Mann Up!

Public Enemies is the smartest thing Hollywood will give us this summer

(July 9, 2009) Previews

Opening Friday, July 10, is Bruno, a mockumentary that finds Sacha Baron Cohen as the gay Austrian fashion designer inveigling people to make fools of themselves. Rated R for pervasive strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity and language. 83m At the Broadway, Mill Creek, Fortuna and Minor.

In I Love You Beth Cooper, a nerdy valedictorian who professes his love for the hottest girl in his school scores when she (Hayden Panettiere, Heroes) shows up at his house that night. Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language, some teen drinking and drug references and brief violence. 102m. At the Broadway.

Opening Wednesday, July 15, is Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the penultimate adventure in the series, wherein hormones compete with magic. Midnight showings at the Minor, Fortuna and Broadway on Tuesday night.

Reviews

PUBLIC ENEMIES: Finally, a summer film to get excited about. Readers should be cautioned that I may be overreacting due to the uniformly dismal film fare that has, as usual, been this season’s offerings, but I think that under any circumstances Public Enemies would stand out. Even those movie fans who are lukewarm to the genre will find genuine pleasures in director Michael Mann’s depiction of the crime scene in 1933.

Mann has been associated with the crime film consistently during his career as a writer and director, beginning with writing some Starsky and Hutch episodes, penning an episode of the TV series Miami Vice in 1985 (a show he produced) and a couple of Crime Story episodes, to name a few. But he rose to the top with the release of Heat in 1995, which he wrote and directed, a dual role he continued with The Insider (1999) and the film version of Miami Vice in 2006. Along the way, he directed Collateral as well, which turned out to be one of Tom Cruise’s better roles.

Public Enemies may not be quite up to the intensity of Heat, but it is a fine film that fits nicely into Mann’s body of work as a writer and director. For one thing, Mann is not afraid of taking time in his crime films to reveal and develop character. As a result, the action sequences seem more weighty and significant than in the normal examples of genre, where action often supercedes all other elements. In fact, for all the bullets that fly in the film, the actual on-screen body count is not all that high. The toughest scenes to watch involve torture by police officers and the final scene when Dillinger is shot down after leaving a screening at Chicago’s Biograph Theatre of Clark Gable’s Manhattan Melodrama in which, of course, Gable plays a racketeer.

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