Public Enemies – A Review

If you make movies for adults, then you have to talk careers. Yes, there’s love, and situation comedy as you get older, but most of adult life is spent at work. A career is when your work matters to you. The director Michael Mann sees anything outside of a career as superfluous. That’s why he makes so many cops ’n robbers movies, because both livings exclude all else. Mann’s protagonists are men the way cowboys were men; their work defines them. Women have too many feelings for Michael Mann. If a stay-at-home mom was his subject, she’d handle her baby like a machine gun. His latest, Public Enemies, is a tale of two workaholics trying to best each other. They’d both choose death over a desk job.

John Dillinger robs banks. His nemesis, Melvin Purvis, is a G-Man. They like to chase each other. Dillinger is a delinquent tease. Purvis is the buttoned-up type. In Depression-era America – and, in a Michael Mann movie – their relationship can’t be consummated with a quick fumble behind the soup kitchen, so instead, when they meet, they fire bullets. Public Enemies is the story of a life-changing summer in 1934, when Dillinger went on a final catch-me-if-you-can crime spree and Purvis ran out of patience. Though ostensibly things were brought to a head by Dillinger’s refusal to stop stealing money, in reality (c’mon, Mel, admit it), it was because John started dating a girl.

Ok, so maybe it isn’t Brokeback Mountain with bank robbers, but casting Johnny Depp as anyone makes for a flustered co-star. Depp is so damn handsome he’d make Mount Rushmore bi-curious. Most of the moral ambiguity in Public Enemies comes from the fact Dillinger looks like Johnny Depp. In a scene where he asks his girlfriend to run away with him, you see her co-worker look at her, as if to say: he looks like that – what does it matter if he kills people? Age has only burnished Depp. He’s fifteen years older than the real John Dillinger when he died, but he could pass for thirty one. Throughout the movie, people gape at him. In a scene where Dillinger has been captured, the public line the streets and cry his name. You need Depp for that scene. He’s required to smirk a lot, so you can’t cast anyone who’s isn’t justifiably smug. Dillinger is like Depp in his hotel-smashing days, pulled through time to see what Pirates of the Caribbean has won him.

If Christian Bale can play anything but psychos with excellent posture, he’s forgot how to. You could put Melvin Purvis in a batsuit and not blink. Not to say Bale isn’t good – but he’s almost too right for a Michael Mann movie. And in real life that has repercussions. Mann’s heroes are guys who eat, sleep and shit perfection. They’re men wound so tight that coiled springs look slack. When Melvin Purvis shoots a criminal dead by way of introduction, my guess is, to Micheal Mann, he’s a go-getter. Bale – and his director – love men who load guns to relax. But while that means they’re both scary-focused on nailing scenes, the human-being element is lacking. Moral ambiguity is further heightened in Public Enemies because 1) (as previously stated) Depp looks like Depp, and 2) Bale may be a robot.

The big sticking point for most people is Mann’s decision to shoot the movie using digital video rather than film. Don’t worry about it. Mann could tell a steely, pulse-jumping story with a camera-phone. He likes digital because he’s not into romance. He wants you there, not swooning over the visuals. Where others see the past as a costume museum, Mann sees the present, with different clothes. The rush you feel watching Public Enemies is the rush of an embedded reporter when a gunfight is caught on film.

Dillinger’s deathbed was outside a movie theatre. He must have been rapt. All his life he worked flat-out to be famous, and his blood-dotted corpse was a must-see before it hit the ground. My bet is: Michael Mann respects a guy who bled prudently for his career. As I watched Public Enemies, I was reminded of something Madeline Stowe once said in interview, about how men are sexiest at work. Isn’t there a double meaning in the title of (Mann’s most famous movie) Heat? Work – when it’s all that matters – is intimate to Mann. He doesn’t make boys’ movies because he looks too deeply. When you love what you do, you’re always brandishing your soul.

Sunshine Cleaning – A Review

The dead are all celebrities; they don’t exist in our world. We think of the dead by way of the roles they once played. We let go of all the times when they weren’t who we wanted them to be. It’s easy to be wonderful when you’re dead. The same logic applies to celebrity crushes: so if, let’s say, Amy Adams plays a fairy princess (in Enchanted), it follows that she must swish around set sprinkling moonbeams on the crew. Now, I admit, Amy Adams looks like she goes through life like a fairy princess (moony eyes; mischievous nose), but then again – she’s 34. Her new movie, Sunshine Cleaning, won’t help anyone with a crush on Amy (she’s still adorable), but we should try to remember: she may stab kittens.

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen – A Review

Good ideas for toys do not make good ideas for movies. Take Transformers, for instance. As toys, they’re ingenious: robots (!) that turn into cars (!), planes (!) and guns (!!!). In one fell swoop you’ve itemised every pre-pubescent boys’ dreams. The robots divide into goodies and baddies (as they must, according to the Lore of the Playground) and they proceed to beat each other up (because what else would pre-teen boys’ want them to do? Get a mortgage?). If you’re lining up merchandizing for a big Hollywood movie: hallelujah! But where’s the movie in all this? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen does not provide a plausible answer.

The Hangover – A Review

A few years ago, while staying at a London hotel, Kiefer Sutherland attacked a Christmas tree. He did it because he was drunk. He did it because someone bet him. And he did it because life is only lived once. Men need have drunken adventures. In times gone by, men sailed the high seas drunk, they went into battle drunk; in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, they even commanded armies drunk. Today, we live in a macro-biotic, cubicle world, far removed from the wild exploits of our forebears. But we still have drink. And men like Kiefer. The new comedy, The Hangover, is a paean to drunken debauchery. Ulysses S. Grant would have loved it.

Lovely By Surprise – A Review

Every first novel is about a writer’s past, especially if it’s set on Venus. It’s the second book that points toward a career. In first novels – whether the writer knows it or not – prose functions like a self-portrait. Forget readers; what’s important is: owning up. If you’re lucky (forgetting sales, forgetting success of any material kind), you make peace with yourself. In Lovely By Surprise, a virgin novelist writes about two brothers who skipper a landlocked boat. If the brothers seem troubled, first-novel logic says: look to the author. This is a movie where fantasy-trappings are used to catch real guilt.

Terminator Salvation – A Review

We wouldn’t win a war against the machines. Most of us struggle with spreadsheets. Humans, at a bare minimum, need: food, shelter, sex and shoes. Machines just need a plug. And therein lies my basic problem with Terminator Salvation; no matter how sexy the human resistance might be, you’d have to bet on the robots. Like the Terminator franchise, they can multiply ad-infinitum. They don’t need motivation to fight, or an explanation as to why they do things. I picture the resistance: bursting for a piss, unsure whose side the lights are on in the toilets. That’s not a battle I’d want to fight.

Drag Me to Hell – A Review

Horror movies have a grandfather’s morality; piddling vices are Hell-worthy and young people are always up to no good. Every time the unwed have sex in a horror movie their life insurance premiums quadruple. If you drink, you might as well drink glass. And yet, young people are the audience for these movies. Do the under-30’s want to suffer vicariously? Is disapproval cathartic? In the new Sam Raimi horror schlock, Drag Me to Hell, a twentysomething becomes the pronoun in the title just for denying a septuagenarian a loan. It’s as if your grandfather was asked what the problem is with young people today and Beelzebub offered a solution.

Encounters at the End of the World – A Review

Shortly after Werner Herzog finished his first movie, a friend called him to let him know that his mentor (the great German film critic Lotte Eisner) was dying. Lotte Eisner was in Paris; Herzog was in Germany. His friend told him to catch a plane. But Herzog refused. Instead, he decided to walk to Paris, in the middle of winter, through clawing blizzards and morgue-like cold. Because he knew that Lotte wouldn’t die as long as he was walking. After days on the road, he arrived in Paris. Racked by illness, Lotte said to him, “I’m tired of life, but there’s a spell on me, that I must not die.” And Herzog said, “The spell is lifted.” Two weeks later, Lotte died.

Once Upon a Time in the West – A Review

I want Sergio Leone to direct my life. I want Ennio Morricone to write the score. Wouldn’t we all be better off with those two behind us? You’d be waiting for the bus and Leone would have your face dominating half the screen… the bus moving toward you like a symbol for an era… on the soundtrack: strings, a mezzo-soprano, euphoric heartbreak, a great virile swell of sound…. And you. Or rather: me. Hmmm. Maybe Once Upon a Time in the West is more Leone. If the Wild West hadn’t existed, he’d have made it up. No director ever suited big spaces and six guns more than Sergio. And no movie ever breathed the West like his.

Angels & Demons – A Review

Dan Brown is a mystery to me. His books appear to be written by a (vending) machine. His characters possess all the idiosyncrasies of spoons. His understanding of Catholicism would look dim-witted for a mollusc. And yet he sells in the millions. There’s an existential hunger for his bullshit. Even though the average Dan Brown novel only has four component parts (1) an obscene amount of exposition, 2) a kinky hit-man, 3) Professor Robert Langdon, 4) a tourist-friendly setting) he’s held up as king of thrillers just for throwing in the odd twist. The latest movie to come from a Dan Brown novel (Angels & Demons) is so silly even the ampersand looks embarrassed.