tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10506214.post6421740661853904038..comments2024-01-23T13:41:41.463-05:00Comments on The Forager Blog: Screening Log for July and part of August: Short VersionJon Hastingshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01030406521787423155noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10506214.post-78055877807043714772009-08-21T09:18:49.731-04:002009-08-21T09:18:49.731-04:00Dave -
I certainly wasn't surprised to find o...Dave -<br /><br />I certainly wasn't surprised to find out (via Eddie Campbell's blog) that PE plays around pretty liberally with the timeline, real events, etc. To a certain extent, I think it being a Dillinger movie is a bit of a distraction, since it really is one of those abstract metaphysical action movies a la Jean-Pierre Melville (La douxieme souffle would make a great double bill with it), Sam Peckinpah in The Getaway, The Killer Elite, and Alfredo Garcia, or Johnnie To in his The Mission/Exiled mode.<br /><br />Here's what I liked:<br /><br />The way the movie sets up and orchestrates these moments of sudden reversals and transitions in relationships - which are always shifting, contingent, and impermanent. In the opening sequence: how Dillinger's captor turns out to be his accomplice, how quickly the the tide turns against the guards, the way the gang decides to oust the trigger-happy guy. Or the way the deaths of Floyd and Nelson play out, with the emphasis on capturing that moment right when life leaves them.<br /><br />I think it is a step down from Heat and a couple of steps down from Melville's best, partly because Mann's moment-to-moment orchestration of these themes/ideas doesn't really carry over on the macro scale. There's a way that all of the sequences are kind of sitting in a big pool of mythic/epic time, with no sense of how little time passed for Dillinger in "real life" (less than a year from the initial prison break to his death). BUT I want to see it again before I make my final judgment on it in that regard. Mann is one of the few filmmakers working at this scale in America who DOES get the moment-to-moment stuff right that I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.Jon Hastingshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01030406521787423155noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10506214.post-47056255463652637862009-08-20T14:56:24.907-04:002009-08-20T14:56:24.907-04:00would love to hear your take on Public Enemies--da...would love to hear your take on Public Enemies--darned if I didn't hate it! (except for the finale moments intercut with Manhattan Melodrama)<br /><br />I fear it replicates everything that's bad, weird and nativist about the Dillinger legend... this is something that Sherwood understood in the Petrified Forest--how did Mann not get the message?<br /><br />I didn't go in expecting anything quite THAT unreflective... I'm not a Mann fan, by any stretch, but I think HEAT has a lot going for it (as one of the most powerful modern examinations of the understandable impulse toward--and the inevitably damaging results of--antisocial behaviour under late capitalism)<br /><br />I thought Public Enemies might serve as a kind of prequel to Heat,and it IS that, I suppose, in its move toward hero-worship, but it doesn't show any of the complexity (or the sheer NOISE) of these futile clashes...<br /><br />Ordet, on the other hand, is sheer genius... have you seen Gertrud?<br /><br />hope you're well!<br />DaveExpos 1983 Blog https://www.blogger.com/profile/10798243137456349089noreply@blogger.com