Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
In Churchill, opening in Bay Area theaters today, we’re asked to see the old English bulldog in a new and unflattering light as he attempts to bend the tide of history to his will. The film suffers from too narrow a focus, and an approach to story that is as simplistic as the former British prime minister was complex.
Like reading a dime novel from off the shelf of your local supermarket, Allied supplies a quick dose of melodrama, suspense, humor, and twists. It’s similarly digested easy, immediately emotional, and just as quickly forgotten. Director Robert Zemeckis has delivered his fair share of sensationalism, from Romancing the Stone to Forrest Gump to The Walk, and many memorable films in between (trust me, you’ve seen a lot of them). My semi-belabored point is, Zemeckis is no stranger to managing exaggerated storylines and overly dramatic plots. In Allied, he sets each scene like a stage play, without any noticeable complexity or vagueness. The complexity is left up to the characters. Yes it may be subtle, but while creating a blatant sense of the time period, the old school art direction also compliments the twists at the heart of the story — after all, this is an elaborate spy game. Pitt and Cotillard bring their serviceable ‘B’ game (not their best work but far from their worst), inflicting just enough charm and charisma into the plot to carry the somewhat nonsensical and ultimately forgettable story forward.
About halfway through Black Sea I realized that I wasn’t breathing. It was a scene in which a few members of the submarine crew exit into the blackness of the ocean floor, and the claustrophobic intensity got the best of me. I had to take a moment to inhale and exhale and remind myself that it’s just a film, and soon after I was sucked back into it. Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea is not just a deep sea treasure hunt that entertains with its thrills. The film sinks in deeper intellectually by the way it weaves in post-war sentiments, economic tensions, and the battle between war-torn human nature versus basic human values. Black Sea is the best submarine film released in many years, and one of the tightest thrillers in recent memory.