This is a holiday where I come from (Virginia), so I'm going to take the opportunity to enjoy that time away from this cursed blog, which might be counted as a shame -- although that's almost certainly not the case -- because today I saw Michael Mann's Public Enemies, and due to the holiday I have no plans to write about it. Part of my indifference to that task stems from the fact that, while I did indeed like the film -- at times, very much -- it left me without a great deal to think about. At this moment, I kind of feel like Public Enemies, as the English say, does what it says on the tin. It's too early to say how tenaciously the film will cling to my brain, but if I do eventually find a level of greatness in it, more than likely this blog will have moved on by then, and that's a loss we'll have to share together.
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I will say that Mann's choice to shoot on HD video jarred me once (in a scene towards the end featuring Marion Cotillard alone in her apartment -- the screen image was filled with a kind of too-modern grain, if that makes any sense), but was otherwise quite striking, especially in a beautifully crisp night-time shootout involving Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham). Also, the highlight of the film, for me, was Agent Winstead, played by Stephen Lang.
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That's Lang above. I've admired him for years, but I know very little about the guy. However, after seeing him in Public Enemies, I'm going to assume that his middle initial is "M.", and on his birth certificate his last name is italicized. Which means his full name is Stephen Motherfucking Lang. That's how I'm going to think of him from now on, anyway..
So have a happy Fourth, all my American brethren, and, to everyone else, have a plain ol' good weekend.
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Oh, and PS! When I return on Monday, it will be with a post for Greg's (of Cinema Styles fame) Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, which lasts from July 6 through July 12. Please join him, won't you?
Skinheads and neo-Nazis have, over the past decade or so, threatened to take the place of the mentally challenged character as the kind of role that gets an actor noticed, who lets him froth at the mouth while showing the wounded heart underneath -- see Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, Edward Norton in American History X, and Ryan Gosling in The Believer. In short, without much effort, the genre was getting a little tiresome. And to one degree or another, I liked all those movies, and thought those were all good performances. And Graham does the frothing-at-the-mouth-wounded-heart business as well. So, there's nothing really new about the character or the story. But I believed Graham was Combo every damn second, I did not see the wheels turning, I did not see him acting. All I saw was genuine rage and hate and violence and sadness and all the rest of it. Utterly mesmerizing. He has a scene where he lays out his philosophy, and, when he strikes a nerve with Turgoose's Shaun and has to calm the boy down and explain why he said what he said, I thought that here's a guy who could make any kind of hatred sound reasonable, because as far as he's concerned he's not selling snake oil. He's selling what he believes to be right and true. Graham is filled with anger and tenderness, and he's just superb.