Public Enemies

Dear Michael Mann,

For thirty years you've been doing your own thing, quietly carving out your owe niche in cinema history. I would like to say that I am a fan of that niche, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to be certain. I've seen all your film work, except for The Keep (and from what I can tell, it is a very atypical film for you), and I can still only count on one hand the films of yours that I love. Yet when you do knock it out of the park, you create some of the best films of the decade (Heat, The Insider). When you miss, though, it can be unbearably dull. I can't say that Public Enemies is a failure, not by a long-shot, but it sure isn't one of your best achievements, either.

When you were making this film, I wonder, were you concerned about the similarities to Heat? Two men, opposite sides of the law, both doing what they do best, leading to an inevitably violent showdown. Yet where that film had a spark of life, a sense of grandeur, here there is only coldness and simplicity. It stands as a pale imitator by comparison. Where is the depth of characters? I had such a hard time connecting to either Dillinger or Purvis, I got no sense of who these men were or why they did what they did. And where was the story? Dillinger robs banks, Purvis tries to stop him, throw in a little romance, and viola! There's your movie. Well, that doesn't quite cut it, not when you made such complex character studies like The Insider or even Collateral.

I have to say, I deeply respect you for not turning this into a Dillinger biopic. This could easily have been about the life and times of America's original public enemy number 1. You could have started with him as a boy, faced with some sort of trauma. That trauma would have thrown a shadow over his whole life, serving as an artificial explanation for everything he does later in life. In short, it could have been simply awful and generic. Instead, you focus just on who he was at that moment in time when his life was coming to an end. Outside of a throwaway reference to a bad father, you offer no explanations or justifications for what Dillinger does or who he became. Still, that doesn't mean all character development must be thrown by the wayside. I felt like neither you nor Johnny Depp really got who Dillinger was, so you didn't try to make him into an interesting guy. There was one moment, however, that spoke volumes: Dillinger, walking into the Bureau building and poking around the office that was investigating him. The way he tests to see if anyone would recognize him, the curiosity on his face - that was a standout moment, but it should not have been the only one.

Where you never fail to impress me is the technical aspects. I know that digital bothers a lot of people, yet you stick with it. I tend to agree that digital takes people out of the experience, but that hasn't been the case with your films. You know how to use it in such a beautiful, sometimes haunting way. The film is a sight to behold, from cinematography to art direction to costumes, but it is the sound design that stands out the most. What a complex, nuanced arrangement of sounds you have. You always know when to ramp up the sound and when to let the silences speak for themselves. Whatever my problems with your characters, there's no denying that you fully drew me into this time and place through your impeccable craft.

I guess I just wish you could marry your technical majesty with a great script. You've done it before, and I know you can do it again. It just seems like you've been in a creative funk this decade. Collateral aside, nothing you've done has spoken to me the way your films in the 90's did. Public Enemies is certainly a step in the right direction after Miami Vice, but it's still a far way off of what you and I both know you are capable of. Still, I thank you for you willingness to put something a little unconventional out there in the midst of summer, knowing full well this isn't what people normally flock to in July. Whatever its flaws, at least this isn't a mindless summer blockbuster. I don't see myself jumping off the Mann bandwagon yet, but please take the sparks of originality in this film and run with it next time. You're still capable of something extraordinary, and I patiently await that film.

Sincerely,
Ken

Terminator Salvation

With the decade coming to a close, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how cinema has grown and changed over the previous ten years, and all the amazing new talents that have emerged in that time. To think, prior to this decade people like Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass had yet to really enter the fray. Meanwhile people like Peter Jackson, Alfonso Cuaron, and Guillermo del Toro finally emerged from the shadows to create major visions. We've had a lot of amazing new talent this decade, but the good must always go with the bad. If the previously mentioned were among the most important new talents of the decade, then who were the worst? Well, I think you can already see where I am going with this since this is my Terminator Salvation review. Director McG started his film making career at the start of the decade with Charlie's Angels, a bad film with little redeeming it aside from Bill Murray. It was followed by the somehow worse sequel (sans Murray), and more recently he made a film I did not see, We Are Marshall. Now maybe that film is a winner, but between his first two films and this new Terminator movie, he has demonstrated that his talent is exceedingly limited, and what's more, he probably drove the final nail into the coffin for this venerable franchise.

I'm a pretty big fan of the Terminator movies, and I enjoy all three for different reasons. The first one is a fun B-movie treated with the utmost respect by its director. T2 is the epitome of how to make a sequel, something James Cameron seems to excel at better than any of his peers. Even the third one, often unfairly maligned, has some good moments. I particularly respected its decision to not allow the franchise to become repetitive by ending it with the often mentioned Judgement Day. It has been six years since the last film (actually the shortest gap between sequels, amazingly) and the franchise has finally moved forward into the future war that has long been discussed. It seems like a pretty hard concept to mess up, but somehow McG and company do an admirable job of getting everything wrong.

We know that Skynet has become self aware and killed most of humanity. We know that John Connor has been told since childhood that he would be the key to humanity's salvation when he grew up. We know that Kyle Reese must be sent back in time to save Connor's mom from the wrath of a terminator. Beyond that, this future has been largely unwritten. The filmmakers could have done practically anything here, free from the confines of the previous films which were about characters fulfilling destiny. So it's pretty insulting that this film fails to move the story forward at all. Even remotely. This movie could have been skipped entirely, we could have moved right along to film 5, and the whole plot here could have been explained in passing by a character in just a sentence or two. Except, the events here are so inconsequential here that no one would feel the need to speak that sentence to sum up these events. Basically Connor finds out that Skynet wants to kill Kyle Reese before he goes back in time to save Sarah Connor. Connor rescues Reese and blows up a Skynet base. No forward movement of plot, no character development - that's it.

What made all the other movies so great was that they were about something. Underneath the great action set pieces was actually humor and thought. Could a person change their fate if they knew the future? What was the difference between man and machine? Could a machine be taught to be more human? Questions like those were at the heart of the original trilogy. We think maybe this film will try to explore something similar when we are introduced to Marcus (Sam Wothington), a man who donates his body to science while he is on death row. Fifteen years later we learn he is part machine, part human. Surely interesting things will come of this, right? Nope. Marcus thinks he's human, finds out he's a machine, and soundly rejects his machine side. What was especially odd about this was Connor's reaction to Marcus. Connor twice met sentient machines prior to Judgement Day, and both times he tried to show those machines how to be more human - he didn't want to believe they were totally devoid of any humanity. Here, when he meets Marcus, he immediately wants to kill him without any second thought. Yet unlike those previous machines, Marcus wants to be human, already has semblances of human emotions. One of the most human of emotions is compassion, yet Connor has been robbed of his for some reason in this film, perhaps only because it serves the story.

The acting is across the board bad, with maybe the exception of Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese. Christian Bale is always gruff as Connor, radiating a deadness inside himself that makes you not care if he lives or dies. What happened to that rebellious kid from T2 that we all loved? Sam Worthington is being proclaimed as the next big star. His next film will be Avatar, James Cameron's long awaited new film. It seems likely that McG saw that Cameron had faith in this new talent, so he grabbed him as well. I'm hoping that it is McG's fault that Worthington is so wooden, because if not, he really has about as much of a future as Hayden Christensen did post Star Wars. And I have a gripe about the women in this film. James Cameron has always been particularly great at developing strong, dynamic women in his films. McG seems to laugh at the notion that women can be strong characters. By my count there were four women in this film. One is a mute child who is an obvious nod to Newt from Aliens. She does nothing and is completely useless. Jane Alexander plays the leader of an outpost hidden in the desert. She is snatched by robots almost instantly. Bryce Dallas Howard is Connor's wife. The only words to come from her mouth are exposition. Finally, Moon Bloodgood is supposed to be our badass heroine here. She isn't. We first meet her stuck in a tree, and she needs help getting down from Marcus. Later she is attacked by a group of marauders, and again needs help defending herself. Then she leads a robot right into camp, unknowingly playing the Judas to Connor's Jesus. Why can't McG make these women strong, interesting, or realistic?

If nothing else, this film has great sound and special effects. I appreciated that they tried to incorporate practical effects whenever possible. And while the cinematography is flat and the art direction is bland, there were one or two action scenes that McG handled well. The problem was they held no weight behind them because the characters were so poorly conceived. If I don't care whether anyone lives or dies, I'm not going to be invested in scenes of peril (not to mention the bigger problem of not caring if humanity wins this war). They also found an interesting way to incorporate Arnold Schwarzenegger in the picture, and it seems likely that special effects have gotten to the point where he could appear in any Terminator film from here to the end of time and no one would really question it.

If you like loud dumb action films, this might be passable to you. If you want an actual Terminator film out of it, it's really bad, so temper you expectations and you will not be as disappointed as I was. I'd say that objectively, Wolverine was a worse movie, but this was a bigger disappointment because I expected more from it. Riddled with plot holes (how does Skynet know about its many attempts to kill John and Sarah Connor if they aren't going to attempt them for ten more years?), filled with wooden acting, and conceived as a place holder more than an advancement of a story, there's just so little here to enjoy. If there ever is another film in the series, I can only hope Cameron or someone of his ilk comes along and finishes this story in the right way.

The Dark Knight

I grew up at a time when it was nearly impossible not to be a Batman fan. While Tim Burton's first Bat-film barely escaped my radar upon release, I still remember the hoopla around Returns in 1992. I was there when they launched the Animated Series, faithfully watching every day after school. I was in line opening day for both Forever and Robin. While other comic book characters were certainly prevalent at the time, none ingrained themselves into my psyche quite as much as Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego. So when the whole franchise came to a sudden and unexpected halt in 1997, I was disheartened. It seemed as though I may have to move on, find a new superhero to satiate my comic book needs. But as the comic book renaissance began at the turn of the decade, I found myself unimpressed by what was being offered. It became apparent that no other character would be able to take over the mantle from Batman, and I would just have to patiently wait for someone to revive the dormant franchise.

Christopher Nolan's 2005 take on the series was a breath of fresh air. It took itself and its characters seriously, aiming to be more than simply a fun time at the movies (though it was that, too). Nolan and company decided to make a hero for a real world, eschewing superpowers and freakish villains. In retrospect, that first offering did have its faults - notably the final act - but all in all, it succeeded where so many other comic book films have failed. Now, three years later, Nolan has set out to top his already stellar first film. To say he does is an understatement. This is a magnum opus for the genre, a film that is alive with ideas, characters, action, dialog, and emotion. Like only a select few sequels, it builds upon its predecessor to expand the world its characters live in while not ignoring what made the first one so successful.

If I have one complaint, it is that Batman is relegated back to second fiddle, much like he was in the first series of films. It would have been nice to focus a bit more on how he was dealing with the events in the film, especially a major choice he has to make about halfway into the film. Begins was the first film to truly explore the character in more than a superficial way, but they've regressed a bit on that front here. His arc was the most difficult to appreciate, simply because not enough time was spent on it. Although in a two and a half hour movie, that may be asking for too much. Especially when every single new character is so damn fascinating.

The scariest villains in film history are ones we don't know anything about. Michale Meyers, Leatherface, Anton Chigurh, Hannibal Lecter (although someone got the bright idea to explain him to no end in a series of sequels) - all work because their actions are unpredictable, seeming to make no sense. The Joker, perhaps one of the most iconic villains in any medium, follows in this fine tradition, and as a result he is both terrifying and riveting. The Joker appears to explain what made him into such a monster, only to later reveal that he was just messing with us. It's like he knows people are trying to analyze him, to figure out what turned him into such a monster, and he is having fun screwing with people's expectations. Was it his dad? A former lover? Something far more mundane? We never get an honest answer, nor do we need one. As a result, Joker is so unpredictable that we are left constantly on the edge of our seats wondering where he is going to take us next.

Heath Ledger makes the role of the Joker his own, proving all the naysayers (myself included) wrong. And while he is so convincing as a man utterly nuts, it is his scene in the interrogation room with Batman that really shows just how great a performance it is we are witnessing. Reminiscent of the diner scene in Heat (in fact, much of the film is an homage to that classic), these two opponents stop the movement of the story for a few minutes to simply talk to each other. While the scene quickly turns out to be an integral part of the plot, for a moment or two this scene just pops with energy as two sides of a coin meet face to face. If Ledger really does get an Oscar nomination, it will be this scene that is showcased on award night.

The ads have led us to believe that this is Heath Ledger's film, but that actually isn't the case. I am fairly certain that the most screen time is allotted to Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent. If that isn't accurate, it simply felt that way because it was his performance that stood out to me the most. We've already gotten Batman's story, and the Joker has no story, so this film ends up being about Dent's arc. And what an arc it is. I suppose it could be considered a spoiler what he ultimately goes through, but if you have any familiarity with the Batman mythos, it should be obvious where he is heading by film's end. Eckhart absolutely sells the character as someone who has strong morals, but is losing his grasp on the idea of how to go about enforcing those morals. He is fighting for the same thing as Batman, but unlike Batman he is forced to obey the law in order to bring about justice. This is an arc that could have felt unbelievable if not handled right, but I bought into Dent's third act transformation. Eckhart is, in my mind, the real centerpiece of the film.

I hope that everyone involved will be back for one more Batman outing. They've hit on some really great themes here that need to be wrapped up in a third film (or, more likely, not wrapped up as much as further expounded upon. Nolan isn't interested in giving us simple black and white morals here). The idea of Batman being not a hero, but a figure of vigilante justice is an interesting one that rarely gets acknowledged in these kinds of films. People in comic book films love Spider-man and Superman in a way they don't with Batman. He takes everything into his own hands, plays by his own rules. He is the Dirty Harry of superheroes. When he essentially wiretaps every phone in Gotham, we are forced to question if he really has our best interests at heart. While he seems to think so, not everyone else does.

Nolan's Batman series has really spoiled the comic book movie for me. I just can't sit back and mindlessly enjoy something like Iron Man or The Incredible Hulk when there is something far more mature and complex out there in the same genre. Sure, those films are fun, but fun is passive, fleeting. To aspire to be something more than just fun, as Nolan is doing here, is to achieve a lasting impact on our culture that will be discussed and analyzed for years to come. And that appears to be what The Dark Knight has achieved.

3:10 to Yuma

Some people have been exclaiming that 3:10 to Yuma will be the film to revive the largely dormant Western genre. While I suspect it will take more than one movie to accomplish such a feat (where, for example, are all the pirate movies after the success of Pirates of the Caribbean?), 3:10 is certainly a monumental step in the right direction. Filled with searing action, crisp dialogue, and a number of pitch-perfect performances, this is the sort of film that transcends the Western genre and appeals to all fans of movies.

A remake of the 1957 original, 3:10 follows two seemingly different men who may have more in common than either would suspect. Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is one of the most notorious outlaws in the west. Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is a weary rancher trying to support his family while facing a foreclosure on his land. The two meet by chance one day when Evans and his two boys stumble upon Wade and his men robbing a stagecoach. From that point on, it seems the two's lives are destined to be intertwined. Wade comes across Evans again in town later that day and ends up helping the lawmen capture Wade. Realizing he can make the money needed to save his land, he offers to help escort Wade to the town of Contention, where a train will be arriving in a few days time that will take Wade to be tried and hung in Yuma. It becomes a task easier said than done, as Wade's men are on their tail.

That the film is filled with crackling action is no surprise. There are many extended gun fights, great chase scenes, and an explosive climax. Like some of the greatest of Westerns, violence is a way of life in these men's lives. The way in which director James Mangold depicts the violence, however, is often quite shocking and unpredictable. I was at times reminded of Scorsese's The Departed in the way that you're never sure who will die or what will happen next. For example, the way in which a major character is so matter-of-factly killed off half way through the film without a second thought serves to remind us that this film doesn't play by the typical rules of most Hollywood films. No film I've seen this year kept me on the edge of my seat guessing what could happen next quite like 3:10 did.

What wasn't so expected about 3:10, and what serves to elevate it from a great action film to a great film, is the brilliant script and the performances that bring that script to life. The characters, especially Wade and Evans, have some very intelligent discussions about life and honor, right and wrong. Some people have criticized the end of the film as being a little too out of character for one of the leads, but I believe that if you listen to what the characters say throughout the film, it will make sense how the end plays out. It also helps that Crowe and Bale deliver some career high performances. Bale is his usual overly serious self, but with a hint of something more, perhaps desperation. This isn't just a man beat by life, but a man who knows he's been beaten by life and has realized that only some sort of miracle can save him. Crowe, on the other hand, seems to be having the time of his life. I've never been a big fan of Crowe for some reason, but here he is nothing short of genius. He is alternatively funny, scary, thoughtful, amused, and wounded. He's so interesting that we begin to wonder if we actually want Evans to get Wade to that train in the end. Supporting them are Peter Fonda as a grizzled old lawman who may be an even less decent human being than Wade, and Ben Foster as Wade's right hand man. Fonda is wonderful and mysterious, but it is relative newcomer Foster that really shines in the supporting cast. He is so frightening and menacing without ever going over-the-top that you begin to wonder why he isn't in charge of the band of criminals instead of Wade.

The Western has long been feared dead, but 3:10 reminds us why the genre was such an important part of film history. It has that rare ability to entertain us while delivering something more, something with weight. The final act is both smart in its dialogue about heroism and exciting in depicting two men who may both be heroes given the right situation. Director James Mangold is a man who had yet to impress me up to this point. His Identity was a fun thriller with an ending that betrayed all the film's built up suspense. Walk the Line was an example of why biopics are so dangerous, as he seemed to be on autopilot. Here he finally gets it right, and as a result he delivers one of the most exciting, thought-provoking, and downright fun pictures of the year.