It’s one thing to make a film about a notably B-level filmmaker and arrive at a success like the 1994 acclaimed black and white biopic Ed Wood. But when you try the same thing about one of the best films ever made, you’re practically set up for failure. It would take some kind of miracle to take Jack Fincher’s clunky, meandering script for the new Netflix film Mank and make it work. A hodgepodge of character study and Hollywood quotes, plucking half-truths and grand real-life names of Hollywood’s past, Mank misfires from poor directing decisions and camera work, a lack of understanding or attention to re-creating the magic of black and white film in the color era. What could have been a love letter to one of America’s greatest celebrated films paints a picture of a screenwriter who, rightly or wrongly, comes off as an unlikeable drunk who couldn’t possibly deserve our attention.
One of the failings of many creators for kids is talking down to them. If you treat children from the very beginning like adults, they will step up to the task and embrace acting like adults. Kids know when adults are speaking down to them. They also will be excited when you give them the straight dope. So if you’re creating anything for an audience that includes kids, whether they are seven to seventeen, don’t hold too much back. And that applies double for relationships–kids are smarter than you think and they listen to everything and absorb everything. One of the best parts of Troop Zero is that you can’t tell if its a coming of age movie for adults or kids. And that’s a great thing.
Troop Zero is a new Amazon Studios direct-to-streaming release, and a great movie to watch while sitting at home with your family this weekend. We love coming of age movies (scroll through several we’ve discussed over the decade here at borg), and Troop Zero easily makes our top 20. This is the more nostalgic, sweet, genuine brand of coming of age film (the best kind), part The Bad News Bears, part Paper Moon, and it’s obviously a little bit Moonrise Kingdom and maybe even enters Shirley Temple territory like in The Little Princess. It also ties into one of our favorite NASA accomplishments, the Voyager space probes and golden records prepared by Carl Sagan with voices and music from Earth (also add the PBS documentary The Farthest–Voyager in Spaceto your must-watch list, reviewed here).
The movie stars the then-12-year-old actress McKenna Grace, who performs like someone with 20 years of experience. This girl has done everything, from playing young Sabrina in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, to young Captain Marvel in last year’s hit film, young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, and she’s the star of the coming summer release (we hope), Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Plus Independence Day: Resurgence, Ready Player One, and a regular on The Haunting of Hill House (the list goes on!). In Troop Zero she plays Christmas Flint, a girl with that same awkward but adorable appeal as Tatum O’Neal in her Oscar-winning performance in Paper Moon. Christmas has the reputation at school for still wetting the bed, she wears red galoshes so no one notices one leg is longer than the other, and no matter how much bad is thrown at her she responds with this incredible positivity. She also loves space, and thinks her dead mother is looking back at her from the stars. When she learns a member of NASA is in town to select a girl to voice the greeting on the Voyager space record, she assembles a ragtag team of girls (and one boy) to join the local scouts, and earn the minimum merit badge each to qualify to go to Jamboree where the troop with the best performance routine will have their voices recorded.
It looks entirely like an experimental expressionistic film, something created by an aspiring filmmaker in film school, maybe an ambitious effort to create something historical and strange like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Is production and costume designer-turned-director Robert Eggers′ The Lighthouse simply a horror movie about two lighthouse keepers or can we hope for something bigger, more of metaphor and allegory? Shot in black and white 35mm film, the initial appeal is for anyone fond of classic black and white Gothic horror. It’s billed as psychological horror, but will it feature psychological horrors of today or stick with more reserved terrors that reflect its more tempting, classic appearance?
The Lighthousestars character actor Willem Dafoe, and co-stars Robert Pattinson in his most public role since the announcement he will don the cowl and cape in a forthcoming Batman movie. Remember Michael Keaton releasing Beetlejuice, Clean and Sober, and The Dream Team with the new acting range spin to get us prepared to see him on the big screen as the dark knight detective? Genre niche popularity of the Twilight series and his brief stint in the Harry Potter franchise aside, Pattinson hasn’t had the universal appeal and popularity Keaton had with Night Shift and Mr. Mom, making him a household name. Can he convince fanboys and fangirls he has what it takes? Can audiences push the future aside and appreciate The Lighthouse for whatever Eggers is trying to do?
As for Eggers, who co-wrote the story with brother Max, this is his second film after the Anya Taylor-Joy vehicle The Witch. Here he’s trying that tried and re-tried convention of bringing black and white films to modern audiences. It often works, as it did with popular and critical success for Paper Moon, Young Frankenstein, Raging Bull, Dead Again, Schindler’s List,The Artist, Logan Noir, and Roma.
Take a look at this nicely moody trailer for The Lighthouse:
On first viewing of Logan, this year’s most critically acclaimed superhero film, a viewer may love it or leave it. It’s not your typical Marvel Comics adaptation, full of f-bombs and the bloodiest of action and violence. Yet it’s also a finely crafted final chapter to the successful X-Men film saga and a tribute to Hugh Jackman’s unprecedented nine-film run as Logan. Last week 20th Century Fox showed a limited screening arranged by the director of Logan in black and white, called Logan: Noir. The version is also included on the Blu-ray release available everywhere tomorrow. If you haven’t seen Logan, skip the theatrical version and go straight to Logan: Noir and if you have seen Logan prepare for a completely different experience with this special edition of the film.
Logan: Noir would be more aptly titled Logan: Black and White, as this is not so much classic noir than a modern Western tale shown in black and white. Thankfully writer/director James Mangold (Cop Land, 3:10 to Yuma, The Wolverine) carefully and elegantly filmed Logan with an eye for the stark contrasts that black and white film once regularly captured so well. Parts of the film will reach into your chest and hold you breathless, revealing the full potential of a comic book based film–and more specifically a superhero film.
Its bleak, cold landscapes are evocative of a John Ford (Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath) Western. Its slow, calculated scenic pans are something Stanley Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove) could only have hoped to have achieved in his early work. Inasmuch as Hugh Jackman is a classic, Western, antihero archetype in his so-far-gone, washed-up, tired and grizzled Logan–former Wolverine of the X-Men–he appears far lonelier and resigned to a dismal, unrelenting future in black and white. The cold contrasts in this Logan somehow create a vision more true to the Old Man Logan of the comic book source material.
