Movies like “Public Enemies”  always make me wonder about our culture’s  fascination with such notorious criminals.   Why do we turn murderers and crooks into celebrities and heroes?   Why do we want to hear their stories told, again and again?    Why is John Dillinger the hero of this movie, and not Melvin Purvis, the lawman who finally took him down?

I think we glamorize criminals because most of us — the normal people – feel like we might like to break the law, but we’d never get away with it.   Getting away with it requires smarts, and courage, and talent.   Getting away with it separates the criminal from everyone else – it makes him an individual, not only above the law, but above the rest of us who are afraid of the law.   In addition to all else it is, law enforcement is essentially a normalizing force within society, forever striving to prove that criminals are, in the end, just like everyone else.   And because in America we worship individuality, we respect the criminal as an individual, and resist the normalizing forces.   That’s why Dillinger’s the hero, and Purvis the villain.

Johnny Depp plays Dillinger as a machine of efficiency and precision.   He reminds me of no one so much as Jason Bourne.  He is a careful planner, a ruthless executer, and a good judge of character.   He is surrounded by violent men, but is not himself violent.   He knows that violence just makes things more complicated.    One gets the feeling that he robs banks simply because it’s the most interesting and challenging job that’s been offered to him.   In 1933, there weren’t a lot of other career options.

The 30′s were the “public enemy era,”  with folks like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson all garnering plenty of attention from the press and the police, but Dillinger was Public Enemy No.1.   Depp’s Dillinger isn’t all that concerned with what the public thinks about him, except as it affects his ability to do his job – which is to rob banks.   He refuses to do kidnappings, because the public doesn’t like kidnapping.   “Who cares what the public thinks?”  an associate asks him.  “I do,”  he says.  “I hide out among ‘em.  We gotta care what they think.”

On the other side of the law are J. Edgar Hoover, played with crisp syllables and suits by Billy Crudup, and his no.1 G-Man, Purvis (Christian Bale.)  While Hoover’s manipulating the press to strong-arm Congress into creating the FBI, Purvis, like Dillinger, seems more interested in doing his job.   When Hoover’s much-publicized G-Men can’t get the job done because they’ve spent more time in an office than on a stakeout, Purvis brings in seasoned lawmen who know how to handle their weapons.   Bale gives Purvis the same kind of hushed intensity he brings to John Connor and Bruce Wayne, even when he’s saddled with clunker lines like “He could be anywhere….but he’s not” and “he will be armed…and extremely dangerous.”   Really?

In the middle of it all is Marion Cotillard, who plays Dillinger’s girlfriend.  Their courtship is odd; either it’s love at first sight for him, or any girl will do.   She keeps telling him she’s crazy to be with him; he keeps telling her he’s going to take care of her.   It’s as if the whole point of the relationship is to raise the stakes, to make life more dangerous and thus more interesting.

Michael Mann wrote and directed “Public Enemies,”  and it’s startling to see the parallels between this, ostensibly based on a true story, and an older Mann classic, “Heat.”    Dillinger and Purvis could be De Niro and Pacino, each caught up in their job, not too worried about good or evil, operating with a grudging respect for the other.    In both movies, there’s a girl, for whom the criminal decides to give up crime, after one last heist, which of course is the one where he gets caught.   I’d say “Public Enemies” is an updated version of “Heat,”  except it takes place 40 years earlier.

What has been updated are Mann’s camera techniques.   “Public Enemies” is shot digitally, and Mann, more than perhaps anybody else, is doing exciting, experimental work with digital cameras.   The primary action scene — Purvis and his men ambush Dillinger at the Little Bohemia house, and just about everyone but Dillinger and Purvis end up dead — is shot in the dark, mostly with handhelds, and with very little supplemental light.  Headlights and flashlights illuminate what they’re pointed at, and everything else; gunbursts light up the woods for brief moments, and we see shadows and reflections flit past.   It’s exciting and new; it’s also disorienting and a little strange, as it’s so different from the “normal” way to film an action scene.

“Public Enemies” slows down and grows ponderous as it nears the end;  Hoover starts to get desperate, and advocates methods that make him sound like Dick Cheney.   And, as with just about any movie in which we know the criminal/hero is going to die in the end, we are given lots of room to believe that Dillinger chose his own death.  In the theater just before he is gunned down, we seem him watching Clark Gable play a gangster on the big screen.   He smiles as Gable goes to his death with brash, quotable soundbytes on his lips.   When he is gunned down, he tries to manage some last words, but nobody’s sure what it is he said.   Apparently, Hollywood gangster and realtime gangsters don’t have much in common after all.

Recommended

• if you’d like to see Johnny Depp try on yet another hat, and then act like he was born to wear it.
• if you like crime/gangster/shoot ‘em up flicks.
• if you’re familiar with the works of Michael Mann and want to keep up.

Not Recommended

• if you’re looking for glib, quotable gangster types.   “Public Enemies” is pretty subdued and serious.
• if gangster/action/violence just isn’t your thing anyway.

]]> http://www.gonnawatchit.com/2009/07/24/public-enemies/feed/ 2 http://www.gonnawatchit.com/2009/05/29/terminator-salvation/ http://www.gonnawatchit.com/2009/05/29/terminator-salvation/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 07:00:14 +0000 gonnawatchit http://www.gonnawatchit.com/?p=895

9 years from now, machines will be intelligent, will have pretty much destroyed civilization, and will be able to shoot lasers out of their, um, eyeholes.   What’s more, they’ll be experimenting with biotechnology, reanimating executed criminals (yet another argument against the death penalty – they’ll be back!) and, ultimately, creating their own fleshy humanoids, modeled on the current governor of California.  (Skynet, is based in San Francisco, after all.)   Somehow this all seemed a lot more believable in 1985.

“Terminator Salvation”  is supposed to be a movie about humans vs. machines.  Its biggest problem is the machines are way more interesting than the humans.   I remember Pauline Kael saying the same thing about “Blade Runner” — one of many movies “TS” shamelessly borrows from – and thinking, well, that’s the point, isn’t it?  In “Blade Runner,”  the line is blurred between man and machine until nobody really knows for sure who is who.   In “Terminator Salvation” the line ought to be, needs to be, crystal clear — the two are locked in an epic war, after all.    But Christian Bale, who plays the grownup John Connor, Saviour of the Human Race (JC for short,)  has only one speed throughout: intense, hoarse, and focused.   You could call it Bat Speed, if you wanted.   And the supporting cast is as thin as rice paper.  Bryce Dallas Howard shows up briefly to be pregnant.   Michael Ironside barks orders to the resistance from a submarine, and appears to be doing his best Michael Ironside impression.   Even Anton Yelchin — far and away the warmest actor and character in the film– is equipped with a cute and mute wild-haired child sidekick that seems an awful lot like a robot.   (Come one, who wouldn’t want to  buy a cute kid-bot that never speaks and always has the tool you’re looking for when you need it?)

To blur the line further between man and machine, our hero is, well, both.   Played by Sam Worthington, he spends most of the movie fighting for the resistance, wondering why he’s alive after that whole lethal injection incident, and looking for Christian Bale.   But because we’ve seen the preview, we know he’s a robot.  Bale learns he’s a robot when he sets off a magnetic mine in the field surrounding the base.   (Good thing nobody in the resistance has braces on their teeth, or pacemakers, or wears belt buckles.  Or, um, carries guns?)  Bale orders him executed (here we go again) but a girl he’s known for two days decides to risk her life to save him, and then there’s this scene in a swamp in the dark….

Oh, to heck with the plot.  It doesn’t really matter.   Long story short, Worthington is a tool for the machines, until he rips some things out of the back of his head, at which point he’s a free agent.   Bale is terribly worried about this guy named Kyle, who’s going to be his father, eventually.   Bale and Worthington break into the Skynet base to rescue Kyle, where they run into the Governator, who kicks their butts until they kick his.

The movie ends on an odd note.   Bale is wounded in the battle, and needs a heart transplant.   Worthington, in a heavyhanded metaphorical move, offers his.   I don’t know why, after watching two hours of killer robots in a postapocalyptic world, this bit felt so implausible to me.   Really, a heart transplant on the battle field?   How do you know he’s even a suitable donor?   What if Bale’s body rejects the donor’s heart, and now you’ve got two dead heroes?   etc, etc.   Maybe it’s because this moment was the only one in the movie that had any bearing on reality at all that it felt so hard to swallow.

But if you’ll accept that the humans aren’t all that interesting, or worth saving, that the plot is convoluted, ridiculous, and most of all, cobbled together from every other sci fi flick ever made, if you’ll approach “Terminator Salvation”  as a movie about big, metal beings with intelligence but no personality battling against smaller, softer beings with less intelligence and no personality, you might have a good time.   The machines are way cool.   They make creepy metallic noises (somebody put some serious love into the sound editing of this film.  I’m serious.)   And the people find creative, if not terribly effective, ways to fight them, despite being outnumbered and outgunned.  ”Terminator Salvation” is pretty much wall-to-wall action sequences, and it never gets boring.   Nothing may be terribly new, but everything’s intense, and well choreographed and shot, and, you know, pretty fun to watch.   Roger Ebert complained that it’s a lot like playing a video game, and it is, but I’m not sure that should be a complaint.   Video games these days are pretty entertaining.

Recommended

• if you really liked “Wolverine,” and want more.
• if you’re way into the “Terminator” series – so much so that you thought “Terminator 3″ was a pretty great movie.

Not Recommended

• if you want to know when all the fighting will end.
• if you’re looking for this year’s “Dark Knight.”  This ain’t it.

By Willie Krischke — July 19, 2008

Right off the, um, bat, “The Dark Knight” establishes itself as a different kind of comic book movie. Actually the seeds of its change are in its predecessor, “Batman Begins,” when Batman declares Gotham a city worth saving.   Now Batman carries the city on his shoulders, and must prove that he was right in his decision to not let Gotham go the way of Rome. Many superheroes have saved their city in a physical sense – defusing the bomb, defeating the megalomaniac – but never before has a superhero needed to save the city’s soul, as well. Christopher Nolan, who wrote the script for “The Dark Knight” with his brother Jonathan, makes that Batman’s task. The result is a movie with more weight, gravitas, and moral energy than any superhero movie before it.

Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker was legendary before anyone ever saw the movie, due in part to the actor’s tragic death shortly after the shooting. It is with great relief that I can report that the performance lives up to the hype. The Joker is the scariest villain to come along in quite a while, primarily because Ledger plays him with such ferocious intensity, intelligence, and bone-chilling aggression. Jack Nicholson’s Joker always seemed to be on stage; he was primarily a circus performer, with the unfortunate habit of killing people in his act. He was evil, but only incidentally. Ledger’s Joker is evil primarily. He is a villain on par with Iago and Mephistopheles; he never offers a reason for his destructive nature, and never needs one. As Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler, says, “some people just want to watch the world burn.” Some credit should go to the writers; the Joker may come across as a nutcase, but he is truly scary precisely because he’s not insane. The Joker is, if anything, an extremely evangelistic nihilist. He describes himself as “an engine of chaos,” and yeah, he’s got a hemi.

In a way, it’s a movie about the human condition, a spiritual as well as physical battle for the city. As Batman strives to bring hope to Gotham and looks forward to a day when the people will unite, take pride in their community and themselves, and no longer need the symbol he provides, the Joker wants to reduce the people of Gotham to their most base, self-serving and primitive tendencies. He continually sets up situations in which regular people must make impossible choices; his aim is to demoralize the people and cripple their spirits. Batman, on top of tripping up the Joker’s destructive traps, must find ways to make sure the Joker doesn’t win the moral battle. If Batman saves the girl, but the soul of the city dies anyway, the Joker has won. The stakes have never been higher.

“The Dark Knight” has an amazing supporting cast for a summer blockbuster. Gary Oldman returns as good cop Gordon, and his performance is more important to the whole feel of the movie this time around. Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes.  This casting change is on par with upgrading from a blowup doll to a real girl.  And Aaron Eckhart is Harvey Dent, the DA and “hero Gotham needs,” in Wayne’s own words. Dent is Rachel Dawes’ current squeeze, and surprisingly, the movie chooses to mostly underplay the ensuing love triangle, allowing the men to actually listen to and like each other.  Filling out the cast are Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, as Bruce Wayne’s support team. Both are given more to do this time around, and neither performance is wasted.

“The Dark Knight” gives the viewer about twenty minutes to remember the characters and enjoy Batman’s awesomeness, then cranks the dial to 11 and doesn’t let up for two solid hours. There isn’t a moment that isn’t tense and exciting; Nolan has solved the pacing problems he had with “Batman Begins” by just never letting up this time around.  I’ve heard it described as dark and depressing; this seems odd to me, as so much of the movie is concerned with hope and the future. But it is fast-paced, intense, and at times, ruthless. It is a vision of a film, well realized and unforgettable. Let’s hope it sets a standard other movies will feel compelled to acknowledge, and strive toward.

Recommended

• if you felt like “Batman Begins” was a much needed reboot to the series.
• If you like movies with a deeper, darker, more spiritual element to them.
• If you want to see the best action flick of the summer, and one of the best movies of the year.

Not Recommended

• if you like the campy, Adam West/George Clooney Batman better
• If you think comic book/superhero movies ought to be shallow and kind of silly. These are men dressed up in costumes, after all.
• If you’re easily frightened. Ledger’s the Joker might be nightmare-inducing.