By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
We’re not very interested the latest studio cast offs, “Old Dogs,” “Armored” and “Everybody’s Fine;” movies that can’t find audiences in spite of expensive ad campaigns. And even if we’re curious about the DeNiro vehicle, (“Fine”), we are better served by the original, Italian version, from 1991, starring Marcello Mastroianni and directed by Guiseppe Tornatore, the man who created “Cinema Paradiso.” Go get the DVD.
But while we’re waiting for “Avatar,” “Up in the Air,” and “Sherlock Holmes,” (among others,) we can still find a little comfort in front of the electronic fireplace, thanks to a couple of recent DVD releases. But we’re going to have to be selective.
Public Enemies
There was a lot of resentful grousing when Michael Mann’s ambitious essay on America’s most famous bank robber opened this past July. The general feeling was that Mann had taken almost 100 million in studio money and turned out a meditative art movie that mainstream audiences wouldn’t get. This impression might have been amplified by critics like Manhola Dargis, who, writing in the New York Times, called it, “a grave and beautiful work of art.” I guess that scared a lot of Hollywood executives.
I don’t know about the “grave” part, but the “Public Enemies” I saw came across as a welcome addition to the American gangster saga, which will happily take its place alongside “Little Caesar,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and both versions of “Scarface.”
The depression era gangster, like jazz, is one of the unique legacies of our relatively young culture. Our pop movies have continually mined the criminal as an archetype, since the earliest silent films. And we keep finding new wrinkles in the same cloth, especially that which deals with bank robbers. Let’s see, is there anything in our recent history that might contribute to that?
What distinguishes “Public Enemies,” from the rest is the way its bold digital photography creates a feeling of deep melancholy, refreshingly absent of cheap sentiment. This is accomplished not so much through what the camera sees, as how it sees. And what makes it so special is the movie’s startling visual clarity, unlike anything we’ve experienced up to this moment.
Michael Mann’s picturesque rethinking of the Dillinger legend puts Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard in the center of a narrative that has more in common with dance than drama. With his detached expressions, that seem to liberate him from the time and space the rest of us are moored to, Depp is ideal as a stoic but oddly romantic folk hero who seems both aware of, and resigned to the downward spiral that leads to his death. The others, flawed by closer ties to the earth, are mainly elements in the movie’s design scheme. But that doesn’t matter because they look so good.
“Enemies” plays out in a series of bullet riddled set pieces that are fluid and energetic, with an almost fanatical emphasis on visual coherence. Note that you can follow almost every moment of the smartly choreographed action scenes. There’s little if any shaky cam or split second cutting, which these days is often used to trick the viewer into thinking he’s seeing what’s happening when the director failed to get enough shots to pull a scene together.
The kind of movement and energy that’s always close to Mann’s heart is given a new lease on life by his decision to use the latest generation of digital cameras. The deep focus images, so filled with details they all but overwhelm the brain, are the modern day equivalent of Gregg Toland’s blazingly sharp black and white cinematography for Orson Welles “Citizen Kane.”
Way back in 1941 Toland lit and shot Kane’s stunning interiors, (including the ceilings,) to comment on different stages of a “great man’s” emotional life. Here, Mann uses deep focus to illustrate the troubled depression era landscape and how it bred a love hate relationship the population developed with bank robbers.
Master cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who has worked with Mann on “Last of the Mohicans,” and “Heat,” in addition to shooting a wide range of material, from “Before Sunset,” to “Frankie and Johnny,” delivers a totally new look here, complementing razor sharp images with muted colors and a seemingly endless pallet of deep grays.
Mann used digital cameras to good effect in parts of “Collateral,” which was alive with gleeful malevolence, and to not so good effect in “Miami Vice,” which was so steely and clinical it froze the audience in an emotional void. But everything the director knows about the new technology complements this project.
The script is full of slyly satiric comments on the G men (government agents) who chased after Dillinger, mainly Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover, but it’s almost completely lacking in irony or literary pretension. The barebones dialogue requires you to let go of the expectation that a particular line or incident will simplify the feelings Mann wants to evoke. You have to go with the flow.
If “Public Enemies” is to be faulted at all it’s for the running time, which at two hours twenty, may be a little much to sustain material so dependent on style. While I think that there are times where the movie feels a bit single minded, I was captivated by the daring of Mann’s vision, from the old suits to the late night shoot outs.
The DVD will call on every pixel your energy hog of a flat screen can summon. Don’t even think of watching “Public Enemies” on a puny I-pod or computer screen. It would be like seeing the Grand Canyon through a telescope.
Inglorious Basterds
The willful misspelling in the title signals that once again, writer/director Quentin Tarrantino is talking out of two sides of his mouth at once. He’s delivering a pulpy fiction on one side, and commenting on movies from the other. And he doesn’t care if it makes a mess of his narrative or not.
This idiosyncratic mash up of war, war movies, and comic books, was an unlikely hit, and I suppose we have to begrudgingly respect the maverick director’s ability to recruit a large audience to his gimmickry and willful borrowing of other people’s work.
“Basterds,” is a half dozen, vaguely connected episodes revolving around a troop of Jewish commandos who slip behind enemy lines to kill Nazis as the tide begins to turn against the Germans. Some will be amused, some bored and others mildly offended by the way he uses the war, as a medium to express his personal obsessions. This is not Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.”
A few of the sequences work like good short stories. One in particular, where we wait for all hell to break loose in a bar, (which it does) keeps us on the edge of our seats until its spasmodically bloody climax. Others, like the finale, a bloodier massacre in a theater, are staged in a self conscious style that’s so synthetic they’re more irritating than amusing.
“Basterds” is less satisfying than “Pulp Fiction,” or “Kill Bill.” But it’s light years better than “Deathproof,” Tarrantino’s long winded and dull contribution to “Grind House.” And here’s the reason. The writer/director had an insiders understanding of the grimy belly of Los Angeles that he and Roger Avary, his co-writer, riffed on so vividly in “Pulp Fiction.” He knew every frame of the B movies he borrowed from in “Kill Bill.” But he obviously had no first hand experience with World War II, or any other war, when he sat down to write “Inglorious Basterds.” And his cavalier disregard for that war’s reality shows.
If there’s a vulnerable place in your heart, where ambivalent feelings about war are held in anxious limbo, you may find this indulgent “entertainment” an unnecessary disturbance.
Julie and Julia
Meryl Streep and Amy Adams vie for our attention as this light drama alternates between the story of a great chef, and a woman who struggles to prepare every recipe in her classic book, one day a time. The irony is that the difference between the two stories mirrors the difference between the two women in a way that trivializes one and lionizes the other. And I’m not sure if that was the intent. Still, the movie is a treat that celebrates an amazing character.
It isn’t that Amy Adams, as the “Julie” of the title, lacks charm or imagination. It’s just that Streep is an actress as large in stature as Julia Childs was as a chef. That leaves Ms. Adams, playing an ordinary mortal, the thankless and task of competing with her. It isn’t a fair fight. But the movie is winning because it explores a real life with a loving touch.
Nora Ephron, the storied creator of “When Harry Met Sally,” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” has adapted Julie Powers’ book with patience and wisdom. She gooses Julie’s trouble cooking with bits of hokum about her marriage, but otherwise resists the temptation to tell jokes just to keep us laughing. You have to give her credit for giving the Julie character ample screen time to begin with. Unfortunately, her impact is limited.
On the other hand Ephron’s handling of Julia Child’s evolution, from novice cook to master chef, shows the skill she’s accumulated over a long, successful career. You can almost feel these two supremely talented, middle aged women; writer/ director and actor, collaborating to keep the scale of emotion true to each moment, even when they’re small, and seemingly, inconsequential. At the end the day the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
You have to wonder how Streep pulled this off. If you’ve ever seen Childs on TV you had to be struck by the incongruous voice and, for lack of a better word, mildly pixilated manner. As a kid I recall thinking of her as spacey, a bit clumsy, and somehow out of place on the screen. What Streep did is embrace all of that, at the same time she found the pulse of an endlessly curious and interesting human. To that she added a unique, self effacing dignity. Where does that come from?
The whole project was risky because there isn’t much tension. The worst thing that happens is that some of the recipes don’t come out. But as the years go by Streep / Julia finds real rewards in tiny increments of success and failure. Complemented by Stanley Tucci’s refined performance as her loving mate, the nuanced camera of Stephen Goldblatt, and a handful of evocative European settings, she brings us a character whose joy of being alive disarms all your rational faculties.
Angels and Demons
While it way underperformed here, the Europeans went whole hog for this handsome, overwrought nonsense that tries to titillate with graphic misdeeds that could end in the annihilation of the Vatican and half of Rome. Actually mid way through you may be rooting for the Mafia to intervene and take out the entire cast.
After the mysterious death of the current Pope, Tom Hanks sprints through Rome trying to stop a cult of high minded ideologues from killing the next in line. He hits about half the city in what amounts to 10 hours or so, but to be honest, the whole thing is so contrived and overblown I can’t remember how long he had to stop the bad guys from blowing the Vatican, well, to Kingdom Come.
Because the plot is so confusing, Hanks has to explain everything he does, while he’s actually doing it. Serving as the Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, is the striking Israeli actress Aeyelt Zurer, here playing an Italian scientist, who’s main job is absorbing all his hooey with a straight face, then jogging around town in an expensive suit. She deserves an award for valor in the face of utter stupidity.
If you’re a Dan Brown fan you probably know how you feel about the source material; I have no interest in debating its merits here. Suffice it to say that “Angels” moves much faster than its’ duller than dishwater predecessor, “The DaVinci Code.”
“Angels and Demons” plays best as a handsome travelogue, spiked by ritual killings that push the envelope of PG-13 standards. In fact, you might like it better with the sound off.
I suppose that for a massively successful filmmaker like Ron Howard and a beloved star like Hanks this is just a pay day that gets them back to even after a couple recent flops. May they live well and prosper.
