The Screengrab : public enemies

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: Dishonorable Mention (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

In Part Three of this list, we presented The Screengrab’s consensus picks for the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009.

Herewith, our individual picks and dishonorable mentions...

Andrew:

1. Wolverine
2. PUBLIC ENEMIES (July 1)

Aside from Bonnie and Clyde, The Untouchables and that Star Trek episode where they went to the gangster planet (“I don’t think you’re stupid, Mr. Krako”), I can’t think of many successful modern tommy-gun stories. Let’s see...Mobsters? The Cotton Club? Billy Bathgate? Sure, Michael Mann is a good director, but when Johnny Depp isn’t swinging for the fences with an Ed Wood, a Sweeney Todd or a Captain Jack Sparrow, he’s just dull as dishwater, and without some truly stellar reviews and/or word-of-mouth, this one's likely to disappear in the crowded summer shuffle.

3. Land of the Lost
4. Transformers...yeah, that’s right, I said it.
5. TAKING WOODSTOCK (August 14)

Ang Lee has certainly made some excellent, memorable films...but this may not be one of them. While a behind-the-scenes history of the 1969 Woodstock music festival sounds like an interesting (if someone redundant) subject, the trailer makes the whole thing look like a third-rate HBO Original Movie (or maybe a second-rate Showtime one). Chances are, Taking Woodstock will only really be remembered as the vehicle that killed off Demetri Martin’s career as a big screen leading man.

Scott:

1. GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (August 7)

Perhaps not the end of civilization as we know it, but you can see it from here.

2. Land of the Lost
3. The Taking of Pelham 123
4. Imagine That
5. Year One

Nick:

1. Land of the Lost
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
3. Year One
4. The Taking of Pelham 123
5. BRÜNO (July 10)

Brüno may very well live up to its hype, but given its subject matter, a large swath of America won’t even consider seeing it. Consequently, its respectable but far-from-enormous box-office take will make it seem like a disappointment.

Paul:

1. Land of the Lost
2. G-FORCE (July 24)

Even if this didn’t look like total garbage -- which it does -- it would be foolish to open a family comedy about a team of guinea pig spies with sassy celebrity voices the week after the latest Harry Potter movie. With the Boy Who Lived facing off against Voldemort, will anyone but Jerry Bruckheimer care about G-Force? I sure hope not.

3. FUNNY PEOPLE (July 31)

Broad Adam Sandler comedies can still bring in the crowds. Adam Sandler dramedies? Not so much. While I applaud Sandler, Seth Rogen, and Judd Apatow for tackling more serious material than usual, I just can’t see this connecting with multiplex crowds, particularly not with a trailer that is light on laughs and heavy on sentiment. Perhaps Apatow would have been better off taking the film to Toronto and garnering some solid festival buzz before rolling it out in the fall.

4. Imagine That
5. THE HURT LOCKER (June 26)

Ever since it received rave reviews from Toronto last year, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama has been sold more as a kickass combat action thriller than as a political statement. So why would Summit Entertainment open the film opposite Transformers, the one blockbuster of the summer that’s practically guaranteed to have loud, kinetic combat scenes and none of the audience baggage that comes with Iraq War movies? Way to piss that Twilight clout right down your legs, guys.

Click Here For The Hits (Part One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Part Five)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Trailer Review: Public Enemies

Paul Clark — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After dividing audiences with his borderline experimental mood-piece update of Miami Vice, Michael Mann is back with his take on the John Dillinger story. Compared to his last film, this looks like a frankly conventional and commercial project- at least, as commercial as a tommy-guns and fedoras movie can be nowadays. But some quibbles aside (I’m not sold on the suitability of the digital gloss for this particular project), Public Enemies looks pretty promising. Depp is an interesting choice for the crime legend (fifteen years ago, who could have imagined him headlining a movie like this?), and I like Bale more when he’s freed from the burden of carrying a movie and can instead unleash his inner character actor. There has been some negative buzz surrounding early screenings of Public Enemies, but I’ve learned that it’s best to give Mann the benefit of the doubt.

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Sundance Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

More wheeling and dealing, via The Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight snapped up the rights to the New York romance Adam, which it “hopes to turn it into the next Once, which it acquired here in 2007.” Sony Pictures Classics won the bidding war for An Education, “for a price in the $3 million-$4 million range for North American and select Latin American rights.” Lionsgate picked up “The Winning Season, James Strouse's tale of a high-school girls' basketball team starring Sam Rockwell.”

This year’s Sundance It Girl has been coronated. Per Entertainment Weekly, it’s 23-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan. “The star of Lone Scherfig's An Education and the bright spot in Shana Feste's melodrama The Greatest, Mulligan is transfixing audiences with her angelic looks and broad acting range.” You can also catch her in Michael Mann’s upcoming Dillinger epic Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

E! Online is on the celebrity swag watch. Any truth to the rumors that Paris Hilton walked off with 30 goodie bags? Apparently so, but not all Sundance stars are so greedy. Screengrab sweetheart Zooey Deschanel refused all handouts, saying it “it takes away from the festival.” Awwww.

Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Five
Sundance Roundup: Day Four

The Top 50 Movies of 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It’s getting harder and harder for us poor drones of the blogosphere to stay current. We haven’t even begun to compile our final thoughts on the films of 2008, and already the Times Online has published their list of the top 50 movies of 2009.

Granted, it’s purely speculative nonsense. “Which hot franchises will step up to fill the spaces left by Batman, Bond and Indy? We’ve taken a look through the studio schedules and picked out the most promising prospects for the coming year.” Some of their choices look pretty safe. The number one pick is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and others finishing in the top ten include Star Trek (#3), the Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels & Demons (#6) and Monsters vs. Aliens (#8). Going out a little further on a limb, they’ve selected the Dillinger biopic Public Enemies to finish behind only Harry Potter. Sure, it’s got Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but it’s also got a whiff of the brat pack bomb Mobsters about it, no?

Of course, the real fun is to be found further down the list. I’m glad someone is optimistic enough to believe Fanboys will finally be released in theaters; on the other hand, I’m somewhat skeptical that “curiosity value alone guarantees S. Darko a strong opening weekend.” Perhaps most intriguing is #42: “Them, a recently announced feature to be directed by Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz’s Edgar Wright, is not, as far as we can tell, an update of the hoary old giant ant chiller but a fictionalised adaptation of Jon Ronson’s investigative book about the shadowy conspiracies that operate behind our notional governments. Unless it turns out that the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group actually are all enormous ants.”

Check out the full list starting here.

Related:
Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"
Your First Look at Star Trek 90210

Morning Deal Report: Who're You, One Of The FREAKS?

Peter Smith — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:55:00 GMT

"Salma Hayek to play bearded lady" — the headline film writers dream of. She's returning from maternity leave to join John C. Reilly in the horror film Cirque du Freak. Now, John C. Reilly is highly capable, acting-wise; playing a vampire is well within his range, I'm guessing. But after years of toil as a character actor, he's finally become famous for goofy comedy. So the question is whether audiences will be able to hear "John C. Reilly as a vampire" without giggling. And frankly, I'm giggling already.

Christian Bale may join Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies. Kind of a dream team here; Depp plays Dillinger and Bale would play Dillinger's nemesis, FBI agent Melvin Purvis.

Lionsgate will distribute the new Conan the Barbarian movie. Hail Crom?

Morning Deal Report: I Vant to Suck Your Blooood

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Hilary Swank is "a TV producer who travels to Romania for an interview with a notorious European arms dealer" — but it turns out he's a sexy vampire!

Michael Mann and Johnny Depp will soon film Public Enemies, about Depression-era gangsters, with Depp as John Dillinger.

A veritable dream-team of documentary directors is adapting Freakonomics.

— Peter Smith