Moon - 6/10
Kept feeling like there should be more to this one. Certainly not a bad movie, and Sam Rockwell is immensely watchable in just about everything he has been in (just about. Can't exactly forgive Charlies Angels now can I?). But the fact that I had seen Solaris and 2001 might have ruined it for me, as I kept getting flashbacks from those two and the worst thing you want to be thinking about when you are watching a movie is another movie you like more. I think it has more to do with the fact that the style of this one is just so inspired from those other movies that it feels too similar. This definitely falls into the category of a film that can't do new, so it reinvents a little old...but not enough so that the old tags aren't still visible from a mile away.
Having said that, the idea is interesting. For a moment there you get the impression this is going to go down the cabin-fever-in-space route, but when the reveal occurs part way through the movie it kinda stops midway up the hill and rises again. There are intriguing interactions here, at the film's strongest. It's just too bad that there isn't very much to do with them...well, beyond what you'd expect. I'm reminded of another space movie called Sunshine which was also flawed. These feel like movies trying to be like the classic space movies but they don't bring enough new material to the table. This was a well done homage to the better space movies of yesteryear, and certainly a good acting vehicle for Sam Rockwell, but I can't really speak more about it. Good, not great.
Public Enemies - 5/10
Michael Mann is a director I respect for a lot of reasons (could be that he directed three of my favorite movies), and one of those reasons is that I love how he films shootouts. The anticipation to the violence, the way the characters flinch as the bullets tear up the sound barrier...yeah. He makes these scenes visceral and exciting because they feel and look so dangerous. There is a scene where Dillinger and company are holed up in the Little Bohemia Lodge and Melvin Purvis shows up with his guys for a shooting gallery sequence that steals the movie.
My blood usually boils when I watched "biopic" movies, simply because I know my history, and I know when I'm being lied to. It's really hard not to take it any other way when Hollywood rewrites history for more sass and edge, but it tends to insult me. It is not that I do not enjoy myths over reality, oh quite the contrary! Please, indulge me your fraudulent interpretations of riveting slant. When done properly, as in the excellent 300 (a film dealing with a real event yet based on a fable, and narrated as one), the intent is clear. "This is the myth," the film says. "Now enjoy it." But what happens in recent Hollywood period movies of any variety is that they're either smuggling the grit-agenda or they want to fondle an icon. These films tout realism, now that realism is in and all, yet they pack the B.S. when reality isn't interesting enough and have a tendency of leaving certain details out...like how a certain brilliant Mathematician abandoned his first, unmentioned wife and had a problem yelling "Kikes!" when at the jewelers. Oh I could go on, but I won't. I'm not condemning. But these kinds of things usually go down one of two ways. If you cop out on your own agenda (presenting the "reality"), then you at least better make up for it. So why are a lot of these movies so dreary? My answer? I blame Batman.
At times, Public Enemies slips into this shtick. Toted as a John Dillinger movie, you really don't learn very much about the man, other than he liked to rob banks, enjoyed the company of pretty women, wore nice suits, and was involved in a lot of shootouts. Perhaps that is all there is to him. But better movies have done more with less. Yet there is a way about how Depp captures some scenes here as Dillinger that provoke some thought (like the way he studies mugshots of himself and his associates on a police bulletin with a mixture of mild pride and genuine awe). No, it isn't an accurate portrayal. Baby Face Nelson and other crime figures from that day never met their fates quite as conveniently as they do here, but Kevin Costner isn't around to toss Frank Nitti off a courthouse roof after Franky shoots Connery, so it doesn't drift into the unfathomable just to get a thrill. In fact, this movie and all its inaccuracies doesn't seem to do what films that have all these detours tend to; it doesn't glamorize. Comes close, but doesn't quite.
Somehow that hurts it a little, if you can believe it.
Say what you will about Goodfellas and America's love affair with the mafia; that movie was damned entertaining. Mann's Dillinger movie doesn't rise much higher than okay. It has good moments perhaps, but okay. Certainly nothing terribly interesting about John Dillinger is learned from watching it, and all the other tropes and cautionary whatevers it has in store aren't new to the formula. I can't even say that the shootouts save the film, because there aren't many of those and remember, this film isn't trying to be glamorous. So it stagnates a little too long to be memorable, and no line of dialogue really jumps out to make you recall anything said a few days later. This territory has been mined and quarried.
I will say this; there is some commanding eye play in the movie, if nothing else. People stare at each other and at objects a lot, looking thoughtful. Thinking more than they say. It doesn't help.
