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There's no chimney, is there?
My week got off to a miserable start, so I watched a movie filled with the ever-present threat of drowning and I felt a lot better.
Kevin Macdonald's Black Sea (2014) opens with a riddle: what are we seeing in this economical, wordless montage of WWII-era footage grainily washed in water-blue and bleeding crimson, Hitler saluted from the deck of a submarine, Nazi flags waving in the sea breeze, a long considering look from Stalin and sea-charts with Russian names and finally a flurry of depth charges and torpedoes? The unmistakable silhouette of a U-boat glides down out of the blue-dimming last of the light and the title comes up across the dark where it disappeared. As we'll learn before the end of the first act, it's a legend. In 1941, with Nazi Germany short of cash and the then-neutral Soviet Union afraid of invasion, Hitler offered to hold off on the Eastern Front in exchange for 80 million Reichsmark. Stalin took the deal; Hitler sent a U-boat to collect. But something went wrong—whether through enemy action, treachery, or accident, his couriers never brought the promised payoff home. Hitler broke his non-aggression pact and Russia broke his army. To this day, the lost U-boat and its millions of dollars in gold bars are still rumored to lie at the bottom of the Black Sea, one more fabulous wreck in the lightless, anoxic deep.
In ordinary times, a hard-headed, hardworking Aberdeen man might not give this story too much credence, any more than he'd try to borrow a couple of quid off the Flying Dutchman. (In point of fact it was invented by the screenwriter, Dennis Kelly.) It's irresistible, however, to Jude Law's Robinson, a veteran skipper of submarines ungraciously laid off after eleven years faithfully and expertly working salvage for Agora Marine Management, the very same corporation that located a likely-looking U-boat on a sunken ridge off the Georgian coast but failed to get inside it before the Russo-Georgian War redrew the border and placed the wreck in disputed waters, effectively off limits to Agora thanks to "paperwork and fucking politics." Until that's sorted out, it's just lying there waiting for a man with the grudge and skill to play tag with the Russian navy for $40 million, particularly $40 million nipped out from under the noses of his former employers whose idea of a severance package was an insult at best. There's as much class anger in Black Sea as there is the thrill of the heist. Robinson's scheme may be funded by a mysterious businessman (Tobias Menzies) whose charity is in direct proportion to the cut of tax-free gold he expects to receive, but the crew he assembles are all redundant blue-collar types like himself, some ex-navy, some ex-cons, all talented and all desperate. "When I was young," Konstantin Khabensky's Blackie sighs commiseratingly, pockets full of wristwatches like cards up a magician's sleeve, "all I think about was sex. Now I think only money. You're dogshit in this wonderful world without money, my friends." He has the "contacts" in Sevastopol to procure them a decommissioned Foxtrot-class submarine (the former B-49, now Black Widow) that looks like all the rust in the Crimea scraped together and fitted with a periscope, but it's seaworthy. He has the language skills to hold together the two halves of the crew, too, an even split between British and Russian with one American outlier in the person of Daniels (Scoot McNairy, metaphysically Paul Reiser), the press-ganged middle manager—their backer keeping an eye on his investment—who moans, "This wreck's going to sink!" only to be told dryly, "Fucking useless sub if it don't." Robinson has the years of command and the boiling sense of injustice. The boat's weathered bow butts beneath the green waves, its conning tower leaves a brief whale-white track and disappears. The tin can and its motley sardines are away.
In one sense there's no great mystery with this setup: we want to know if our antiheroes will recover the gold, but whether they do or they don't, we're waiting to see if their stresses and rifts and agendas and breaking points will undo them like so many other thieves fallen out. Six of Alistair MacLean, half a dozen of John Huston. If Black Sea doesn't quite rise to either of those levels, at least it doesn't get crushed under the pressure of cliché. The plot is full of bad luck and bad decisions, but for the most part both feel organic; there are very few Hollywood moments, even the triumphant ones. With the exception of Law, who looks rougher and more volatile here than I can remember ever seeing him, the casting is pure character actor and it pays off with the quick, sharp sketches in Kelly's script. Practical, not unkindly cynical Reynolds (Michael Smiley) refers to himself and his fellow sailors as "penguins," by which he means that at sea they're comfortable, graceful, and competent, but a penguin on dry land is "just a wee waddling prick." For proof, just look at Ben Mendelsohn's Fraser. Roaming the sub's corridors, playing with his gutting knife, the master diver is a violently territorial hothead responsible for two of the sub's most disastrous altercations; he escalates fights, starts them if they don't exist, and is generally a landfill fire waiting to happen. Suited up, moving like an astronaut through silt-clouds of black water, he's all professional cool; he prides himself on never having lost a man and talks novice Tobin (Bobby Schofield, Andrew's son) through his first deep-water dive as steadily and reassuringly as if they were friends, not unspoken competition for Robinson's promised equal shares. Bring him back inside and he demonstrates all the stability of nitroglycerin on the Coney Island Cyclone, with the inevitable chasers of regret, shame, and even more anger. He's the most extreme example, but no one of this crew is any one thing, for good or ill. Some are unknown quantities, like Morozov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), the tall, reserved navigator with a beard like a young priest, but others are just tricky and valuable, like bearish engineer Zaytsev (Sergei Puskepalis) or wheezy ex-diver Peters (David Threlfall). Blackie looks like a joker with his elastic expressions and explosive profanity, but he's the resilient spine of the boat, no pushover despite his unassuming smile. It's not great that his constant mediation between mutually unintelligible crewmates puts him in the way of so many shouting matches, but who else have they got? Even tough, idealistic Robinson will go a little crazy before the end, less from greed than the increasingly reckless idea that successfully recovering the gold will be sticking it to Agora, the bosses, the faceless one-percent "they" who skim their posh schools and luxury vacations off the backs of better men; he's not wrong, but it'll be a Pyrrhic victory if he gets all his ninety-nine-percenters killed proving it. If you don't believe in any of these people, the film's just a collection of nicely tuned moving parts. I might have changed a few points in the portrayal of Daniels, just because I've seen Aliens (1986) and I know how this character goes, but otherwise my sole complaint is that the nature of the genre—if social-justice-heist-adventure-survival-horror is a genre—precludes everyone we meet from making it to the closing credits.
I am not sure that we need to see Jodie Whittaker as Robinson's ex-wife. We know almost nothing about her, except that his friends liked her and his long absences broke up their marriage and now he dreams about her and their son ("Daddy lives on a boat") in sun-dazzled, lens-flaring snapshots of a perfect day by the sea, the tourist's sea of sapphire-blue breakers and sun-warmed white sand rather than the murky, working sea of charts and instruments and rocks and riptides and the inescapable hot engine oil smell. She's important to him, but what's important to the film is her absence. We could get that just as clearly from conversations and photographs. I am interested by the way she functions as a kind of siren, appearing most vividly to Robinson when he's closest to death despite the fact that Chrissy herself isn't the least bit dead, just divorced and remarried and raising their child with another man, but in general I feel that if your only reason for women in your movie is their symbolic value to men, please just make an all-male movie and spare me the angel in the house. I can take it. I prefer it to movies where women are tokens, literally. So much of Black Sea is focused thematically on masculinity: the anxieties and definitions of manhood, whether that means your work or your family or not letting yourself get pushed around by big business or stabbing your translator because violence is your only learned response; some of its observations about identity and priorities and anger and greed are universal, but some are specific to under-employed, working-class cis dudes.
I read and loved Macdonald's biography of his grandfather last year without ever having seen any of Macdonald's own films; I started with this one frankly because it looked like fun. He seems to direct mostly documentaries, often award-winning ones, with occasional forays into fiction, of which I had noticed The Last King of Scotland (2006) because of Forest Whitaker and The Eagle (2011) because of Rosemary Sutcliff. It's tempting to credit that background with the naturalistic feel of Black Sea, which gets away with some high-octane action because it's set in a diesel–electric rustbucket crewed by a dozen men instead of seventy-eight and running deep and silent except for when some bampot forgets and flips on the radio to check the National Lottery. There's no need for artificially injected tension with matter-of-fact horrifying death never more than a few inches of plate steel and cooperation away. Macdonald has a restless camera, often shallowly focused so that characters sharpen in and out of the audience's attention as they move through the field of vision; it turns out this technique doesn't annoy me when it's meticulously cued to blocking and dialogue and it highlights the claustrophobia of the environment, keeping the film's point of view as restricted and hemmed in as the characters in their tight corridors of rivets and valves. You might get a better look at the big picture if you stepped back, but good luck phasing through that hatch if you try. Even in brief external cutaways, we are always aware of the stacked weight of water on all sides, the eerie fragility of something as bulky and churning as an old Soviet submarine half-glimpsed like an eel in the silt-green gloom. Cinematographer Christopher Ross has a trick of photographing the men's faces like sculpture, chiseled imperfectly out of sweat and light; the film's palette is richly saturated and heavy on the blues, sea-suffused until the emergency lighting turns the sub's interior into a hellish Christmas tree. Justine Wright's editing keeps time with the close-cropped camera, tighter and quicker on dialogue, easing up to drift in the underwater scenes—of which there is one extended, superb example in the second act, combining the supernatural stain of a haunting and the cold equations of a spacewalk. You may note that I haven't gone into the plot much, because it's the kind that's much less gripping to summarize than to watch, but I will say that it contained just as much heroic engineering as I was hoping, including a jerry-rigged, analog substitute for sonar that made me grin as much as anything in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).
And it was full of the sea, which is what I wanted, the sea held at bay with a thin bubble of engineering and chutzpah, the sea always searching for a way in, that is so much stronger than you are, here before the oldest of you and here long after the last of you and the way things are tending, that might be any second now. The deep sea, not the splashing surface. The crush-depth heart of Tethys. Recommend me some more submarine movies, with or without Sean Connery, John Mills, or U-96. This dive brought to you by my benthic backers at Patreon.
Kevin Macdonald's Black Sea (2014) opens with a riddle: what are we seeing in this economical, wordless montage of WWII-era footage grainily washed in water-blue and bleeding crimson, Hitler saluted from the deck of a submarine, Nazi flags waving in the sea breeze, a long considering look from Stalin and sea-charts with Russian names and finally a flurry of depth charges and torpedoes? The unmistakable silhouette of a U-boat glides down out of the blue-dimming last of the light and the title comes up across the dark where it disappeared. As we'll learn before the end of the first act, it's a legend. In 1941, with Nazi Germany short of cash and the then-neutral Soviet Union afraid of invasion, Hitler offered to hold off on the Eastern Front in exchange for 80 million Reichsmark. Stalin took the deal; Hitler sent a U-boat to collect. But something went wrong—whether through enemy action, treachery, or accident, his couriers never brought the promised payoff home. Hitler broke his non-aggression pact and Russia broke his army. To this day, the lost U-boat and its millions of dollars in gold bars are still rumored to lie at the bottom of the Black Sea, one more fabulous wreck in the lightless, anoxic deep.
In ordinary times, a hard-headed, hardworking Aberdeen man might not give this story too much credence, any more than he'd try to borrow a couple of quid off the Flying Dutchman. (In point of fact it was invented by the screenwriter, Dennis Kelly.) It's irresistible, however, to Jude Law's Robinson, a veteran skipper of submarines ungraciously laid off after eleven years faithfully and expertly working salvage for Agora Marine Management, the very same corporation that located a likely-looking U-boat on a sunken ridge off the Georgian coast but failed to get inside it before the Russo-Georgian War redrew the border and placed the wreck in disputed waters, effectively off limits to Agora thanks to "paperwork and fucking politics." Until that's sorted out, it's just lying there waiting for a man with the grudge and skill to play tag with the Russian navy for $40 million, particularly $40 million nipped out from under the noses of his former employers whose idea of a severance package was an insult at best. There's as much class anger in Black Sea as there is the thrill of the heist. Robinson's scheme may be funded by a mysterious businessman (Tobias Menzies) whose charity is in direct proportion to the cut of tax-free gold he expects to receive, but the crew he assembles are all redundant blue-collar types like himself, some ex-navy, some ex-cons, all talented and all desperate. "When I was young," Konstantin Khabensky's Blackie sighs commiseratingly, pockets full of wristwatches like cards up a magician's sleeve, "all I think about was sex. Now I think only money. You're dogshit in this wonderful world without money, my friends." He has the "contacts" in Sevastopol to procure them a decommissioned Foxtrot-class submarine (the former B-49, now Black Widow) that looks like all the rust in the Crimea scraped together and fitted with a periscope, but it's seaworthy. He has the language skills to hold together the two halves of the crew, too, an even split between British and Russian with one American outlier in the person of Daniels (Scoot McNairy, metaphysically Paul Reiser), the press-ganged middle manager—their backer keeping an eye on his investment—who moans, "This wreck's going to sink!" only to be told dryly, "Fucking useless sub if it don't." Robinson has the years of command and the boiling sense of injustice. The boat's weathered bow butts beneath the green waves, its conning tower leaves a brief whale-white track and disappears. The tin can and its motley sardines are away.
In one sense there's no great mystery with this setup: we want to know if our antiheroes will recover the gold, but whether they do or they don't, we're waiting to see if their stresses and rifts and agendas and breaking points will undo them like so many other thieves fallen out. Six of Alistair MacLean, half a dozen of John Huston. If Black Sea doesn't quite rise to either of those levels, at least it doesn't get crushed under the pressure of cliché. The plot is full of bad luck and bad decisions, but for the most part both feel organic; there are very few Hollywood moments, even the triumphant ones. With the exception of Law, who looks rougher and more volatile here than I can remember ever seeing him, the casting is pure character actor and it pays off with the quick, sharp sketches in Kelly's script. Practical, not unkindly cynical Reynolds (Michael Smiley) refers to himself and his fellow sailors as "penguins," by which he means that at sea they're comfortable, graceful, and competent, but a penguin on dry land is "just a wee waddling prick." For proof, just look at Ben Mendelsohn's Fraser. Roaming the sub's corridors, playing with his gutting knife, the master diver is a violently territorial hothead responsible for two of the sub's most disastrous altercations; he escalates fights, starts them if they don't exist, and is generally a landfill fire waiting to happen. Suited up, moving like an astronaut through silt-clouds of black water, he's all professional cool; he prides himself on never having lost a man and talks novice Tobin (Bobby Schofield, Andrew's son) through his first deep-water dive as steadily and reassuringly as if they were friends, not unspoken competition for Robinson's promised equal shares. Bring him back inside and he demonstrates all the stability of nitroglycerin on the Coney Island Cyclone, with the inevitable chasers of regret, shame, and even more anger. He's the most extreme example, but no one of this crew is any one thing, for good or ill. Some are unknown quantities, like Morozov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), the tall, reserved navigator with a beard like a young priest, but others are just tricky and valuable, like bearish engineer Zaytsev (Sergei Puskepalis) or wheezy ex-diver Peters (David Threlfall). Blackie looks like a joker with his elastic expressions and explosive profanity, but he's the resilient spine of the boat, no pushover despite his unassuming smile. It's not great that his constant mediation between mutually unintelligible crewmates puts him in the way of so many shouting matches, but who else have they got? Even tough, idealistic Robinson will go a little crazy before the end, less from greed than the increasingly reckless idea that successfully recovering the gold will be sticking it to Agora, the bosses, the faceless one-percent "they" who skim their posh schools and luxury vacations off the backs of better men; he's not wrong, but it'll be a Pyrrhic victory if he gets all his ninety-nine-percenters killed proving it. If you don't believe in any of these people, the film's just a collection of nicely tuned moving parts. I might have changed a few points in the portrayal of Daniels, just because I've seen Aliens (1986) and I know how this character goes, but otherwise my sole complaint is that the nature of the genre—if social-justice-heist-adventure-survival-horror is a genre—precludes everyone we meet from making it to the closing credits.
I am not sure that we need to see Jodie Whittaker as Robinson's ex-wife. We know almost nothing about her, except that his friends liked her and his long absences broke up their marriage and now he dreams about her and their son ("Daddy lives on a boat") in sun-dazzled, lens-flaring snapshots of a perfect day by the sea, the tourist's sea of sapphire-blue breakers and sun-warmed white sand rather than the murky, working sea of charts and instruments and rocks and riptides and the inescapable hot engine oil smell. She's important to him, but what's important to the film is her absence. We could get that just as clearly from conversations and photographs. I am interested by the way she functions as a kind of siren, appearing most vividly to Robinson when he's closest to death despite the fact that Chrissy herself isn't the least bit dead, just divorced and remarried and raising their child with another man, but in general I feel that if your only reason for women in your movie is their symbolic value to men, please just make an all-male movie and spare me the angel in the house. I can take it. I prefer it to movies where women are tokens, literally. So much of Black Sea is focused thematically on masculinity: the anxieties and definitions of manhood, whether that means your work or your family or not letting yourself get pushed around by big business or stabbing your translator because violence is your only learned response; some of its observations about identity and priorities and anger and greed are universal, but some are specific to under-employed, working-class cis dudes.
I read and loved Macdonald's biography of his grandfather last year without ever having seen any of Macdonald's own films; I started with this one frankly because it looked like fun. He seems to direct mostly documentaries, often award-winning ones, with occasional forays into fiction, of which I had noticed The Last King of Scotland (2006) because of Forest Whitaker and The Eagle (2011) because of Rosemary Sutcliff. It's tempting to credit that background with the naturalistic feel of Black Sea, which gets away with some high-octane action because it's set in a diesel–electric rustbucket crewed by a dozen men instead of seventy-eight and running deep and silent except for when some bampot forgets and flips on the radio to check the National Lottery. There's no need for artificially injected tension with matter-of-fact horrifying death never more than a few inches of plate steel and cooperation away. Macdonald has a restless camera, often shallowly focused so that characters sharpen in and out of the audience's attention as they move through the field of vision; it turns out this technique doesn't annoy me when it's meticulously cued to blocking and dialogue and it highlights the claustrophobia of the environment, keeping the film's point of view as restricted and hemmed in as the characters in their tight corridors of rivets and valves. You might get a better look at the big picture if you stepped back, but good luck phasing through that hatch if you try. Even in brief external cutaways, we are always aware of the stacked weight of water on all sides, the eerie fragility of something as bulky and churning as an old Soviet submarine half-glimpsed like an eel in the silt-green gloom. Cinematographer Christopher Ross has a trick of photographing the men's faces like sculpture, chiseled imperfectly out of sweat and light; the film's palette is richly saturated and heavy on the blues, sea-suffused until the emergency lighting turns the sub's interior into a hellish Christmas tree. Justine Wright's editing keeps time with the close-cropped camera, tighter and quicker on dialogue, easing up to drift in the underwater scenes—of which there is one extended, superb example in the second act, combining the supernatural stain of a haunting and the cold equations of a spacewalk. You may note that I haven't gone into the plot much, because it's the kind that's much less gripping to summarize than to watch, but I will say that it contained just as much heroic engineering as I was hoping, including a jerry-rigged, analog substitute for sonar that made me grin as much as anything in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).
And it was full of the sea, which is what I wanted, the sea held at bay with a thin bubble of engineering and chutzpah, the sea always searching for a way in, that is so much stronger than you are, here before the oldest of you and here long after the last of you and the way things are tending, that might be any second now. The deep sea, not the splashing surface. The crush-depth heart of Tethys. Recommend me some more submarine movies, with or without Sean Connery, John Mills, or U-96. This dive brought to you by my benthic backers at Patreon.
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Tobias Menzies
YOU HAD ME AT HELLO
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I think it came and went here in a matter of weeks: IMDb puts its U.S. release date at January 2015, which means it was the dead of winter and everyone was paying attention to the Oscar bait anyway. I really liked it. I would not have felt ripped off if I'd bought a ticket in theaters. Have you seen anything else of Macdonald's? I am heavily inclined to watch my way through the rest of his movies, even the documentaries, just to see if any of the rest are like this.
YOU HAD ME AT HELLO
In the interests of full disclosure I must warn you that his part is a small one, but like everyone else in the movie he does exactly what he needs to with it.
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I never saw it for just that reason, because The Eagle of the Ninth was such a strong chilhood imprint, but now I'm thinking I might enjoy it, even if I have to consider it as its own thing.
My father saw The Last King of Scotland. Forest Whitaker is one of his favorite actors. I should ask if he recommends it.
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Two out of three of those I can get behind! (And if the third is enough of a gap, I'll be fine. If it's the uncanny valley of adaptations, we'll see.)
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(T also refused to watch Shakespeare adaptations with me for a while, but I got better about that.)
*And then there's also adaptations that sit in a kind of uneasy intersection but I love them anyway, like Lee's Sense & Sensibility and Princess Bride and Room with a View and Virgin Suicides and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Trainspotting and Ryder's Little Women and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the adaptations are pretty faithful but also really different in some crucial underpinning details. I love them, but they're also the kind of adaptations that people can go to the books afterwards and be all "WTF?"
(See also, every adaptation of Lolita ever. She's not a seductress! She's not conscious about it! -- BUT ANYWAY)
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To its credit, I think the 1962 film of Lolita knows that, but it's got other problems, including the fact that the answer to the breathless advertisement "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?" is rather obviously ". . . They didn't."
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It is indeed Kubrick. I've written about it a little. Years later Nabokov decided the ideal Lolita would have been Catherine Demongeot of Zazie dans le Métro (1960), which would never have flown in Hollywood, but I can see it.
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....if there is a point here I have strayed far from it. /o\
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Oh, I pass her regularly - she's visible from the train into London as it crosses the Medway. And that's a fair description.
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That's really cool! Please say hello to her the next time you pass. She performed her part admirably.
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I watched it essentially cold (I knew the premise in the sense of "sunken Nazi/Russian gold, expedition to retrieve it shockingly does not go as planned") and I really enjoyed it. It's on my shortlist of sea-movies now.
I'm not sure I could watch, though. Sometimes films about small spaces actually trip my claustrophobia.
This film might do that less if you watched it on a TV or a computer, but it still might do that. It really is the camerawork. You could be looking into the galley of a submarine but confident you were really on a sound stage if the camera had more freedom of motion, more distance. Here at certain points the camera can't draw back because there's just no further back to go.
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(The author greatly disliked the movie tho. Oh dear.)
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I know of Das Boot, but have not yet seen it. All signs point to me really liking it when I do, though. It's even got Otto Sanders.
(The submarine films I've seen that I can remember are The Hunt for Red October (1990) and We Dive at Dawn (1943), with a kind of honorable mention for The Spy in Black (1939), which stars a U-boat captain but mostly takes place ashore. I guess that could also extend to 49th Parallel (1941), for more ironic values of "star." Okay, and none of The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming! (1966) could have occurred if Theodore Bikel hadn't run his submarine aground off the coast of New England trying to get a better look at America. Those are all kind of submarine-adjacent, though.)
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You can visit the Das Boot submarine set they used today at the Bavaria studios in Munich, and about an hour away of Munich, there's the Lothar Buchheim museum, Lothar Buchheim being the novelist whose book it's based on, who did serve on a WWII submarine; he was the son of painter Charlotte Buchheim and a great art collector & amateur painter himself - I hasten to clarify, due to his generation, that he did not collect stolen art! -, and the museum is worth a visit.
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I don't know if it got a broadcast on American TV, but it is now available on DVD; I have always assumed it's the version I should watch, as with Fanny and Alexander (1982).
They both had this anecdote about the US premiere of Das Boot where during the initial intro text at the start of the cinematic version that tells the audience how many German submarines and their crews were destroyed during WWII there was a loud cheer in the American audience, and Petersen & Eichinger looked at each other and thought, good lord, this is never going to work, but by the end of the movie the same audience was, err, anything but cheerful, as intended.
Good! That's how empathy is supposed to work!
Lothar Buchheim being the novelist whose book it's based on, who did serve on a WWII submarine
Nice. Was the novel autobiographical in that sense or just written from experience?
We used to visit the USS Albacore on the way to and from my grandparents in Maine when I was growing up. (It almost certainly went into this poem.) I tend to like submarines.
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Nice. Was the novel autobiographical in that sense or just written from experience?
It was autobiographical, though, as is usual with novelists, in a fictionalized way. To quote from an article about Buchheim: "His experiences as a crew member of the VII - C submarine U 96 are the basis of his best known book, "Das Boot" from 1973. In 1943, he wrote his article "Jäger im Weltmeer" which describes a furious fight between a German submarine and a British destroyer, the event which would later show in fictionalized form in "Das Boot". In 1944, Buchheim escaped with U 309, one of the last German submarines in the Atlantic harbors of France, from the fortress Brest. This evacuation was the basis of his novel "Die Festung" from 1995."
Submarines are fascinating. The first one I ever saw was the one they have in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, when I was a child. Until then, I had imagined them like Captain Nemo's large vessel, and so when I saw how much, or rather, little, actual living space there was for the crew I was stunned.
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I've never seen the film edit. I keep feeling I should, just for comparison, and then I remember that it deletes most of the supernatural aspects and a lot of the emotional tissue and I wonder why I want to do that to myself.
Until then, I had imagined them like Captain Nemo's large vessel, and so when I saw how much, or rather, little, actual living space there was for the crew I was stunned.
I can see that. The thing is that I live very badly with people, and would undoubtedly live much worse with people in the close quarters of a submarine, but just for wandering around in, I loved the compactness. It was neat, like so much good engineering; I felt about it the same way I did about the space shuttle. And it was full of things to climb up and down and through, which as a child was a very important part of the experience.
[edit] I don't know when I will be able to write it up, because I am swamped, but I saw Das Boot, all five hours of the original television version, and it was as excellent as I had been promised.
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I will try. I loved it.
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in general I feel that if your only reason for women in your movie is their symbolic value to men, please just make an all-male movie and spare me the angel in the house. I can take it. --Same.
a decommissioned Foxtrot-class submarine ... that looks like all the rust in the Crimea scraped together and fitted with a periscope --pure *you*--great image.
Thank you!
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There are some wonderful lines in the script. I appreciated that even if it's a suspenseful movie, it's not a dead humorless one.
--pure *you*--great image.
Thank you!
Thank you!
You're welcome! Thank you for reading.
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Which reminds me, have you seen Kill List (2011)? I think I may have asked right after I saw it back in the LJ days, but you hadn't then.
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I think I've seen him only here and in A Field in England, but he's been great both times, as very different people.
Which reminds me, have you seen Kill List (2011)? I think I may have asked right after I saw it back in the LJ days, but you hadn't then.
I still have not! I really fell off on recent movies in the last couple of years.
I am trying to get better about it.Rest assured that if I watch it, I will undoubtedly write about it.no subject
Speaking of which, I finally got to see The Shape of Water and !!!!!!
Yeah. It made me think of you.
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I wrote it up in January! It was everything it was cracked up to be and, since nobody had warned me about Michael Stuhlbarg, even a little more.
Yeah. It made me think of you.
*glows*