Black Mass Review

                Welcome back! Lately I have been on quite a big gangster/ mafia fix due to the fact that we have been discussing The Godfather in class. For my second blog post I thought I would continue on my fix, and review one of Johnny Depp’s recent films, Black Mass. In this movie Johnny plays the notoriously famous Boston gangster Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger. The plot of the movie closely follows as the story behind Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang and there rise to power over the Boston, Massachusetts area. The storyline also follows Bulger’s double life as one of the most dangerous gangsters of all time and a FBI informant. After watching the movie I was quite interested in finding out if the events depicted within the movie were actually true events. Google quickly told me that the events shown within the movie were strictly fictional except the fact of Whitey being a FBI informant. If you don’t know much about Whitey Bulger I highly suggest that you google him, because he is a very iconic man and gangster of our time.

 Personally I thought that this film was beautifully shot. The angles and the frames that the director, Scott Cooper, used were well thought out and tastefully done. I noticed that he focused most on portraying the faces of the gangsters with lots of close up shots to fully express the emotion and lack of emotion that these men possessed. The close up shots were unforgiving, because the shots purposefully displayed the scars and aging of these individuals in order to show us the toughness and pain that these individuals had gone through as gangsters. I also liked the way the director used establishing shots to set the scene within the Boston area. I am very unfamiliar with the upper east coast but with the use of repetitive establishing shots throughout the film I felt as if I was familiar or have lived there once in my life. Scott cooper captured the hilly nature of the city by putting the emphasis in the framing of the vertical structure that the houses and sidewalks.

Another favorite aspect of the film was the use of emphasized diegetic sound within intense scenes. The film overall is a quite film with not a lot of non-diegetic sound or music. The lack of sound raises our awareness of visual aspects and creates a sense of anticipation for the chaos that was soon to come. In the murderous scenes heightened diegetic sounds were used in place of non-diegetic sounds to add greater suspense and fear to the scene. Some examples of emphasized diegetic sound are gun shots, hospital machine beeps, and cries of victims.

While some aspects of the film were very well done, some were not. One thing that I did not care for was the makeup that was put on Johnny Depp in order to make him more realistic, specifically the colored contacts. The contacts that Depp wore were too false, meaning that you could tell that they were fake. With every other part of the makeup being done very well, I felt as if they should have also had colored contacts that also looked realistic. Another thing that bothered me about the film was that the events taken place in the film were strictly fiction. I personally believe that film would be better as a whole if the director had actually depicted true events that occurred in Boston due to the Winter Hill Gang. But overall I liked the film and I thought it was quite interesting, and would definitely recommend to anyone interested. Just a warning though it is very gruesome!