Film review: Blackhat, Michael Mann (2015)

There's an artist in the UK called Jim'll Paint It who uses Microsoft Paint to create affectionately absurd and frequently nightmarish renderings of scenes suggested by his fans, like "Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach":

Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach - ealadubhsidhe pic.twitter.com/wCuwLOzDII

— Jim'll Paint It (@Jimllpaintit) September 13, 2016

I mention this not only because it's utterly brilliant but also because, with a little help from this retrospective on Miami Vice by Stephen Hyden, I've realised that it provides a good way of illustrating how best to enjoy Blackhat, the 2015 hacker thriller from director Michael Mann.

Hyden says of Miami Vice that "the plot [...] matters less than how it looks and feels", and although I think Miami Vice is still a pretty terrible film, I also think Hyden's observation works perfectly for Blackhat.

Blackhat is about a hacker who gets let loose from jail so that he can help the US and Chinese governments track down a nastier hacker who caused a nuclear power station to go into meltdown. The good(ish) hacker is played by Chris Hemsworth, the same actor who plays Thor in those superhero films. Yes, really.

And despite his character's primary skills being by nature best deployed at a distance and distinctly non-physical, Hemsworth is soon gallivanting off to China and Malaysia, throwing tables at people and using screwdrivers for things other than upgrading his motherboard.

There's also a love interest, who's supposed to be a network engineer. This mostly involves caressing Hemsworth's forearms.

But none of this matters. What matters is that, as in two of Mann's masterpieces, Heat and Collateral, Mann has a reason for pointing his lens at things and making them beautiful. In this case those things include the interior of a Korean restaurant, the skeleton of a half-built skyscraper, bullet-riddled shipping containers and the control room of a decaying nuclear reactor.

Mann shoots cities, and people interacting with cities, better than anybody else around. Way better.

And so it doesn't matter how improbable it is that Thor-as-freed-from-prison-kickass-hacker would be sent into a still-hot reactor core to physically wrench out a hard drive while the walls crumble around him. What matters is that it gives Mann an excuse to shoot Hemsworth in a lime-green radiation suit smashing the place up with an axe (see one minute forty for a brief flash):

Just like Jim'll Paint It cramming Zippy, Kermit and Sooty into a reimagining of the Alien chestbuster scene, Blackhat takes a mountain of improbables and uses them as the anything-goes basis for creating something almost unbearably gorgeous. It's a work of art.

Book review - Vade Mecum, Richard Skinner (2015)

A vade mecum, the final few lines of Vade Mecum tell us, is a "guide or handbook, kept close at all times and used for instruction". I wouldn't go as far as keeping VM with me at all times, but I did take it away with me on a long weekend, and I do intend to keep it within handy reach for a while now that I'm back home, even though I've finished it. Why? Well, the main thing it has going for it is that it's a slim but dense source of things that sound interesting and that I want to check out...

This will be easiest for music, in this age of Spotify: there's a 12-page essay on dub as a musical style, for example - the longest entry in the book - and I want to listen to pretty much every musician and track mentioned in it.

Then there's the entry that consists solely of a list of moments / aspects from films, without any explanation of what they have in common. They're obviously bits Skinner likes / attributes something to, but why / what? Some explanation would have been nice actually, but you get the gist: the films are worth seeing.

I love collections of criticism and comment that span different media, and VM is a worthy addition to the likes of Adair's Surfing the Zeitgeist and Hitchen's Arguably. It's not quite on the same level, but it's a denser source of promising trails to follow, and well worth keeping close to hand for that reason alone.

The Everyone Moment

There comes a point in many a movie badguy's runtime at which he must impress upon an underling the scale of response needed to a certain situation, usually a threat posed by the hero. I think of this point as The Everyone Moment.

In John Wick, which I watched this morning, that moment goes as follows:

Boss: "Task a crew."
Underling: "How many?"
Boss: "How many do you have?"

I think of this moment as The Everyone Moment, and I like to think that every movie boss also thinks of it that way when their moment comes.

Why do I think of it so?

Because the definitive example of this moment, the instance every movie must now shrug its shoulders and surrender in the face of, is the instance in Leon / The Professional, as executed by Gary Oldman:

There are two reasons why this example will never be bettered. The most important is that Oldman is superb in this role, with barely a human hair's width between where he pitches it and going overboard. His isn't the scariest or even the craziest movie villain - the former honour is shared by the characters played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, to my mind; the latter I don't know, maybe Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight - but he is the zaniest movie villain who still manages to be scary.

The second is the actual scale of response the film delivers, which within the scope of my experience is matched only by the equivalent scene in Terminator 2 when the cops show up at Cyberdyne Systems. But T2's moment doesn't have Oldman.

Part 2:

A somewhat similar point in many action films is that at which the film establishes the badassery of its hero.

In John Wick this moment precedes the film's Everyone Moment by just a couple of minutes. It's a very successful, if slightly ridiculous scene, which starts with the following dialogue:

"It's not what you did, son, that angers me so. It's who you did it to."
"Who, that fuckin' nobody?"
"That fuckin' nobody ... is John Wick."

The badassery-establishing bit follows, but this is the bit that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

I haven't yet found the definitive example of this moment, but for the time being I think of it as the Ryback's File Moment, from the scene in Under Siege in which Gary Busey's character finds a personnel file on who we previously thought was a mere cook (well, not really, because he's played by Steven Seagal) and proceeds to read it aloud to his fellow badguys. It's a rather blatant scene, but effective nevertheless, mainly because of the great performances of Busey and Tommy Lee Jones:

If anyone wants to offer a suggestion as to the definitive Ryback's File Moment, have at it in the comments.

Book review: Story - Robert McKee

I'm often not the most perceptive person. For example, I managed to watch a film I like about half a dozen times without realising that one of the main characters kills himself. I probably would never have realised if my friend hadn't said to me, "Isn't it sad when..."

Which is why I wish I'd found Story 10 years ago. I've harboured the desire to write, on and off, pretty much ever since I learned to read, but aside from enjoying Stephen King's On Writing and, more recently, bookmarking useful websites that have reached me via Twitter, I haven't made the effort to get to grips with the craft of the process. I'm not sure why. I think fear plays a large part, but I need to give it more honest thought.

Anyway, Story is about the most instructive thing I've ever read. I may never successfully write anything, but I feel like I've taken about 12 gigantic leaps forward for having read this book. Going back to what I said at the start, I think I could have read books and watched films and TV forever without ever having come to such now-simple-seeming realisations as that the nature of the protagnist's conflict determines the medium for which the story is best suited.

For the ignorant like me, Story is packed with gems such as this.

Not only that, but McKee makes for a very entertaining, interesting and amiable teacher, so reading Story never feels like ploughing through a textbook. Instead, I wanted to reach for it as often as a good murder mystery, and it was only the frequency with which my mind was blown by the density of insight that made me put the book back down for a while every 20 pages or so.

I was in two minds whether to recommend the book or not, because the petty, jealous part of me thinks that the fewer people who know this stuff, the less competition there will be if I ever get my act together. But McKee deserves better thanks than that.

So thank you, Robert, very much.