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Review
It was the movies that killed John Dillinger -- Gangster No. 1 until he was gunned down outside a Chicago theater after taking in the pictures one hot night in 1934 -- and it was the movies that brought him back to life. More than once. But this time it's different. This time Michael Mann is in charge.
Win, lose or draw, Mann, director of "Heat," "Ali," "The Insider" and the current "Public Enemies," is inescapably one of the masters of modern American cinema. He's a restless soul, a striver, pushing his work toward dramatic intensity and the recapturing and recasting of reality.
Mann often wants to do traditional films but do them differently, do them better, enabling the audience to feel both the newness and the tradition. With "Public Enemies," he has made an impressive film of great formal skill, one that inescapably has a brooding dark-night-of-the-soul quality about it.
Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann's latest work (he shares screenplay credit with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.
"Public Enemies' " title, though taken from Bryan Burrough’s history of Depression era crime, offers uncanny -- and deceptive -- echoes of one of the iconic gangster films of the period, William Wellman's "The Public Enemy," which starred an incandescent James Cagney as a hooligan so hard-boiled he shocked American by squeezing a grapefruit into girlfriend Mae Clarke's face.
But if Cagney is all exuberant, anarchic energy, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is just the opposite. There is a formal, almost existential quality about his fatalistic portrayal of the scourge of the Midwest, more "Le Samourai" than "White Heat," more Alain Delon cool than Cagney hot.
It's almost as if Depp, who lives in France, and his French costar Marion Cotillard have unconsciously collaborated with Mann to channel the spirit of the classic French gangster director Jean-Pierre Melville into these decidedly American proceedings.
A restrained performance like that only succeeds when it's given by an actor as intrinsically charismatic as Depp. His Dillinger can be as ruthless as the next guy and handy with a submachine gun when his bank robbery spree demands it, but what we end up admiring are his nerve, his style, his long gabardine overcoats (reminiscent of the long dusters worn by those other Midwestern movie outlaws, the James gang) and his hip, round sunglasses. This is star power acting with magnetism to spare.
The story Mann and company set out to tell is in part the traditional one of the doomed love of outsiders on the run and in part a newer, more socially aware interpretation of gangsterdom, the story of lone criminal wolves, in Mann's words, "being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces -- on the one hand J. Edgar Hoover inventing the FBI, and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism." We're a long way from "The Untouchables" here.
"Public Enemies" opens with one of the standards of the crime genre, the prison escape, with Dillinger, just released after nine years inside, returning to break his gang out of the Indiana State Penitentiary. It didn't happen quite that way, but that matters less than the vivid style in which masterful cinematographer Dante Spinotti has shot it.
Spinotti, working with Mann for the fifth time, combines intense close-ups with a polished, energetic style of shooting action that brings a fluidity to the film's bank robbery sequences. Spinotti's use of digital equipment, which creates, he says, "the ability to see into shadows," makes possible one of the films several rat-a-tat set pieces, a nighttime shootout with the FBI at the Little Bohemia lodge in northern Wisconsin.
Once he and this entourage are out of prison, Dillinger heads to the big city of Chicago, where he meets the beautiful Billie Frechette (Cotillard), a hat-check girl with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. She is dubious of his attentions at first, but when he tells her he has a weakness for "baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you," she is hooked.
Though even his criminal pals tell him that what they're doing won't last, Dillinger says he's too smart for the opposition. He reckons without the more modern and scientific nature of the other side, led by the FBI's fussy, obsessive J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his man on the ground in the Midwest, Melvin Purvis.
Efficiently played by Christian Bale, Purvis is an icy and implacable nemesis who keeps after Dillinger with the help of handpicked Texas lawmen like Charles Winstead (Mann veteran Stephen Lang at his best). Purvis may have doubts about Hoover's methods, but he knows he has time on his side, even if Dillinger does not.
Though any number of name actors, including Lili Taylor as a confident sheriff and Giovanni Ribisi as gangster Alvin Karpis, make appearances, what's unusual about "Public Enemies" is Mann's determination not to have any face be an ordinary one.
A full 15 people (led by Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmerman) are credited with casting work on the film, and every face that appears on screen, from the members of Purvis' Chicago FBI squad to youthful junior G-men, are clearly hand-picked for individuality and impact.
Mann's attention to nominally small things, his insistence that every detail be authentic, including the clothes (Colleen Atwood is the costume designer) and the often historic locations (Nathan Crowley is production designer), lend a sense of rightness to the entire endeavor.
Just as potent, as always with Mann, is the eclectic musical landscape, which here includes, in addition to Elliot Goldenthal's score, Billie Holiday doing "Am I Blue," Diana Krall singing "Bye Bye Blackbird," blues by Blind Willie Johnson and Otis Taylor, and the Smithsonian Folkways recording of "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" sung by a group of Old Regular Baptists. Not your ordinary tunes.
One of the interesting side effects of this exceptional care is to make "Public Enemies" so real it seems to transcend its period and exist out of time. Though the Depression was a major factor in Dillinger's career, we don't see or feel it all that much. What we get instead is the sense of a man whose name has lasted until now for a reason and, if the movies have anything to say about it, will last longer still.
Review
KIDS will love the cute, exciting "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," the third installment of an animated franchise that shows no sign of fatigue in its first 3-D outing (in some theaters, at least).
Their parents will no doubt be amused by the idea that this time, dinosaurs coexist with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers -- at least in a subterranean world that seems immune to the global warming that thawed the last installment, "Ice Age: The Meltdown."
There is much more of an emphasis on action in this nicely crafted, fast-paced sequel, which at its best shares the antic qualities of classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
Ray Romano returns as the voice of the neurotic woolly mammoth Manny, with Queen Latifah as his now-pregnant wife -- and Denis Leary as his pal, the saber-toothed Diego, who is feeling left out by the impending blessed event.
The plot is set into motion when the wacky sloth Sid (John Leguizamo) finds some dinosaur eggs and -- very amusingly -- decides to hatch them himself.
Of course, this is not a great idea, and leads to the others having to rescue poor Sid from a pack of dinosaurs.
The major new character is a one-eyed (and quite demented), swashbuckling weasel named Buck buckling weasel named Buck (voiced by a very funny Simon Pegg) who seems to owe a lot to Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.
There's less dialogue than in the previous episodes, with much screen time devoted to interludes featuring the mischievous and hyper squirrel Scrat, who finds love with another member of his species.
Blue Sky Studios -- responsible for the delightful "Horton Hears a Who!" as well as the "Ice Age" movies -- may not turn out masterpieces like Pixar's "Up." But they've been consistently making toons superior to the much-hyped DreamWorks Animation, which relies too heavily on celebrity voices and cultural references.
Director Carlos Saldanha, encoring from "Ice Age: The Meltdown," keeps things moving at a rapid clip and uses 3-D far more imaginatively and effectively than in DWA's "Monsters vs. Aliens."
"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" makes especially clever use of music, including several variations on the Lou Rawls classic "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine."
Even Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" turns up.
Review
Introducing her new romantic comedy at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, writer/director/star Nia Vardalos warned attending critics who had "come here to dump all over it" to "put a cork in it." Alas! Corks must pop for a glorified sitcom as transcendently inept and self-regarding as I Hate Valentine's Day. Slim, trim, and far too old to be simpering like a demented kitten, Vardalos affects a bizarrely self-conscious runway lope through this naked attempt to repeat the box-office moxie of her big, fat Greek wedding. Trading Toula for Genevieve, Vardalos is now an apparently fancy-free Manhattan florist who sets a five-date limit on all potential relationships until she meets a shy restaurateur (John Corbett, again) with permanence written all over his handsome mug. Flanked by the usual gay stooges (Stephen Guarino and Amir Arison) gamely cracking wise and an ensemble of sidekicks (among them Rachel Dratch, Jay O. Sanders, and Gary Wilmes) more gifted than she, Vardalos stalks from one dreary set piece to the next (pretentious art shows, dire karaoke—that sort of thing), wearing an expression of petrified vivacity occasionally softened by, here it comes, the childhood wounds that have rendered Genevieve so scared of commitment. Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.
Review
Part of “My Sister’s Keeper” takes place in a courtroom, and the convoluted plot can be a trial in itself. Yet the essence of the story, a fictional projection of medical possibility, is anything but legalistic. For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting.
The plaintiff, 11-year-old Anna, is played endearingly by Abigail Breslin. Anna grabs our attention in the prologue when she announces, “I’m a designer baby. I was made in a dish to be spare parts for Kate.” Her older sister Kate, that is, who suffers from leukemia; she’s played, beautifully, by Sofia Vassilieva. Almost from birth Anna has been an involuntary donor of blood, bone marrow and other substances that Kate needs to survive. Now, faced with a kidney transplant, Anna wants to put a stop to her painful servitude, so she sues for medical emancipation from her parents, Sara and Brian (two more fine performances by Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric.) The excellent cast includes Alec Baldwin as Anna’s lawyer, Heather Wahlquist as her aunt, Thomas Dekker as Kate’s boyfriend and Joan Cusack as a sternly compassionate judge.
Nick Cassavetes directed from his and Jeremy Leven’s adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel. The book had its own structural problems, plus an ending that was problematic to say the least. If the back-and-forth time line remains tangled, the ending is now more honest, though anguishingly so. Honesty and intelligence suffuse the production, which is equally eloquent about the toll that grave illness can take on a family and the role that love can play in healing it. The superb cinematographer Caleb Deschanel has contributed images of great warmth, though also unsparing ones when they’re appropriate. “My Sister’s Keeper” may seem unusually serious for summer entertainment, but any season is the right one for a good film.
Review
Michelle Pfeiffer has a career triumph in "Chéri" playing an aging courtesan. Aging has never looked so good. At 49, her Lea de Lonval realizes that her glory days, along with the waning hours of La Belle Époque, are over, and so, for sport, she decides to take up with a 25-year-old dandyish Adonis named Chéri (Rupert Friend). She plans to teach him a few things before sending him on his way. What she doesn't count on is that they will fall in love with each other.
Directed by Stephen Frears, written by Christopher Hampton, and based on two celebrated novels by Colette – "Chéri" (1920) and "The Last of Chéri" (1926) – "Chéri" is being promoted as a frisky comedy. It's a great deal more melancholy than that, though. Frears summed up Lea in an interview where he stated that "she's unnerving, as though being that beautiful contains its own tragic quality." The tragedy lies in what is being taken away. For a courtesan, whose face and figure are her fortune, the diminishment of beauty is especially burdensome. But Lea's masklike radiance in this film transcends youthful allure. She's more mysteriously beautiful than ever. This is what Frears was aiming for – the incandescence of the tragic – and it is what Pfeiffer so movingly conveys.
Because she started out in the movies as glorified eye candy – she had the standard surfer chick look – it took a while for Pfeiffer to become recognized for the great actress that she is. In "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Age of Innocence," "The Russia House," and many other films, she has a force and a frailty that astonish. (I've always wished she could play a Chekhov heroine.) In "Chéri," as in "The Age of Innocence," she can move right into a plush period piece and give it a present-tense vitality.
It would have been easy in "Chéri" for Pfeiffer to play Lea as a weepy victim, but she understands that Lea has her pride. Pfeiffer's performance is all about what lies beneath Lea's pride. She is savvy enough to have lived extremely well off the ministrations of wealthy men, but, to her amazement and fascination, Lea for the first time finds herself in love. It's not just that Chéri brings her back to her youth. He also reminds her of what has been lost. When he leaves her for an arranged marriage, and then returns to her, she says to him, "You came back and found an old woman," and she is not simply fishing for a compliment. She means it. Lea has achieved success in life by being brutally practical. Even in love, she cannot submit to false delusions.
Frears creates a buzzing, cackling universe of old-time courtesans, including Chéri's mother, Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates), once Lea's rival, still an adversary. Bombastic, devious, her dark, sprawling home chockablock with vulgar gewgaws, Charlotte is everything Lea is not. (Charlotte spins her years by reporting that "saggy flesh holds perfume better.") Lea not only wants to rescue herself, she also wants to rescue Chéri from the clutches of such a woman. The airiness of Lea's Art Nouveau house, with its soft pastel colorations, is a blissful respite for him.
Frears and Hampton previously collaborated on "Dangerous Liaisons," which also starred Pfeiffer and to which this film no doubt will be compared. But the gamesmanship in "Chéri" is far more nuanced. The only thing at stake, ultimately, is the human heart. The film might have been even better if Rupert Friend were a stronger counterweight to Pfeiffer. He has a tendency to let his looks do his acting for him. But as Chéri, he presents the right ripe image, and, in any event, Lea's passion for him is not intended to be entirely rational.
How could it be? She muses at one point that she was born decades too early for him, but if they had met up at the same age, their liaison would have been dimensionless. Lea's sweet sorrow, not to mention Chéri's, is inextricable from their disparate years. Plenty of terrible movies know how to work your tear ducts. Here's a weepie that, in Pfeiffer's performance, touches you on the highest levels. Grade: A (Rated R for some sexual content and brief drug use.)
Review
TORONTO -- Two decades after it happened, the horrible story of the stoning of a young married woman in a small Iranian village, on the basis of her husband's patently trumped-up charges of adultery, has finally been told, and told powerfully (and with excellent production values), on the big screen.
Originally described in 1990 in a book by a French-Iranian journalist named Freidoune Sahejam, this stunning adaptation is the work of first-time director Cyrus Nowrasteh, an American-born graduate of the USC film school, who knows what film technique is all about.
Adventurous indie distributors should definitely give this film a look, especially those with an interest in human-rights or women's issues. It would also be a natural for film festivals around the world and should do extremely well in the ancillary market, especially with sales to colleges.
Iran officially denies that stoning takes place there, but independent evidence indicates otherwise. In any case, one problem the film might encounter is that in the present environment it could certainly be construed as an anti-Islamic work, since virtually everyone in the film (certainly all the males) are presented as villains.
The story is related as a flashback told to the French journalist, the day after the event took place, by Zahra, Soraya's close friend. The latter is played by the excellent and well-known Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2004 for her work in "The House of Sand and Fog."
Soraya's husband Ali wants to divorce her to marry a tempting pre-teen girl who's been offered to him, but Soraya refuses to agree until she can earn enough money to support her and her two sons. Ali gets impatient, however, and blackmails the local ayatollah (a former hatchet-man for the Shah) into helping him. Soraya's uneducated employer Hashem is easily intimidated into testifying that she had "slept in his bed," and the wishy-washy mayor goes along with the obviously phony charges.
The film itself is presented with the stateliness and inevitability of Greek tragedy, and the nobility with which Soraya accepts her fate is reminiscent of the grandest of Italian operas. It's obviously meant as a fable, a cautionary tale, and can't be judged by the usual criteria of realism, especially the pure villains like her husband Ali.
Given the title of the film, we all know exactly what is going to happen, and the film's strategy is to slowly draw out the horrifying details: the gathering of the stones; her burial standing up, as far up her waist; the forcing of her two sons to abjure her and throw stones themselves; and of course the chilling spectacle of the blood lust of the mob.
The editing is a bit overdone at times (especially when the cuts are amateurish and unnecessary), as is the occasionally melodramatic music track, though the ambient sounds on the soundtrack are brilliantly done. In any case, it's a powerful, shocking piece, and the denunciation of a system in which an accused woman has to prove her own innocence (while in the case of a man, his guilt has to be proven by others), is strong and clear and unforgettable.
Review
The Iraq war has been dramatized on film many times, and those films have been ignored just as many times by theatre audiences. But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is the most skillful and emotionally involving picture yet made about the conflict. The film, from a script by Mark Boal, has a new subject: the heroism of the men who defuse improvised explosive devices, sloppily made but lethal bombs planted under a bag or a pile of garbage or just beneath the dirt of a Baghdad street. Bigelow stages one prolonged and sinister shoot-out in the desert, but the movie couldn’t be called a combat film, nor is it political, except by implication—a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene. The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt. “The Hurt Locker” narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat.
Over and over, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), following a tip-off, walks to a bomb site in a heavy protective suit and tries to figure out how to pull apart clumsily tangled wires and flimsy triggering devices. We’ve seen James’s predecessor die on the job: a man watching him from a nearby store detonated a bomb with a cell phone. As James goes in, slowly, under a hot sun, treading like a spaceman through trash-filled streets, people gather in doorways or look out windows. Which of them is hostile, which friendly, which merely curious? The two other members of James’s team, the frightened young Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and the wary, experienced Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), cover James, screaming at anyone who moves. The two men feel entirely vulnerable; they both admire and detest James, who pulls them into situations they would rather leave to someone else.
In the past, Kathryn Bigelow, now fifty-seven, has outdone the macho movie boys at their own game. In her “Blue Steel” (1989), as Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a cop, geared up for a day’s work, Bigelow focussed on her revolver, her leather holster, and her shoes, in gleaming closeup. The sequence hovered somewhere between fetish and parody. Bigelow went into the ocean with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfer-crime movie “Point Break” (1991), and brought off scenes of languorously slo-mo destruction in the cultish sci-fi crime movie “Strange Days” (1995). By the mid-nineties, I had her figured as a violence junkie with a strong tendency to stylize everything into stunning images that didn’t always mean much. As a filmmaker, Bigelow is still obsessed with violence, but she’s become a master at staging it. In “The Hurt Locker,” there are no wasted shots or merely beautiful images. As Eldridge and Sanborn jerk their guns this way and that at a bomb scene, Bigelow, working with the great cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, jerks the camera around, too. She wants us to be there, to feel the danger, the mystery.
This kind of immediacy is commonplace in action filmmaking, but, unlike so many directors today, who jam together crashes, explosions, and people sailing through the air in nonsensical montages of fantasy movement, Bigelow keeps the space tight and coherent. No matter how many times she cuts away, you know exactly where James is in relation to a bomb—whether he’s in the kill zone or far enough away to be safe. (You can’t break up the integrity of space when space is the subject of your movie.) And Bigelow prolongs the moment, stretching out our anxiety almost to the point at which it becomes pain. “The Hurt Locker” is quite a feat: in this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like “Some of us like explosions. Ease up.” Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.
The insistence on plainness, the absence of stylization, carries over to the performances as well. Jeremy Renner has played the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and many minor roles in action movies. He has a round face, with a beautiful smile that he mostly keeps hidden, and a strong but unglamorous body. Bigelow’s idea in casting him, I think, was to make her star a competent but physically ordinary American serviceman whose greatest gifts are within. William James, it turns out, is implacably heroic. He never steps away from danger. You might say that he’s drawn to it and needs it, but he never makes a fuss about what he’s doing. His charisma consists of having no obvious charisma except phenomenal concentration and guts. And since he knows, handling bombs, when to be cautious and when not to be, he can be hair-raisingly casual, tossing aside a disabled device as if it were an empty juice carton. At one point, he shucks his headset, too, and Sanborn, who needs to stay in touch with what James is doing, is so enraged that he slugs him. In the nineteen-fifties, Aldo Ray played men like William James—war lovers, completely at home on the battlefield but hapless in the normal relations of life. (When James and his partners relax and get drunk, the only way they can show their affection is to punch one another in the stomach.) But Ray’s military men were unreachable, stone-cold killers, while James has strong emotions, which he keeps pent up.
