Friday, July 16, 2021

Perfect Pauses: 6 Underground

Don't worry, I'm not going to start telling you about it every time I pause a movie to go to the bathroom.

But this one did stand out to me, not for capturing a felicitously frozen moment, or for being an apt commentary about something going on in the story. No, this one stands out just for its beauty.

It may sound like I'm tiptoeing dangerously close to ogling actress Adria Arjona, one of the stars of the 2019 Netflix movie 6 Underground. She is beautiful, but that's not what I'm doing. The beauty I'm really talking about is how she is captured in a single moment that a fashion photographer would envy.

That hair could not be more perfectly blown astray by the wind, and the light giving her eyes the appearance of two different colors also adds an alien quality to her appearance. And anyone who's ever seen a model walk down a catwalk knows that they are considered the most optimal specimens of modeldom when they have a confrontingly alien quality to them.

I was actually going to initially write that 6 Underground looks so beautiful, overall, that every pause was a Perfect Pause. This was undone a bit by the fact that I paused it a half-dozen more times and none of the others were particular noteworthy.

But I was also given pause, so to speak, by a realization about 25 minutes in (after this Perfect Pause), when I was prompted to finally check my phone to see who the director was. 

Lo and behold, it's Michael Bay.

Which makes perfect sense given the subject matter and general appearance of the film, but I guess I never thought it was possible to forget that Michael Bay had directed a movie, and usually not possible for me to miss one of his movies at the time they came out. (I see them all if only so I can rip on them when I review them, as happened with Transformers: The Last Knight, but which did not happen with 13 Hours: The Secret Solders of Benghazi.)

I'd be lying if I said it didn't taint my enjoyment of the movie just a bit to know that Bay was the one responsible for it, though I've liked Bay films before. I still found it hugely entertaining overall, as it's both kinetic and funny, and never drags even at a very Michael Bay-like 128 minutes. 

It was also a reminder that Bay is indeed capable of some legitimate cinematic beauty, even though it's always undercut by one too many shots of helicopters or hot women (both of which appear plenty here). I do wish I had not discovered it was Bay until after the movie was over, as it would have created the rare unbiased consumption of a movie without knowing who is behind the camera.

I might have even given 6 Underground four stars out of five based on pure entertainment value. Learning it was Bay did not make it the 3.5 stars I gave it -- it's still the same movie that entertained me -- but it did make me conscious of some of Bay's regular preoccupations and cinematic tics that he should have progressed past at this point. That he's still stunted in some of his more pubescent tendencies is a weakness for the film when he's the director of it, maybe not so much when someone else is.

In any case, his films always produce good fashion photography stills, and probably always will. 

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