10 Great Black & White Films From the Last 20 Years

The upcoming Spring releases of two much-hyped black-and-white movies – Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” starring co-writer Greta Gerwig as an aspiring dancer, and Joss Whedon’s barebones stab at “Much Ado About Nothing” – left us wondering what modern movies have succeeded without the benefit of a full palette. So, with that in mind, here’s a look back at ten gloriously colorless (or largely color-deprived) movies from the last two decades.

“SCHINDLER’S LIST” (Steven Spielberg) 1993

The most famous director of all-time has loads of classics under his belt, including “E.T.” “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” but most critics view “Schindler’s List,” Spielberg’s deeply personal Holocaust drama, as his masterwork. Speilberg used color only sporadically through the film, most memorably on a small Jewish girl’s red coat as she attempts to navigate the chaos of the Krakow ghetto, and in the final scene as Schindler Jews are shown at Oskar Schindler’s grave site in Jerusalem.

“ED WOOD” (Tim Burton) 1994

Before he viewed powdering and propping up Johnny Depp as passable filmmaking, Tim Burton was was crafting some of the most entertaining movies of the late eighties and early nineties, including “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.” But Burton’s best examination of outsiderdom might have been “Ed Wood,” his biopic of the “Plan 9 From Outer Space” director, with Depp shining in the titular role. Burton returned to black-and-white with last year’s stop-motion fantasy “Frankenweenie” — a well-received return to form for Burton that was quietly one of the most fun-to-watch animated movies of the year.

“CLERKS” (Kevin Smith) 1994

In 2013, Kevin Smith has his fair share of detractors, and his directing career has proven to be a case of diminishing returns. But love him or hate him (and certainly you do one of those two things) Smith’s crudely acted, shoestring-budget debut “Clerks” has been hugely influential on the modern comedy scene, paving the way for mumblecore and the Apatow empire by making aimless dialogue about sex and “Star Wars” totally kosher, just so long as it’s entertaining. The movie also went on to inspire a (colored) sequel and a highly underrated animated television spin-off. Smith recently announced he will round out the “Clerks” saga as a trilogy, and make “Clerks 3? his final film.

“FOLLOWING” (Chris Nolan) 1998

Christopher Nolan’s first feature, made for a nearly unfathomable $6,000 dollars, feels like a $250 million universe from “The Dark Knight Rises.” But the twisty neo noir is still a Nolan flick through and through, featuring a meticulous plot, non-linear narrative, and obsessive characters with motivations you can’t quite pin down until the end. Nolan scores craftiness points not only for his clever story, which revolves around a shifty loner who begins to follow strangers, but also his ability to pull it off on an essentially non-existant budget.

“THE GIRL ON THE BRIDGE” (Patrice Leconte) 1999

Patrice Leconte is one of the few filmmakers whose range and restlessness might put Steven Soderbergh to shame. This glisteningly monochrome 1999 charmer about a knife-thrower (the great Daniel Auteuil) who uses suicidal young women as targets for his circus act plays like a mad French emulsion of a Federico Fellini film. Starring the gorgeously gap-toothed Vanessa Paradis as a girl with all the love in the world but no one on whom to pin it, this woozy romantic does more with shades than most movies could with a full Technicolor palette.

“THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE” (Joel and Ethan Coen) 2001

Buried in the shadow of three better-known Coen Brothers works (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou”), the often-overlooked “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is among the two-headed directing monsters’ best. As usual, the Coens were none too kind to their protagonist, sending the reticent Ed Crane (an exceptional Billy Bob Thornton) on a bottomless downward spiral following a failed blackmailing scheme. The neo noir throwback features appearances from Coen regulars Frances McDormand, Jon Pilito, and Richard Jenkins, as well some inspired villainy from James Gandolfini, and a pre-stardom Scarlett Johansson.

“SIN CITY” (Robert Rodriguez) 2005

Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel was just as entertaining as it was uber-violent, and brought Mickey Rourke back onto the Hollywood map with his memorable turn as the murderous, damn-near unkillable Marv. The gory neo noir, which also starred Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, and Bruce Willis, opened the door for more R-rated graphic novel adaptations – including “The 300? “The Watchmen” and Kick-Ass” – to make it into theaters. The long-anticipated sequel, “A Dame to Kill For,” is due out later this year.

“GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK” (George Clooney) 2005

George Clooney established himself as serious filmmaker with “Good Night and Good Look” a behind-the-scenes look at hard-smoking, no-nonsense Edward R. Murrow’s toe-to-toe face-off with Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare. It didn’t hurt that Clooney put together an impressive cast that included Robert Downey Jr., Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels and an unforgettable David Straitharn as the stone-faced Murrow. Serving as a slick criticism of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, “Good Night and Good Luck” made a compelling case for television – probably our most sneered-at medium – to be used in an ongoing battle against dishonesty and injustice.

“PERSEPOLIS” (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi) 2007

Part coming-of-age tale and part exploration of the complex effects of United States interventionism, Marjane Satrapi’s animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel suited the screen every bit as well as it suited the page. Satrapi’s tale of growing up amidst the political turmoil of 1980s Iran served as a touching reminder that while the grown-ups of the world grapple with religion and geopolitics, kids everywhere mostly just want to wear sneakers, drink a little booze, and listen to Michael Jackson. Strapi credits the movie’s black-and-white luck to her background in underground comics.

“THE WHITE RIBBON” (Michael Haneke) 2009

Michael Haneke is one of the few foreign directors regularly recognized in the United States, and for good reason: his work, from “Cache” to “Amour,” is consistently beautiful and wrenching. “White Ribbon,” his bleak examination of oppressive rural life in pre-World War I Germany, is just as haunting and heavy as his better-known works, and almost impossible to imagine in color. ‘The White Ribbon” went somewhat under the radar in the US, but took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2009.

Editor’s note: I’d add “Tabu,” “Lake of Fire,” “The Day He Arrives,” and pretty much everything made by Béla Tarr and Guy Maddin. What are some of your favorites, or films that we’re forgetting? Let us know in the comments section below.

Categories: Features

Tags: Black & White, Ed Wood, Frances Ha, Much Ado About Nothing, Schindler's list, The White Ribbon

Why So Serious? How this Year’s Action Movies Are Proving that Fun is the Future

Antoine Fuqua’s “Olympus Has Fallen” hit theaters last Friday, and its arrival announces a possible new chapter in its director’s now twenty-year career. Fuqua has carved out something of a niche with his brand of gritty action drama, from the mud-colored theatrics of “King Arthur” to the crooked-cop morality play of “Training Day,” still his most successful film to date, but “Olympus” represents a surprising turn toward honest-to-goodness levity. A duly patriotic riff on the shopworn “Die Hard” template, “Olympus” seems from the outset like just another blast of urban grit and uncomfortable conservatism from a director known to specialize in both, but it quickly becomes clear that its intentions are markedly lighter.

Acutely aware of its own ridiculousness, Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt’s screenplay gently mocks the genre to which it so obviously belongs, exaggerating the extreme silliness of the proceedings without veering too far into parody. It’s a good look for a film otherwise defined by noxious hyper-nationalism and a simplistic moral framework, ultimately ridiculing its own agenda instead of positing it problematically. And it’s a savvy career move for Fuqua, who proves that he does in fact have a sense of humor.

What “Olympus Has Fallen” doesn’t do is go far enough. Though it abounds in humorous one-liners and slightly mocking plays on genre convention, the film is nevertheless a bastion of formal mediocrity, proceeding with such nondescript simplicity that it may as well have been shot and edited using a computational algorithm. Fuqua, however “gritty” his aesthetic sensibility, still approaches filmmaking as though it were a job to simply be completed on time and under budget, and the most generous praise one could offer him is that he is a perfectly competent craftsman. This approach makes for consistent and – in this case – surprisingly successful films, but it also makes for films that are hard to get especially excited about one way or another.

This is in part because filmmaking as a practice is rigidly, almost suffocatingly ritualized, the formula for setting up a Hollywood project and seeing it through to fruition a matter of literally going through the motions required. And when so much money is on the table in each case—the budget for “Olympus” was $130 million—it’s not hard to understand why studios would discourage the risk of even minor innovations. And so what we get is another film like the others.

What we need, far more than workmanship, is genuine artistry, and if artistry is too much to ask of action cinema, at least a more innovative craft. When it comes to movies, it’s always better to have an unpredictable failure than a predictable success, which is why we need films whose purpose is to entertain without limitations, to mock themselves in form and content, and to essentially approach the genre anew. The best action films of the past several years aren’t the ones concerned with monochromatic urban grit or an air of dour self-seriousness; they’re the ones that seem vital and vibrant, liberated from their own pretenses to be pure and simply fun.

Our best action filmmakers think about the genre in a different way: for Paul W.S. Anderson, whose recent ”Three Musketeers” set a new high-water mark for the 3D adventure spectacle, that means deferring to a sense of space and visual orientation, retaining a light touch and formal elegance through the chaos of its action; for James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, whose wildly underrated “Lockout” (aka “Space Jail”) transformed Guy Pearce into a sci-fi Philip Marlowe (replete with a host of amusing zingers), it means adopting full-blown cartoon physics, using CGI not to augment natural reality but to stretch and expand it. And for Neveldine/Taylor, the directorial duo behind “Crank” and “Gamer” and two of the most inventive action filmmakers currently working, it means rejecting convention and making a movie however it pleases them.

Neveldine/Taylor’s sensibility has a crassness and vulgarity that can make their films difficult to stomach, but in terms of film production the two have more in common with the jazzy on-set improvisation of Jean-Luc Godard than with any of their contemporaries. Shooting on inexpensive, lightweight consumer cameras that enable them to cover their action with striking proximity (and precariousness), the pair also somewhat notoriously serve as camera operators on their own productions; they’re known to follow their actors on rollerblades in lieu of any sort of dolly, stringing themselves up on bungee cords and harnesses for daring mid-air takes, fashioning their cameras to bikes and car bumpers and generally just tossing them around with a carelessness they couldn’t afford were they relying on a more traditional setup.

The results, especially in both “Crank” and its sequel, “Crank: High Voltage,” proceed with a remarkable briskness of pace, the camerawork frenzied and breathless; in a given scene, many of which featuring broken anti-hero Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) running for his life, the camera might track his feet at ground-level, cut to a shot inches from his sweating face, spin around him rapidly, and be interrupted by a non sequitur title card or strange sight gag. The style is certainly abrasive, but it’s uniquely their own.

“Crank” is the sort of film series in which a character speaking in another language is given unhelpful phonetic subtitles, a flashback dream sequence turns into an imagined daytime talk show, and two characters inexplicably transform into giant Kaiju versions of themselves to have a Godzilla-style battle—all of which occurs without need or explanation and none of which seems even slightly predictable or boring. (“Crank 2,” in particular, is veritably an avant-garde work.) What’s astonishing is how Neveldine/Taylor are able to achieve such formal radicalism under the aegis of a Hollywood studio, but the reason they’re afforded such creative freedom is because, much to their credit, their films are made quickly and under-budget, which means a small investment on a relatively impressive return. It’s proof that innovation can not only be accomplished within the mainstream, but actually thrive there. It’s also proof that our continuing acceptance of the monotony of bland action films is patently unnecessary, because genuinely visionary genre filmmakers are among us. This weekend’s big release – Jon Chu’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” – features a wordless nine-minute sequence in which rival clans of ninjas zipline around a Himalayan mountainpeak while playing a deadly game of keepaway with a bodybag, and that’s reason enough to hold out hope for the future.

Categories: Features

Tags: Action movies, Antoine Fuqua, Calum Marsh, Crank, Crank 2: high voltage, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Jason statham, Mark Neveldine, Olympus Has Fallen, Paul w.s. anderson

Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later

“Hey, let’s all promise that in 10 years from today, we’ll meet again, and we’ll see what kind of people we’ve blossomed into.”

The absurdist comedy troupe known as The State earned a fair cult following with their ’90s MTV show of the same name, but not enough to get Wet Hot American Summer — directed by David Wain and starring many of the troupe’s members — more than a modest theatrical release and a middling critical reception in late July of 2001.

Thankfully, it seems that time has only been kinder to one of my favorite comedies from the past decade (no, maybe not one of the very best, but high among my personal faves). It’s an affectionate send-up of ’80s summer camp romps like Meatballs, not to mention the era’s regrettable fashion trends. The skewering of underdog sports clichés, horny teen staples, and Vietnam-trauma melodrama is long overdue and perfectly irreverent in execution.

Wain juggles an exceptionally game ensemble that includes Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, Christopher Meloni, Amy Poehler, and a then-unknown Bradley Cooper, and together, every last character thread is escalated to maximum effect.

Nice guy Coop (Showalter) is this close to getting the girl and instantly takes that too far, hearing wedding bells when she’s just looking for a fling. When teacher Gail (Molly Shannon) vents to her class about her own marital woes, one young boy in particular sagely consoles her … to the point where they announce their own January-May romance come the end of camp. And when camp manager Beth (Garofalo) falls for astrophysicist neighbor Henry (Pierce), they top everyone with an immaculate conception, just because.

When the counselors go on a day trip into town, they manage a crime spree and record amounts of substance abuse over the course of what we learn was a mere hour. Our narrator (played by Liam Norton, but voiced by Samm Levine) is lambasted for not having showered for all eight weeks of summer, but sadder/funnier still is the reveal that poor Arty’s been talking into an unplugged microphone the entire time. Ultimately, a falling piece of SkyLab threatens the fate of the campers (yes, really), and who saves the day but a socially awkward deus ex machina who just happened to have powers beyond belief.

It’s all so gleefully manic, alternately astute with regards to coming-of-age formula and utterly ridiculous. Rudd’s ultra-obnoxious routine is priceless, and if you can find a movie with a more quotable can of vegetables, then keep it to yourself. Even now, Wain and friends have floated the idea out there of doing a prequel that would see the whole cast return, now older than ever in roles that would require them to be younger. If they do manage to make it, I hope it doesn’t take an additional 10 years to get the gang back together, and then another 10 on top of that just to find its rightful audience.

In the meantime, I’ll be back at my bunk, fondling my sweaters.

Tags: american summer, amy poehler, blockbuster, bradley cooper, david wain, elizabeth banks, michael ian black, michael showalter, paul rudd, wet hot american summer