Bang bang, the script is dead

For the first half of "Public Enemies," two things kept jumping out at me. The first was that there seemed to be one scene after another written with a punchline crafted just for a good trailer. That gets old after a while. Stop teasing. Start telling the story.
 
The second was that I just kept wishing director Michael Mann had a smarter script to work with. (Then in the credits I noticed that he's among the screenwriters for this.) It's a pretty good movie, It's not what I imagine it could have been – but we'd better get used to it. Our recent golden age of movies – room for the shoot-em-up, blow-em-ups, room the arty movies, room for the occasional "what the heck was that?" – is over. The big studios that a few years ago bought up the art-house studios are shutting down those operations.
 
And then there's "Moneyball." How they figured to turn a book about the economics of baseball into a major movie with Brad Pitt is beyond me, but this sort of thing has worked before. So there they were, ready to start filming and the studio pulled the plug. In essence, the problem was that the script was a little too smart and the approach a little too offbeat. There is some hope in the fact that they've brought in Aaron Sorkin ("West Wing," "A Few Good Men.") to re-do the script. (Maybe we'll get Torii Hunter saying, "You need me on that that center field wall.") I'm not saying we're headed into the Dark Ages, but Hollywood's pendulum of art and commerce is swinging is a safe, boring direction.
 
Go see "Public Enemies." Johnny Depp is always good. There's not enough Marion Cottillard (Oscar a couple of years ago for "La Vie en Rose). Christian Bale is, well, he's Christian Bale, showing the emotional range of a grapefruit. Honestly, the best thing I've seen him in is "3:10 to Yuma." Stephen Lang commands a couple of scenes. It's beautifully shot. The music is great, though not all in my group shared that opinion. It's a Michael Mann movie, so I was looking for a bunch of very good performances in small roles, as in "Heat." That part worked. As with "Heat," we might look at this 10 years from now and say, why look, there's so-and-so in a bit role before he became So-and-So.
 
I say go see it because it'll probably be among the dozen best movies of the year. Not a B movie, but not a four-star effort either. Maybe it's time to start being a little more choosy and opt for a good book once in a while. For my birthday, a friend gave me Garrison Keillor's "Pontoon." I'm thoroughly enjoying it.