Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Everything tagged with “Johnny Depp”
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Trailer for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Heath Ledger’s final film, with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law standing in as ‘aspects’ of Ledger’s character’s personality. Looks very Gilliamesque, with shades of Münchhausen.
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Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland trailer
The first trailer for Tim Burton’s ‘re-imagining’ of Lewis Carrol’s original story. Looks like Burton-by-numbers and I’m not keen on the cheap ‘throw objects toward the screen for IMAX 3D punters’ technique but still looks enjoyable.
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Public Enemies
I am completely gay for both Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and I’m a sucker for any film set in the 1930s, so Michael Mann’s Public Enemies would seem to hit all the right buttons, telling the story of FBI agent Melvin Purvis’ attempts to capture celebrity bank robber John Dillinger. Unfortunately some technical flaws and lackluster characterisation left me feeling a bit cold toward the whole affair.
I like a bit of decent film photography as much as the next man but the cinematography here distracted me. Shot in HD video throughout, it looks cheap and harsh, a high-budget production shot on home video cameras. Everything ends up looking like it was shot in a studio, over-lit with cameras drawn in tight. It left me feeling like I was watching a History Channel dramatisation, and every time a scene ended I expected a narrator — one of the lesser Baldwins perhaps — to start talking over some archive footage.
Sound-wise, I had similar issues. I don’t know whether it was just my cinema having problems but the audio struck me as being severely unbalanced, with headache-inducing gunfire at one end of the scale and inaudible dialogue at the other. Depp mumbles his way through the role of Dillinger, and I’m sure there were some very pithy witticisms that I never picked up on. At least the soundtrack worked: tracks by Otis Taylor, Billie Holiday and The Bruce Fowler Big Band are all excellent, and gave the bank hold-up scenes in particular an extra level of giddiness.
Once I’d willed myself to move past the distracting video and sound I found myself watching a pretty solid gangster film, albeit not a great one. Though Depp’s performance could have used a tad more charm, Billy Crudup was excellent as a young J. Edgar Hoover struggling to give credence to the notion of a Federal Bureau of Investigations, Christian Bale as Purvis was fine and a welcome respite from the gravel-voiced roles Bale has been playing recently, and Marion Cotillard is always watchable.
They’re supported by a cast of strong character actors that I would have liked to have seen more of: Stephen Dorff, Channing Tatum, Rory Cochrane, Giovanni Ribisi, Peter Gerety, and if they ever make a companion film about the life of Baby-Face Nelson, English actor Stephen Graham shows here that he’d be perfect for the role. Unfortunately, Mann doesn’t seem inclined to give too much attention to the roles these men take on, so it’s tricky at times to know who’s who, particularly given the similarities between Dorff and Graham.
Public Enemies lags a little at times, particularly when the too-tactiturn Dillinger is wooing Cotillard’s Frechette, but as is typical for a Michael Mann film, the action sequences are explosive and excellent, so if you like your Tommy Gun shoot-outs you’ll be well-served here. If that doesn’t move you, it may still be worth seeing the film, but probably not worth going out of your way for. As Mann seemed to want this to look like a made-for-TV movie, perhaps that’s where it will really shine.
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Trailer for Michael Mann's Public Enemies
Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, telling the story of how gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd were taken down in the ’30s.
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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Hard as it may be to imagine, I do, in fact, enjoy some films. Take the first Pirates film, for instance; I really liked it. It was funny, it had some very quotable lines, the action was enjoyable, Johnny Depp was brilliant, Geoffrey Rush equally so, Orlando Bloom didn’t get in the way too much and Keira Knightley was reasonably fanciable, in that borderline-anorexic way of hers. I couldn’t really fault it.
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The Shape of Things to Come, III
Of those mentioned six months ago; I didn’t watch Fantastic Four or The Dukes of Hazzard as they looked awful, I saw Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire and King Kong and thought they were so-so and I saw The Island, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Serenity and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and liked them all. A Scanner Darkly seems to have slipped into a Summer 2006 release so hopefully I’ll get to see that in a few months.
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I had a bad feeling when I entered the cinema for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; not only were there children in the audience but the staff had run out of tea, which meant I’d had to have some sort of sickly fruit drink instead. It’s as if nobody warned them I was coming.
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The Shape of Things to Come
With 2004 nearly over, and fewer opportunities to be disappointed by awful films that promise much yet deliver little this year, I thought I’d have a look ahead to see what’s in store.
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