Public Enemies was much better when it was called Heat.
Both films are about relentlessly organized bank robbers and their methodical police counterparts. In both there are lovely women who complicate the bank robbers’ continued success. Both are long, drawn-out examinations on police and criminal procedure, and both are directed by Michael Mann, one of the most underrated directors in the business.
Similarities aside, though, Mann’s new movie is hardly self-plagiarism — Public Enemies moves to its own rhythm — even if it is awful similar to 1995’s Heat, a movie that used atmosphere and mood to evoke a bank robber’s unceasing paranoia of capture, or just loneliness. Maybe Mann (Miami Vice, The Insider, Ali) was channeling John Dillinger while directing Heat, and now here he is telling Dillinger’s story in a film he couldn’t have foreseen 14 years ago. Or maybe he just repeated himself in a new time period with new actors. I can’t speculate further without infringing on a talented moviemaker’s catalog of crime capers.
John Dillinger, “public enemy No. 1” as J. Edgar Hoover called him, was a criminal of principle who outshined his contemporaries and brought the entire federal government — or was it the Mafia? — crashing down on him. Here he’s played uncannily by Johnny Depp, who gives him more humanity than a criminal and murderer deserves, but it is that humanity that allow Mann’s movies their unique edge. Depp, and Mann's screenwriting (along with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman), never attempt to explain Dillinger, the man or the myth. They just present him, factually, unblinkingly.
The film follows Dillinger’s rise in the 1930s from ex-con to the folk hero of crime lore, betrayed and gunned down on the sidewalk outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where his last moments alive were spent watching Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Yes, that’s the destination of Public Enemies, but it’s not the route.
In scenes of daring bank robberies, armed shoot-outs with Thompsons clucking away and high-speed chases in Model A Fords, Dillinger is shown as a loyal alpha male slugging men for their rude behavior, demanding love from his latest flame (Marion Cotillard) and forcing the mobs’ hand when he brings a reconstituted FBI and its crimestopping G-Men sweeping through the Midwest looking for trophies for Hoover’s mantle. Dillinger may have been a brute, but Depp plays him as a lover and a fighter, and a man deeply focused on beating the system. Of course, he’s wealthy beyond his imagination, but it’s not satisfying because money alone isn’t proof of victory.
The film shares with us Dillinger’s biggest flaw: his friends. “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Capone associate Frank Nitti, these were the men that would eventually contribute to his ultimate demise, if not directly than from the heat brought in from Washington, D.C, where the FBI had a third of its operating budget designated for Dillinger’s capture or death. Also, Dillinger never stopped robbing people, which couldn’t have helped his wanted status. At one point in the film, Dillinger strolls into the FBI's Chicago field office, where they have a wing designated to his capture. He peruses through the cluster of desks admiring the work being done to track him down, and then even exchanges words with men who were supposed to know Dillinger better than their own wives. Apparently this really happened.
Investigating Dillinger's crimes is FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), who was later erased from bureau history by a vendetta-prone Hoover, that weasel. Bale, whose single-note performance grows very thin here, never seems Depp’s equal and the FBI scenes droop because of it — although one interrogation sequence is superbly acted. For once I would have preferred that Mann stuck exclusively with the criminals rather than balancing a story across two polarized sides. One actor, Stephen Lang, plays an older FBI agent who has the best, and last line, in the movie in a jailhouse interview with Dillinger’s girlfriend. After Lang’s big scene ended I was picturing him in the Purvis role and admiring the potential improvements. For once, Bale was all wrong here.
Exactly how accurate the events from the movie are — the prison break, the dust-up at the Little Bohemia Lodge, the set-up at the Biograph — I will let you discover with a Google search. Most of the scenes take place where they actually happened. A caution, though: The film is not the history of the facts, but a scenario of Dillinger’s potential emotions so don’t take too much stock in Mann’s revisionist Dillinger history.
Overall, this is not one of Mann’s strongest films. It’s a well-made picture, with wonderful costumes and cars, and with all of Mann’s trademarks — an inconspicuous near-ambient score, terrifying weapon effects that seem too real to be just effects, and beautiful night photography — but it’s missing the forward momentum of some of his past works. And despite the big names in the cast list, Public Enemies drags itself to a point we all know is coming outside the Biograph. And when we get there, it's all very anti-climactic considering we still don't understand Dillinger, Purvis or what drove them to this intersection. The route, in this case, wasn’t worth the trip.
Robert Oppenheimer kept coming to mind during Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. After bringing together the smartest minds in the world, and years of research, the scientist successfully created the first nuclear bomb. Afterward he had enough sense to realize what he’d done: “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he famously quoted after seeing the blast.
Director Michael Bay will not have that hindsight with his new Transformers movie, which also brought together a lot of talented people with good intentions to produce a critical mass of movie so genuinely awful that we, as a people, don’t deserve the art of the cinema if we deify these transforming robots to the tune of a billion bucks or more. It’s not entertainment anymore; it’s a cruel and violent assault on our senses.
At least you get a bang for your buck, though: Transformers is like a dozen or so other movies stripped of their souls, hollowed out and mashed into this one preposterously long (two-and-a-half hours!) summer blockbuster. Transformers 2 contains everything, which is just a kinder way of saying it contains nothing at all. Exotic cars, hot babes, military gunplay, computer hackery, robots, motorcycles, action, thrills, romance, stereotypes, clichés, racist robot caricatures, inexplicable titillation on custom choppers, mechanical fire farts, dogs humping legs … all of it atomized into this inane plot about a boy and his transforming robot buddies. It all comes at you so fast and unrelenting that watching it is like having your eyeballs sandblasted with salt and red-pepper flakes.
The film wasn’t written so much as it was grown in a marketing analyst’s Petri dish, like the way bio-chemists harvest anthrax. You’ll know exactly what I mean when afterward you feel like drinking a Mountain Dew, downloading a song by Green Day (sell outs!), logging on to a Cisco Systems video chat or buying a Chevy, a GM brand that our tax dollars are keeping afloat while they goof off on movie sets. Product placement isn’t a new device at movie theaters by any stretch of the imagination, but Transformers makes it feel even dirtier than it should, like making moonshine with holy water.
I don’t dare explain a plot in fear that a black hole form around my desk and begin sucking this side of the solar system into it. Generally speaking, it’s again about Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), who has the Transformers on speed dial because, what the hell, every super-mega-ultra transforming robot forms an alliance with a powerless teenager who still hasn't got to second base with the Geekdom's reigning queen. Sam’s going off to school, which gives his mother a reason to eat pot brownies and sack the Frisbee players on the university lawn, a scene so horrible it actually stands out from the clutter.
The movie dives headfirst into a lot of Transformers mythology, none of which makes any sense even to the robots, one of whom is shocked to discover that a shard of god-cube has downloaded into Sam’s brain if only to give Sam a reason to stay in the movie. (I guess he has more of a role than Megan Fox, though, who pouts on the Web chat seductively.) Then there’s all the rules: the shard can re-animate dead robots, the shard can also kill living robots, there’s a Matrix thingy that unlocks a device, the device can only be started by the One, the One can only be found in a temple of dead robots, the temple requires magic writing to find … on and on into infinity until your brain is a soupy mush. At one point a Transformer with a pirate beard transports himself to Egypt with no explanation as to how he did it or why we hadn’t seen that specific trick before or since.
As if the plot wasn’t confusing enough, the Transformers themselves are just as perplexing. First of all, they have no shape. So when they fight it’s hard to tell who’s giving a punch and who’s receiving one. Nevermind that they all have guns on their arms, but still fight with swords. At one point five Transformers unite into one big robot to (I think) eat the Pyramids, although I’m still not sure how. And secondly, all the Transformers look alike. The good guys, the Autobots, are usually more colorful, while the bad ones, the Decepticons, are steel gray, although this rule is not usually followed consistently so good luck making sense of anything from the first chase sequences in China to the endlessly long battle in the sands on the Giza Plateau.
And speaking of locations, someone explain this to me: Sam apparently walks the two blocks between New York City and the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. in like 10 minutes. Once he’s in the Smithsonian, he walks out the back door into an airplane boneyard in Tucson, which doesn’t look at all like the Washington, D.C., area. And then he transports inexplicably to Egypt. To review, he goes from NYC to DC to Tucson to Egypt in about 15 minutes of screen time. If you can explain this without defying the natural order of things, I’ll buy your tickets to the next Transformer movies up to Part 6, or until Michael Bay is run out of town, whichever comes first.
Compounding all these visual illusions, Bay frames the action in tight close-ups and using these dizzying spin shots that rotate around scenes to show off stuff not really worth showing off. All totaled up, it’s utterly and stupendously incomprehensible. It was difficult enough to watch on the big screen I can’t even imagine how kids will be able to watch this thing on their tiny iPod screens in four months — makes me want the red-pepper flakes again.
This is director Michael Bay’s eighth movie, which, coincidentally, is also the number of films he’s probably actually seen. Had he screened even a single movie that wasn’t his own he’d learn that this is not what people want or need with their films. The movie-going public just thinks it needs it because it’s on billboards, TV and comes as a freebie with their combo meal. We can have talking transforming robots, but we must also have coherent plots, characters that are important to those plots, and images that are more than visual static.
What Bay’s done is taken a line of Hasbro toys and injected less life into their contorting bodies than the children that were playing with them in sand boxes back when Reagan was president. If that's an achievement then I refer back to my original suggestion: we, the artless hacks called humans, no longer have a right to contribute to the cinema and should abandon it until we can prove ourself worthy again.
The Proposal is cliché stacked on top of more cliché. Most romantic comedies are, but this one is shameless.
She is a high-intensity book editor in New York City. She schedules Oprah’s guests with single phone calls. She lives in an apartment that overlooks Central Park. She is so feared at her publishing house that the employees instant message, “It’s here,” to the entire office when she arrives to work. She fires someone in the first scene to show us how heartless she can be.
He is her assistant, which means he fetches cups of coffee, or empty props that resemble Starbucks cups. He is an Alaskan country boy living in NYC to become an author. His first manuscript might be good, but he’s only an office assistant so no one reads it.
So far this collection of rom-com clichés could be describing one of, oh, two dozen films. Clichés I half expected to see, but didn’t, include the Walking Away From an Explosion And Not Turning Around to Look Trick, the Let Me Show My Vulnerability By Apologizing in a Dense Downpour Moment, or He Was Dead the Whole Movie And He Didn’t Even Know It Twist. Maybe if the movie was 10 minutes longer.
She is Margaret (Sandra Bullock) — “Do you prefer Margaret or Satan’s Mistress?” someone asks. He is Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who’s sold integrity down the river by playing slave boy to Margaret, who calls him to make “midnight Tampax runs.” He tells her, “You’re allergic to the full spectrum of human emotions.”
Margaret’s Canadian, eh, so when an immigration official starts poking around she makes Andrew marry her so she can stay in the country. Of course, an elaborate visit to Andrew’s sleepy Alaskan hometown is in order so Margaret can sell herself to her future in-laws, including Craig T. Nelson and Mary Steenburgen, who’s aged like a million bucks. Some of this might look vaguely familiar because The Proposal is uncannily similar to Bullock’s While You Were Sleeping, but this time the groom is wide awake.
What follows from there includes all the other clichés: a crazy granny (Betty White), a disapproving dad, a sweet ex-girlfriend (Malin Akerman), impromptu party speeches full of ad-libbed lies, a scene of accidental nakedness, bedside tenderness, a sing-a-long (“It Takes Two”), a trite score of string plucks and false crescendos, and, in a prototypical rom-com moment, a shocking wedding confession. I’m convinced the plot was conceived by an automated computer program that simply mixes the variables into different orders — 1-2-3-4-5 might produce The Proposal while 1-2-3-5-4 creates Notting Hill.
When it’s not running on rails, The Proposal goes all batty with scenes so bizarre they’ll make you cringe. One of them has Bullock doing a painful Indian tribal dance. Another has an eagle, an eagle’s talons and a puppy — you do the math. One gag with a homely stripper started out uncomfortable, but turned more hilarious as Ramone (Oscar from The Office) showed up throughout the movie in different roles: he’s a gyrating stripper, waiter, hardware clerk and the town’s clergy.
Bullock plays ice queen most of the movie until she hits that point in all of her roles where you feel real sympathy for her loneliness. She looks at the man, eyes welling up with tears, and spills the beans to everyone. It’s her trademarked gimmick, but she does it well and even 90 minutes of nonsense is kinda worth it — stress kinda. What can I say about Reynolds? He seemed like he was just along for the ride.
What I’m most curious about is how, and why, Bullock keeps accepting these roles. There’s a gifted actress waiting to burst from this menagerie of mediocrity. Yes, these films are popular, but they don’t really push her as an actress. And she can only make the same movie so many times.
I fear how many times that actually might be, though.
Footnote: Watch the scene where Sandra Bullock is supposedly naked. There are some strange digital tricks going on around that cupped crotch shot. It's either a) Sandra Bullock's modesty or b) Sandra Bullock's mutated groin area. My bets on a): she didn't want to really be naked in the scene so she wore panties or a thong and then it was all digitally erased later.
Walking out of Land of the Lost, a man turned to his family and said, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen.” He walked about 15 more feet through the lobby and then turned to say it again. Apparently, it was worth repeating.
Not to ridicule this poor guy or the nameless encounter he allowed the rest of the lobby to witness, but he is the core audience for Land of the Lost: people who have little to no expectations for film coherency, people who are just thrilled to be out of the house experiencing a trip to the theater, people who prefer volume over content.
Nothing wrong with those things, but they nearly render me incapable of reviewing Land of the Lost, which I think is stupid on a level that can’t even be appreciated in that stupidly awesome way some bad movies aspire to.
As a mini review inside my review, here’s an unbiased summation of the film: It stars Will Ferrell. It’s a comedy. High-velocity things happen inside high-volume stunts. Special effects render tyrannosaurs, lizard men and giant crabs into engaging adversaries. The jokes sample from physical gags and bathroom humor (Dino urine! Dino farts! Dino burps!) to supreme irony and over-the-top parody. A love interest develops that ends happily. The movie doesn’t really transition from scene to scene in any coherent way, so there’s actually more room for action, special effects and laugh-out-loud jokes. And in the end, there’s a possibility for a sequel.
If you think you might like Land of the Lost then stop reading, because the biased review will commence from here on.
For starters … Will Ferrell. The comedian phoned this one in, and from payphone at some dumpy corner store, too. He plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a quantum paleontologist who develops a proton pack that rips a hole in the space-time continuum. Marshall is sucked into this land of the lost, which acts as a hub for all time — “Is that a Cessna crashed in a viking ship?” Yes, indeed. And there are dinosaurs, cavemen, lizard people and two varieties of fruit (bug-filled fruit and narcotic “White Rabbit” fruit).
Ferrell, who still thinks his presence alone is comedy gold, provides one of the most uneven performances of his career: he’s a science genius, bumbling fool, arrogant jerk, raging nerd and a failing hack, but never any of them at the same time. Every time he appears on the screen he’s someone new, as if the scenes required nothing but his current mood during that particular day of shooting. He spends a great deal of time fleeing from a T-Rex that can run about five times faster than humans, but can never seem to catch any of them. Later the dinosaur swallows, digests and excretes Marshall. Thankfully, the excreting takes place off screen, although, an earlier scene of Marshall dousing himself in dino urine to hide his scent is not.
One line, that deserves its own paragraph, is uncomfortably cruel: “Forget the Polish, it’s the tyrannosaurs that are the real dummies.” In a family comedy? Really?
Talk about overkill on the jokes, this clunker kicks dead horses out of sheer desperation. The urine gag goes on forever, as does a food-binging joke early in the film — Ferrell, in a creative stupor, eats like 12 meals … haha. Then there’s Chaka, the ape-like missing link that turns up and never leaves. Vast portions of the dialogue are spent translating his lost language, which always ends with the mispronunciation of a key word (“Chorizo tacos … I love those”). Chaka, I’ve since been told, was in the original Land of the Lost TV show, so his presence was required, but never wanted.
The main female character (played by Anna Friel) was written into the script to be groped repeatedly. See, Chaka communicates by grabbing women’s breasts. Later, just because, she tears her pants into little booty shorts. I hate it when movies make me feel like a feminist, but come on — most women just do porn when they want to be degraded. It may not apply here, but this quote from HBO's Flight of the Conchords came to mind: "She's so hot she's making me sexist … bitch."
The only highlight in this slag heap of film is Danny McBride, whose been the funniest thing in everything he’s touched going as far back as 2003’s All the Real Girls, his first film. He does this cocky, shoot-from-the-hip brand of honesty that’s refreshingly pure in a film this outlandishly overblown. McBride on the dinosaur jungle: “I betcha someone is growing weed up in here.” McBride on life: “Never trust a dude in a tunic. Ever.” McBride on bathroom humor: “You were deuced out by dinosaur?! Too cool.”
Some movies are bad in good ways. Some are good in bad ways. Then there’s Land of the Lost, which is bad in a bad way. Sadly, it seems proud of this.
Public Enemies was much better when it was called Heat. 
Similarities aside, though, Mann’s new movie is hardly self-plagiarism — Public Enemies moves to its own rhythm — even if it is awful similar to 1995’s Heat, a movie that used atmosphere and mood to evoke a bank robber’s unceasing paranoia of capture, or just loneliness. Maybe Mann (Miami Vice, The Insider, Ali) was channeling John Dillinger while directing Heat, and now here he is telling Dillinger’s story in a film he couldn’t have foreseen 14 years ago. Or maybe he just repeated himself in a new time period with new actors. I can’t speculate further without infringing on a talented moviemaker’s catalog of crime capers. 
John Dillinger, “public enemy No. 1” as J. Edgar Hoover called him, was a criminal of principle who outshined his contemporaries and brought the entire federal government — or was it the Mafia? — crashing down on him. Here he’s played uncannily by Johnny Depp, who gives him more humanity than a criminal and murderer deserves, but it is that humanity that allow Mann’s movies their unique edge. Depp, and Mann's screenwriting (along with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman), never attempt to explain Dillinger, the man or the myth. They just present him, factually, unblinkingly. 
The film follows Dillinger’s rise in the 1930s from ex-con to the folk hero of crime lore, betrayed and gunned down on the sidewalk outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where his last moments alive were spent watching Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Yes, that’s the destination of Public Enemies, but it’s not the route. 
The film shares with us Dillinger’s biggest flaw: his friends. “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Capone associate Frank Nitti, these were the men that would eventually contribute to his ultimate demise, if not directly than from the heat brought in from Washington, D.C, where the FBI had a third of its operating budget designated for Dillinger’s capture or death. Also, Dillinger never stopped robbing people, which couldn’t have helped his wanted status. At one point in the film, Dillinger strolls into the FBI's Chicago field office, where they have a wing designated to his capture. He peruses through the cluster of desks admiring the work being done to track him down, and then even exchanges words with men who were supposed to know Dillinger better than their own wives. Apparently this really happened.
Investigating Dillinger's crimes is FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), who was later erased from bureau history by a vendetta-prone Hoover, that weasel. Bale, whose single-note performance grows very thin here, never seems Depp’s equal and the FBI scenes droop because of it — although one interrogation sequence is superbly acted. For once I would have preferred that Mann stuck exclusively with the criminals rather than balancing a story across two polarized sides. One actor, Stephen Lang, plays an older FBI agent who has the best, and last line, in the movie in a jailhouse interview with Dillinger’s girlfriend. After Lang’s big scene ended I was picturing him in the Purvis role and admiring the potential improvements. For once, Bale was all wrong here. 
Exactly how accurate the events from the movie are — the prison break, the dust-up at the Little Bohemia Lodge, the set-up at the Biograph — I will let you discover with a Google search. Most of the scenes take place where they actually happened. A caution, though: The film is not the history of the facts, but a scenario of Dillinger’s potential emotions so don’t take too much stock in Mann’s revisionist Dillinger history. 
Overall, this is not one of Mann’s strongest films. It’s a well-made picture, with wonderful costumes and cars, and with all of Mann’s trademarks — an inconspicuous near-ambient score, terrifying weapon effects that seem too real to be just effects, and beautiful night photography — but it’s missing the forward momentum of some of his past works. And despite the big names in the cast list, Public Enemies drags itself to a point we all know is coming outside the Biograph. And when we get there, it's all very anti-climactic considering we still don't understand Dillinger, Purvis or what drove them to this intersection. The route, in this case, wasn’t worth the trip.
