been “just do your normal Jack Black thing pls”. The main characters have no arc and are completely forgotten for large parts of the film, completely lost in the messy action. There were a couple of nice creature effects, but most of the effects felt flat and volume-y.
On the the other other hand (we’re on our third hand now), this really could have been a lot worse.
This just didn’t work for me. The first act was a bit of grim fun but ultimately felt like Director Bong on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, the film becomes something else entirely when Ruffalo and Colette appear giving career-worst performances and completely upend the film’s tone and pointedness of the satire.
A fun mash-up of spy film styles. The understated, rigidness of Le Carre combined with the jazzy smoothness of Bond, Black Bag is entertaining enough and breezes along but I’m afraid this wasn’t a total success for me. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s impeccable as you’d expect from a film shot by Peter Andrews (I know). But narratively, it was all over the place. The stakes of the story are Hollywood-enormous ‐ literal nuclear meltdown ‐ but the protagonist’s main concern are some very British dinner parties. In video games, they call this ludonarrative dissonance and it’s confusing as hell.
All the same, I’m glad someone gave this a go but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again..
I know England in the 80s looked post-apocalyptic but holy shit Alan Clarke really pushes it in Road, turning it into a Beckettian primal scream of working-class rage. Lesley Sharp’s monologue is heartbreaking and the obvious highlight of the film but the real genius is the camera: unflinching and constantly moving, refusing to give us comforting edit breaks. I don’t think a fourth wall break has ever made me as uncomfortable as they did here.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, Bill Gates has released this really terrific memoir of how they got started, including the source code for the original Microsoft Basic, which he claims is “the coolest code I’ve ever written”. It’s such a great artifact and the presentation is chef-kiss perfect.
When I was 15, it felt like everyone in my all-boys school discovered Full Metal Jacket at the same time. And it’s impossible to overstate what an impact it had on us at that age. We thought it was the ne plus ultra of hardcore, grown-up filmmaking and we made sure we could recite pretty much every line from scratch. God, we were insufferable.
Watching it now, it’s hard to be completely objective because of the oversize impact it had on me/us at that age. But the thing that stands out is just how much it feels like it was specifically designed to appeal to teenage boys. But being teenage boys, we completely missed the ironic detachment of the film and so we just saw the whole thing as a big macho act. We missed the fact that the scenes, each iconic on its own, never really cohere into a truly effective whole, especially with the bifurcated structure of the story.
A masterpiece of breathless “just then” storytelling. Vienna goes to the bank and JUST THEN the gang decide to rob it and JUST THEN one of them kisses Vienna and JUST THEN etc etc. It’s extremely shallow stuff, but that’s not what makes this film stand out. It’s the performances that are the real draw here. Okay so Sterling Hayden is extremely wooden but the female leads are crushing it. Crawford is fiery, and McCambridge is electric as the malevolent Emma Small whipping the town into a frenzy. The McCarthyism allegory is interesting but also reflects our current political situation, which is more than just a little heartbreaking.
Painterly in its composition. That final shot is as gorgeous as anything ever put on screen. But its reach exceeds its grasp, as Scott struggles to inject any emotionality into the film and Carradine struggles with the material in general.
It’s a bold and audacious debut that represents the best and the worst we’d see from its director over the next 50-odd years..
johnke.me
