Reeling

"The Big Picture" debuts

Beginning this week, I'm going to be doing brief video segments on herald.com talking about the new movies opening in theaters. I am one of those people who is terrified of a TV camera, and I think I overcompensated for my nerves bytalkingamileaminute.

I also didn't use a script, the way the video gurus at the Herald suggested, because I'm ever worse when trying to read a teleprompter. I basically just made it all up on the spot, but I'm not sure it didn't turn out like babbling.

Anyways, here's the first installment. Looking for constructive criticism, so please let me know what you think. Don't pull your punches. I'm a critic. I can take it.

Is "Public Enemies" do-or-die time for Michael Mann?

The Daily Beast's Kim Masters has posted an interesting story claiming that Michael Mann's future as a maker of big-budget studio movies is riding on Public Enemies, which opened today.

The story takes a negative slant toward Mann and the movie, quoting a "former studio chairman" who has not seen the film that "it’s going to take itself too seriously, it’s going to be way too long and it will not focus on entertaining the audience. Michael Mann, in the past 15 years, has not made one movie I’ve liked.”

What, Masters couldn't find anyone in Hollywood who had actually seen Public Enemies to comment?

The story also claims that "Johnny Depp disliked Mann’s chaotic style of filmmaking to the point that he ultimately refused to speak to the director."

I'm guessing the vibe on the sets of those write-them-as-we-go-along Pirates of the Caribbean movies was a lot calmer and more orderly. And even if the gossip is true, and Depp stopped speaking to Mann altogether, it certainly didn't hurt his performance. So who cares?

I'm not a studio executive, but I can't imagine any of the higher-ups at Universal Pictures saw what Mann was up to during the shooting of Public Enemies and thought "This is gonna be bigger than Transformers!" They knew exactly what they were getting into, especially considering this is the same studio that distributed Mann's last movie, Miami Vice, which was even more aggressively uncommercial than Public Enemies.

There is no shortage of Hollywood movies that "focus on entertaining the audience." But the number of serious film artists like Mann who get to play on a large-scale canvas continues to get smaller. I can't imagine that, when you add in home video and cable TV revenues, the $100 million Public Enemies won't at least earn its costs back.

In the process, Universal gets to distribute a film that qualifies as a work of art - and that some people will still be thinking and talking about long after the summer movie season has receded into a hazy memory.

Another 1980s staple gets the remake treatment

Variety reports a remake of John Landis' 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf in London is in development at Dimension Films. I'm guessing someone at the studio figures that after New Moon and the Benicio Del Toro remake of The Wolf Man, both due later this year, werewolves are going to be the new vampires.

No matter who makes it, a remake of London is doomed to fall short of the original, because one of the things that made the 1981 movie so memorable was the Oscar-winning makeup effects work by Rick Baker. Those effects, which depicted the Dr. Pepper guy transforming into a shaggy beast, were unlike anything moviegoers had seen before.

The new version will presumably just use boring old CGI, which just isn't as effective. Plus London was one of the first horror movies to combine laughs with scares throughout, which has become old hat now. A much better candidate for a remake is The Howling, which came out the same year and had a premise you could spin out in a new direction.

Review: "Public Enemies"

 

Michael Mann's extraordinary Public Enemies is an unusual sort of gangster picture: A near-impressionistic recreation of the last year in the life of one of the most notorious bank robbers in American history. The movie doesn't coddle or ingratiate itself to the viewer: Mann, further honing his emotionally cool aesthetic to a diamond-like hardness, doesn't trade in the conventions of biography. For those willing to invest in what he is doing, the rewards are plentiful.

Plunging into the action with no set-up, Public Enemies opens with John Dillinger's brazen orchestration of the prison break of his pals from the Indiana State Penitentiary in 1933. That sequence, shot with the same you-are-there verisimilitude Mann employs through most of the picture, gives you a quick sketch of the camaraderie and loyalty between Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and his men, his place as the unquestioned leader of the gang and the profound pain he feels whenever one of them is felled by a lawman's bullet.

Those qualities, which are further explored and expounded on as the movie progresses, are mirrored by the relationship between FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his men, who are under considerable pressure by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to apprehend Dillinger, dead or alive. Public Enemies is essentially a chase picture, centering on Purvis' dogged pursuit of Dillinger, who proves impossible to hold onto even after he's caught.

 

Mann has been intrigued by the ballet between the law and the lawless since the beginning of his career, which began with 1981's Thief, segued into Miami Vice and continued with the cool-as-ice epic Heat. In Public Enemies, Mann transplants that obsession to the Depression era, drawing parallels between Dillinger's gradual alienation from organized crime, where his headline-grabbing antics and antihero popularity had little purpose, and Purvis' increasingly obsessive quest to apprehend him, which more than once results in less-than-sound judgment on the part of the straight-arrow lawman.

Depp's penchant for playing oddballs and weirdos has made him something of a hermetic actor, but the role of Dillinger frees something inside him, the way Sean Penn seemed energized by the opportunity to play Harvey Milk. Mann isn't interested in a biographical recounting of Dillinger's life: Public Enemies, which was based on the scrupulously researched book by Bryan Burrough, provides surprisingly few details about who he was or what formed him.

 

Instead, Mann is interested in burrowing deep inside Dillinger's psyche, which he does primarily through the criminal's relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat-check girl who captures his heart at first sight. Their romance, which initially seems manufactured and improbable, gradually becomes the heart of Public Enemies, revealing the sincere passion lurking underneath Dillinger's bad-boy persona. Depp's natural charisma is invaluable to the movie, humanizing Dillinger by showing us the ordinary man behind the extraordinary facade.

By comparison, Bale's performance as Purvis is more limited, relegating the character to the cliché of incorruptible, unrelenting sheriff. But if the movie is emotionally lopsided in Dillinger's favor, Mann is careful not to sway the audience's sympathies too strongly in his direction by constantly reminding us of the trail of bodies he and his gang left in their wake.

 

Every death in Public Enemies - and there are a lot of them - stings. Mann's emphasis on the value of human life adds a layer of suspense and excitement to the film's plentiful action sequences, the best of which is the FBI's raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin where Dillinger was holed up. The sequence, which marries the immediacy of Mann's high-definition digital photography with the connection the audience has built to the characters, is a hair-raiser, worthy of comparison to the bank heist from Heat (still Mann's finest hour as a choreographer of shoot-'em-up action).

If, by the end of Public Enemies, you have more questions than answers as to who John Dillinger was, the movie, along with Depp's tricky, elusive performance, leaves you feeling as if you had met him in the flesh. For all its genre trappings (the tommy guns everyone wields are as cool as the light sabers from Star Wars), Public Enemies is ultimately more of a character study than a rat-tat-tat action picture, a first-hand account of what it felt like to live moment-to-moment as public enemy No. 1, never thinking about tomorrow because that would mean dwelling on the inevitable.

Evan Rachel Wood joins the Spider-Man universe

Evan Rachel Wood, who displayed some fine singing chops in Across the Universe (and is terrific as a simpleton with a heart of gold in Woody Allen's Whatever Works, which opened yesterday), will play Peter Parker's girlfriend Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the Broadway musical scheduled to premiere next February.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Alan Cumming has also joined the cast as Norman Osborn, who goes on to become the Green Goblin. Julie Taymor, who reinvented The Lion King for Broadway, is directed, and Bono and The Edge are supplying the songs. Being a fanatic of both Spidey and U2, I can't help but be very excited about this, no matter how ridiculous the show sounds.

Opening today

 

Here's my Q&A with director Sam Mendes about his new film Away We Go, which opens today (you can read my review here). Woody Allen's latest, Whatever Works, is also his funniest in a long while (review here),

Connie Ogle says masochists will find plenty to love in My Sister's Keeper (review here) and that Michelle Pfeiffer is miscast in Stephen Frears' Cheri (review here). There is also, of course, Transformers, which had an astonishing opening-day gross of $60 million on Wednesday - more than all four of these other movies will earn combined during their entire runs.

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RIP Michael Jackson

I'm a Generation Xer, which means I learned to shuffle-skate (shut up) at the old Midway Skating Rink at Midway Mall to Don't Stop Till You Get Enough; tuned in along with millions of my peers for the world premiere of Thriller  on MTV and never thought about music videos the same way again; caught the Victory tour in Miami when the Jacksons played the Orange Bowl; happened to be at Epcot the weekend that the Francis Coppola-directed Captain Eo premiered there; and danced to a sped-up remix of The Way You Make Me Feel while celebrating my 21st birthday at the former China Club on South Beach (now Jerry's Famous Deli).

But when I heard the news today that Jackson had died, I realized I had only thought of him for the better part of 20 years as a performer turned bizarro eccentric by his own fame.

It's a testament to his artistic legacy that today, I haven't really been thinking about Wacko Jacko, but about the man who was such a big part of the soundtrack of my youth. Rest in peace, Michael. 

Those Oscar betting pools just got a little more interesting

 The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has announced next year's Oscars will have ten - count 'em, ten - Best Picture nominees instead of the traditional five.

The number of Best Picture contenders used to vary from year to year in the Oscars' early days. For example, there were 12 nominees in 1934 and 1935.

Academy President Sid Gannis said that "having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.”

  In other words, popular movies like The Dark Knight, which many people felt should have been a Best Picture contender, will no longer be shut out of the race. That will hopefully translate into higher ratings for the Oscar telecast, which airs March 7 next year.

The American Black Film Festival returns to Miami

After a two-year stint in Los Angeles, theAmerican Black Film Festival returns to Miami today. Here is a link to my story about the festival, which runs through Sunday.

The story ran on the front page, which also featured a tease to my Transformers review. I like it when they run my name in big red letters on 1A. You never see them running this guy's name on 1A like that.

Is Michael Bay worried about "Transformers 2?"

Michael Bay never looks like he sweats the small stuff, but after seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last night, I'm starting to understand why the director fired off that hissy e-mail to Paramount executives last month complaining the studio was doing a poor job hyping the movie.

Aside from Bay's interesting use of English ("I would of got something saying how we broke download records"), the letter is fascinating as the writings of a man who, having cut a sweet deal to take home a fat chunk of the sequel's profits, may now be starting to worry the film won't match the original's mammoth $700 million gross.

Maybe Bay has been checking out the early reviews for Revenge of the Fallen, which thus far have been much more vicious than the ones that greeted the first film.

You can read Bay's pouty e-mail in its entirety here. Warning to the grammar police: Writing is obviously not Bay's strong suit.