Public Enemy

[+ g56whiz]

I liked it.

 

I'm not the greatest judge of acting but Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard were pretty convincing and I didn't even recognize Billy Crudup as Hoover until the credits. There's some interesting lighting and camera angles as well and I noticed these although the story line moves very swiftly along. One word of warning: sit as far away from the screen as possible. There's a lot of hand held camera work and it can get jarring and uncomfortable to sit forward as I did.

 

A question though: at one point Billy Franchette (Marion Cotillard) invites the clothed Dillinger to join her in the bathtub. As he leaves to disrobe, he responds "I and my Prince Albert will be right back." Was dillinger actually "pierced" down there. If so, I expect Depp's portryal may be a bit too bland.

[+ Lucky]

Dillinger's dick discussed- at length!

 

http://www.altpenis.com/penis_news/dillinger.shtml

[+ g56whiz]

Lucky, the breadth of you erudition takes MY breath away!

[+ Lucky]

Public Enemies

 

Hopefully, gwhiz has found his breath by now. I can't agree with him on the movie as I thought it was disappointing. Depp seemed flat, there wasn't a single spark between him and his co-star Cotillard, and the movie seemed to be about how many times the weapons would go off.

[+ sf westcoaster]

Lucky, My exact reaction to the movie. I even gave-up trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. I truly found this movie to be a major disapointment.

[+ Charlie]

I also sat too close to the screen, and found the artsy camera work nausea-inducing. I thought they were trying to make another "Bonnie and Clyde," but without the same spark, so they tried to make up for it with more gunfire--it could have ended a lot sooner for my taste.

[uwsman2]

sitting back from the screen

 

I'm glad I saw the first posting here before I went to see Public Enemies. I deliberately sat a bit further back than I usually do, and had no problem. Those jerky hand-held camera shots, intended to give a realistic documentary feel to the scene, are a time-waster, as far as I'm concerned. And at the end of it, I thought there was a certain pointlessness to the film, because it illustrated a chain of events but I didn't get the feeling of any probing beneath the surface to figure out what made these gangster-types tick. Depp was understated and fine, the others decent, although I thought that Christian Bale was curiously wooden as Purvis. (Was he trying to capture the actual man on whom the part is based, and what was his basis for making the guy such a stiff?)

 

On the other hand, it is fast-paced and exciting, even if all those gangsters in suits seem to blend into each other, resulting in some confusion about who is who.

 

And - I can never understand why producers do this and actors let them get away with it - in the final credits, they just run the names of the actors without listing which characters they played, so you don't even have any help sorting things out when the film is over. You have to go on-line to try to decipher things on one of the websites.