OK, so I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to accomplish with this new blog. I want the freedom to write about anything, but am fearful of where that freedom could lead. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely, and nowhere will a man ever have more power than on his own blog. In a situation like this, its hard to avoid gratuitous self-indulgence. What I definitely don’t want is for this to be a “Look at my life, aren’t I interesting?” kind of blog. You see those everywhere, and they’re boring. They’re also pretty presumptuous when you think about it. Why should you be interested in my life? I’m probably not interested in yours.
Bear with me here in the early goings while I figure this out. Ideally, I’d like this to be a place you can come for laughs and insight. At my best I like to think I’m capable of both. At my worst…..well, lets not go there. I don’t want you to have nightmares. The point is, I’m planning on putting a lot of effort into this. I ordered a computer from Best Buy over a month ago, and when it finally arrives I want to be blogging on an almost daily basis. Who knows if that will actually happen, but a man can dream……can’t he?
Anyhoo, if you’ve read my blogs in the past you know I like to do movie reviews. I’m no cinema expert, but I see a good amount of movies and I usually go solo, so my perspective is untainted (except by my own biases). I’ve seen two movies in the past 2 weeks, and I think both of them merit some discussion. We’ll do one today and one tomorrow.
Public Enemies
I was really psyched to see this movie. As soon as I found out Bale and Depp were going to be co-starring in a movie about John Dillinger I was absolutely certain it was going to be a home-run. I was wrong. I’d say this movie was god-awful, but that makes it sound too noteworthy. Public Enemies wasn’t god-awful. And it certainly wasn’t good. It wasn’t anything. It was just….there. Two hours of nothing that I paid $12 to see.
As my boi Katz astutely points out, the character development is atrocious. At no point did I care about any of them. Most of the time I barely knew who they were. This movie throws a boatload of characters at you without any introduction or back story and then assumes you’re emotionally invested in all of them. At one point they spend 5 minutes on a tear-jerker death scene between Johnny Depp and some guy I honestly didn’t recognize. Obviously he had to have been in the movie before then, but I couldn’t tell you when. This sort of negligence is typical. Characters, most of whom are played by people you’ve seen but whose names you don’t know, come and go unchecked throughout the film. They’re all clealry supposed to be important figures, and the result is that none of them actually are.
As bad as that problem was, and it was pretty bad, there were worse to deal with. Namely the story of Dillinger and his wife. This is basically the focal point of the movie, yet is completely devoid of any attempt at originality. Instead hackneyed cliches abound, including the most hackneyed cliche of all: love-at-first-site. Depp knows from the second he sees her that this woman will be his wife, and he tells her so. Rather than being creeped out, she naturally finds it endearing. Then she has some misgivings and takes off (gasp!) leaving Depp to languish in the rain for a while before tracking her down and telling her to “never walk out on him again.” At this point I think they’ve known each other for an hour. But, as the movie makes abundantly clear, these two share a love the rest of us mere mortals couldn’t possibly understand. Seriously, they love each other. You don’t even know. You might think you do, but you don’t. You can’t. Their love knows no bounds. It could move mountains, fill valleys, cross oceans, slay orcs, blah, blah, blah. The same bullshit you’ve seen in EVERY SINGLE MOVIE EVER MADE. It’s just so tired. So god-damn tired. So tired it took a 4-hour nap at work and then ate a whole box of taffy while listening to Enya’s greatest hits. Oh wait, thats me. What were we talking about again?
I might be piling it on here, but this movie was just so disappointing. Bale’s character wasn’t allowed so much as a facial expression, and Depp’s Dillinger was…..wait for it….actually a good guy! Turns out he was kinda like that Robin Hood fella! Cool, huh? Seriously though, I knew I was in trouble when during the first bank robbing scene Depp tells this scared woman, “It’s OK ma’am. We’re not here for your money, we’re here for the bank’s money.” I mean COME ON (Jimmy voice). That line, that exact same fucking line, has been used at least 5 times in the new millenium alone. The fact that the screenwriter couldn’t even be bothered to write new lines is indicative of the entire creative process behind this movie.
It is beyond lame to simply make Dillinger the good guy. For one thing, he wasn’t a good guy. He was a bank robber. But aside from that, simply making him the good guy is played. Soooo played. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford provided a perfect blueprint for how to appropriately mythologize a criminal. Don’t make him a good guy. Start with the admission that he was a bad guy, but show him as a bad guy who’s torn, who wishes he could be good but can’t. Internal conflict is a hallmark of all the most interesting characters. It makes you want to know their story. One thing I can promise you is that you won’t leave Public Enemies wanting to know more about Dillinger’s story. You’ll be thinking about something else long before the movie ends.
The final insult comes right before the credits when a few paragraphs come on screen to wrap things up. I didn’t even want to read them, but I thought I might as well see it through. As it turns out Melvin Purvis, Bale’s character, committed suicide a year after he finally bagged John Dillinger. So the most successful FBI agent of all time was apparently such a tortured soul that he was driven to take his own life shortly after his greatest triumph. Boring, right? Wouldn’t want to play that angle up or anything. Better just to hire one of the best actors in the world and give him comparable screen-time to Stephen Dorff. Now thats what I like to call gettin’ Dorffed. It’s OK Bale, you weren’t the first, and you sure as hell won’t be the last. My boi swingin’ Stevie has broken a lot of hearts in his day*.
*In all seriousness, if you’re making a movie and you find yourself saying, “You know who would be great for this part? Steven Dorff,” then you need to stop everything; your movie is going to be terrible.
