Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” is the essence of crime cinema cool boiled down to its bones, combining the spartan feel of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” with the sheen of Michael Mann’s ’80s output like “Thief.” Throw in a protagonist reminiscent of Ryan O’Neill’s strong silent wheelman in Walter Hill’s “The Driver,” and you’ve got a shiny movie buff confection.

Ryan Gosling completely owns the nameless lead role, shiny scorpion jacket and all. The year Gosling had in 2011 effectively silenced his critics who wrote him off as a pretty face in “The Notebook,” with “Drive” standing at the head of the pack. His soft exterior makes his cool-yet-vicious character in “Drive” all the more potent whenever he has to stomp some poor henchman’s head in.

I love grizzled, masculine action heroes like Liam Neeson and Lee Marvin as much as the next red-blooded American, but Gosling steps up to the plate, points to the outfield, and knocks the ball straight into the spark-spewing lights. Don’t let his soft features or feathery surname fool you. Gosling brilliantly channels the brand of cool perfected by Alain Delon in Melville’s quiet heist & hitman sagas.

Another great turn is given by Albert Brooks, normally known for playing lovable characters with low self-esteem in “Broadcast News” and “Defending Your Life.” Any trace of Brooks’s natural likability is nowhere to be found in “Drive.” He completely embodies a truly frightening gangster heavy with a penchant for fileting his enemies with a razor. In a conversation with Gosling, he says, “I used to produce movies, in the eighties. Kinda like action films, sexy stuff. One critic called them European. I thought they were shit.” This makes me wonder if Brooks’s character isn’t a homicidal take on Menahem Golan or Andy Sidaris. Maybe both?

As my co-host on the HomeVideodrome podcast pointed out this week, “Drive” was snubbed at the Oscars this year, garnering only one nomination for Achievement in Sound Editing. There were only nine nominations for Best Picture, as opposed to the ten from last year. So it would seem one of the year’s most acclaimed movies was snubbed in favor of … nothing. Ouch. But “Drive” seems like too much of a weird, arty genre outsider to get a nod from Oscar.

Thankfully, “Drive” doesn’t need the potential for gold statues to boost its cred, as it’s already gained a fanatical following from movie fans (when I stopped by Best Buy to pick it up, the racks containing it were almost empty). Excuse me, but I’ve gotta crank Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx’s “Nightcall” while I write the rest of this article.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

Speaking of Michael Mann, he produced a new flick that’s out this week, and his daughter, Ami Canaan Mann, took up the directing duties.  The title is ridiculous and intriguing all at once: “Texas Killing Fields.” Being a man who has a taste for Texas-fried genre fiction by guys like Joe R. Lansdale, this sounded like a yarn that could be right up my alley. I love sweaty, southwestern noir like “No Country for Old Men” and “The Killer Inside Me,” and “Texas Killing Fields” promised some solid talent, including Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Grace-Moretz, and Jessica Chastain, who had the best year of any actress in 2011 (Sam Worthington’s in there too, but he ain’t really a “draw” for me). Shame what they served up was just a bland, boring mess.

“Texas Killing Fields” is about as dull as murder mysteries get, it’s characters are burdened by cliche, and the story lacks focus, and happens to be devoid of meaning to boot. A hothead small-town cop (Worthington) is paired up with an emotional detective from New York (Morgan) to solve a string of murders, and a bunch of stuff you won’t care about happens in the meantime. You know the drill, crime scenes procedurals, cliched cop dialogue, it all adds up to something you’ve seen done better a gazillion times before elsewhere.

It could only help the film if it could be called “formulaic,” because at least formula means it would at least hit the proper beats. Instead it’s a ball slow, muddy sludge, with fruitless subplots and a boring mystery. The story might not be such a drag if Mann’s direction added any flavor, but it just lies there on the screen like a dead fish. I would say it’s “television quality” direction, but doing so would be unfairly dismissive of the far more satisfying work in the genre that we see on TV every day.

It’s wildly disappointing when such a talented cast and crew cooks up a big fat nothing-burger like “Texas Killing Fields.” Even the most brilliant talents squeeze out the occasional turd, they are human after all. This is one of those movies that you might come across flipping through the NetFlix Instant Queue one night after you’ve had a few too many beers which might arouse your curiosity, but trust me, hombre, just keep flipping until you find something else.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Other Noteworthy Releases

Transformers – Dark of the Moon 3D: Michael Bay’s celebration of boys & their toys finally comes to 3D home video. I sort of admire Bay for making something as unapologetically vapid as this movie is, it’s pretty much a Bay’s trademarks blasted straight at your face without any hint of pretensions towards character and coherent storytelling. You can also grab the entire series in a deluxe box set, which should make for a remarkable tool if you’re into marathon S&M sessions.

Available on 3D Blu-ray

Star Trek – The Next Generation – The Next Level: I loved the Blu-ray releases that were put together of the original series, and it looks like they’re doing something similar with “The Next Generation”, offering re-created effects for high-definition. This three-episode set is a taste of what the full season sets will offer, serving three episodes that have been given the hi-def treatment: “Encounter at Farpoint,” “Sins of the Father” and “The Inner Light.” The beauty of what they did with the original series was they offered you a choice: you could watch it with the old effects, or the flashy CGI stuff, whatever floats your boat. Hear that, George Lucas? Choice. We like that. This release comes at an affordable price, but it’s a release for the impatient. If you’re gonna buy the whole shebang anyway, save your money and wait for the real deal.

Available on Blu-ray

In Time: Andrew Niccol’s stuff hasn’t ever really scratched my sci-fi itch, though “Gattaca” was pretty sweet. I love how Harlan Ellison sued the makers of this film for ripping off “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman”, only to drop his lawsuit once he saw the film. I guess he only likes to take credit for stuff that’s good.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

The Thing: Back when I would gobble up any horror film I could get my hands on, curiosity would’ve been a good enough motivator to see this one. It doesn’t seem like it’s sure whether it’s a prequel or a remake, so I’ll just stick with the John Carpenter one, thanks. Also, the Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks classic is pretty swell too.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

The Big Year: A film starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson about bird watching … which bombed badly at the box office. Given that my Father is an avid birder, I’ll be watching this one with him for kicks some day soon.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

Dream House: Another bomb, this Jim Sheridan film starring Daniel Craig looks like a script someone dug out of M. Night Shyamalan’s garbage can. A sure sign a movie needs to make some fast cash after a bad box office draw: it’s available for rental on Amazon Instant the day it comes out, instead of making you purchase it for streaming. Not a rule, but it’s interesting how duds often come out of the gate accepting rentals there.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

The Double: In case you were wondering what Richard Gere is up to.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Amazon Instant

Outrage – Way of the Yakuza: A new Takeshi Kitano film?!  Sign me up!  Ever since I saw him terrorize high schoolers in “Battle Royale”, I’ve been a fan.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

The Magnificent Ambersons: Orson Welles’s half-masterpiece finally gets a stand-alone DVD release.

Available on DVD

Blubberella: I just wanted to point out that this exists. Of course, Uwe Boll is involved. Note how the titular character is firing off machine guns while gripping the clips in the cover art. Just sayin’.

Available on DVD

To Kill a Mockingbird: Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched this. Time to give it another look now that it’s got a Blu-ray dip coming out.

Available on Blu-ray, DVD and Amazon Instant

Adaptation: The best Charlie Kaufman creation, “Adaptation” is as brilliantly meta as it gets.  Nic Cage haters need to remember that the man is great when he’s in the right movie.  This one, “Moonstruck,” “Wild at Heart,” “Raising Arizona,” “Leaving Las Vegas”… recognize.

Available on Blu-ray

Shakespeare in Love: It’s Oscar season, so a bunch of movies that got a bunch of wins/nominations are getting Blu-ray dips. I couldn’t ever muster up the will to force myself to watch this movie. Now that it’s on Blu-ray, I’m not shocked I still don’t care.

Available on Blu-ray

The English Patient: Anthony Minghella’s middle name was “Oscar” during his career. Another one of his movies, “Cold Mountain,” also comes to Blu-ray this week.

Available on Blu-ray

The Piano: When I think of tortured female-driven dramas, I think of Jane Campion’s “The Piano” starring Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel’s penis.

Available on Blu-ray

Frida: Being an admirer of Diego Rivera’s murals, I really enjoyed Julie Taymor’s biopic on his wife, Frida Kahlo, which covers her career, and their tempestuous relationship. Taymor’s such a visually-driven director that this Blu-ray release should look fantastic.

Available on Blu-ray

Malcolm X: He may have blocked my mouthy self on Twitter (hey, shameless plug time, follow me because you love me), but I do enjoy me some Spike Lee movies when he hits the right notes. “Malcolm X” is one of those times where he knocked it out of the park.

Available on Blu-ray

This article originally appeared over at Parcbench

It’s about horse racing and the characters the sport attracts. It’s filmed largely at California’s Santa Anita race track and tells the story of racing from so many potentially fascinating points of view: gamblers, owners, jockeys and trainers. It stars a cast that on paper can’t lose, including Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina and real-life Kentucky Derby-winning jockey Gary Stevens. The co-executive producer is Michael Mann, who understands light and sound and color as well as anyone in Hollywood.

But that’s on paper. As bettors know, the horse with the winningest record, the best times, the richest purses and the bloodline for the distance doesn’t always win. There’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Stumbling out of the gate, “Luck” turns out to be a one-trick pony. It hurts to write that, because this show has the pedigree of a champion.

“Luck” begins with a peek behind the daily workings at a busy track. There’s the Peruvian trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz) described in press materials as “brilliant but disreputable.” And there’s the hard-luck grinder Walter Smith (Nolte), a good horseman and a good man who deserves the big win.

There’s the clique of obsessive, desperate gamblers: Marcus (Kevin Dunn), Renzo (Ritchie Coster), Jerry (Jason Gedrick), and Lonnie (Ian Hart). And there’s the sad sack agent Joey (Richard Kind), the once-great jockey determined to pull his life back together (Stevens), and the eager young apprentice rider (Tom Payne).

What is supposed to carry this tale to the winner’s circle is the ominous appearance of Hoffman’s character, wealthy gangster fresh from prison Chester “Ace” Bernstein, and his loyal tough-guy driver Gus Demitriou (Farina), fronting as a horse owner for his felon boss. They have nefarious grand plans, and mayhem ensues.

Well, not really. It should, but it doesn’t. For long stretches, nothing ensues. Characters mope and horses go in circles while Milch indulges himself with his artistry.

Hoffman looks bored and wooden throughout, and Farina is never allowed to unleash the sparkling menace he’s capable of. As for Stevens’ acting, well, he’s a great jockey and deserves respect for a brilliant racing career.

Robotic may be the best way to describe “Luck.” There’s no conflict, no depth. In their own way, the characters single-mindedly pursue predictable goals. Ace wants to take over the track, and he drifts through every scene with that label pinned to his lapel. The trainers want the best horse. The jockeys want to ride. The gamblers want to win. Some of it’s logical, but with nine hours to dig deeper, viewers deserve more.

“Luck” isn’t without bright spots. The biggest surprise is Nolte. He delivers an outstanding performance and reminds viewers of the great work he is capable of, playing a world-weary trainer who missed his shot. Kind plays his role as the good-hearted but pathetic loser with heartbreaking enthusiasm, the quartet of frenzied gamblers lope along gamely with the storyline even when situations make little sense, and Kerry Condon is endearing as Rosie, the exercise rider who dreams big.

Where performances stumble may not entirely be the fault of the actors. They are, after all, reading lines. For a man who spent so much of his life at horse tracks and proclaims a love for the sport and the atmosphere, Milch writes a story that is a painful exercise in drudgery. Even when characters win, they lose. Like a horse that snaps a leg just short of victory, Milch is there to trip up anyone who gets close. The cumulative effect keeps viewers at arm’s length.

Anyone who has enjoyed a day at the track will be baffled by this theater of dread. “Luck” is on a long, narrow course without twists or turns, and there’s never a payoff.

Milch’s previous HBO tour de force, “John From Cincinnati,” landed with a thud. A subsequent effort for the premium outlet never made it to the screen. Now “Luck” may hint that Milch’s is running out. An HBO subscription adds a chunk to the cost of the average cable bill. How long can his triumphant creation “Deadwood” carry him?

To be fair, for viewers who stick around through all nine episodes (hat tip to HBO for allowing reviewers all nine), “Luck” rallies down the stretch. The last two episodes pick up the pace and hint at better things ahead. But there’s more than the final furlong to a horse race, and a series should engage and reward viewers throughout its run. “Luck” does not.

“Luck” premieres at 9 p.m. EST tonight on HBO

Why it’s a left-wing film

Once again, like “A Civil Action,” we’re presented with a left-wing film using the cover of a true story to further an overall message. And once again I’m not going waste time and energy digging into the weeds of arguing for or against the facts of this particular “true story.” So let’s stipulate the story is true and get to the bigger issue: The True Stories Left-Wing Hollywood Chooses to Tell. But first, my own biases up front…

Believe it or not, I don’t hate Hollywood. People think I do and I take complete ownership of that misconception but my feelings towards today’s movie industry are something more along the lines of the parent of a bad seed. I love Hollywood, wish it would do better (both morally and creatively), forever hope it will, and for my troubles am constantly getting my heart broken. Also, to their credit, on the field of political battle, Hollywood is at least something of an honest broker. Like Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, and the Huffington Post, leftists in Hollywood make little to no attempt to disguise their agenda. Yes, it’s unfortunate that too often they stand against good, but they’re also fairly upfront in presenting themselves as who and what they really are. On the other hand, there’s the left-wing media…

As far as the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Jon Stewart, the broadcast networks, the wires, and sites like Mediaite, etc…  Well, let me put it this way, the only way I’d piss on any of them is if they weren’t on fire. Yes, on a human level there are no doubt some genuinely nice people who work within these completely corrupted institutions, but as a whole they are committed leftists willfully lying and manipulating the truth to further an agenda and most unforgivably, doing so under the guise of sanctimonious elites who puff themselves up as pillars of objectivity.

There just isn’t a corner of Hell hot enough to stack the legacy of the whole bunch.  

On the other hand, there’s a redeeming quality in the person of an Oliver Stone and those like him who say “I’m a Leftist and this is what I believe.” By contrast, there’s absolutely nothing redeeming about Jon Stewart and Katie Couric and those who say, “I will tell you what the truth is.”  Would I press the red button that would make them all disappear forever? No. But I would stroke it as though it were a cat and I were the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Where was I?

The hero of “The Insider” is real-life, left-wing journalist Lowell Bergman (portrayed by Al Pacino and his rooster hair) and he is presented to us in the way Hollywood always presents left-wing journalists, as a crusading truth-teller who oozes integrity, is incapable of lying, and who only runs into trouble when he stands too firm upon noble principles. Maybe that’s true about Bergman and maybe that is exactly the case surrounding “The Insider’s”  story of a whistleblower tobacco executive and the reluctance of CBS to air his story on “60 Minutes” for fear of how the threat of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit could upset the impending sale of the network to Westinghouse. I don’t know and more importantly, I don’t care.

What I do know is that the only time Hollywood criticizes the news media is when they’re not liberal enough, when they’re not anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-business, and anti-war enough. Which, of course, is the least of the media’s problems, much less “60 Minutes’.”

Where’s the film on RatherGate? Talk about a rise and fall story. Where’s the film on the fallout from Walter Cronkite’s decision to abuse his position and turn against the Vietnam War? Better still, where’s the film laying out how the Tet Offensive was completely mischaracterized by the entire media which ultimately resulted in the massacre of a few million innocents in Southeast Asia ?

Good grief, Walter Duranty anyone? How about the fall of ACORN?

There are so many scandals involving the American media’s malicious liberal bias and sins of omission that contain all the human drama and history you could ask for in a great film, and yet all we get from Hollywood are cherry-picked representations like “Good Night and Good Luck,” and “All the President’s Men” that venerate liberal journalist chasing conservative politicians or “Shattered Glass” that are meant to show us just how ethical and trustworthy a liberal institution like the Nation is or “The Insider” that laughably tries to tell us journalism isn’t liberal enough.

Michael Mann’s film hits every left-wing sweet spot there is: Big Evil Tobacco, corporate evildoers threatening a brave whistleblower and his family, the left’s latest straw man about corporate influence on the same media that’s currently more biased in favor of the left than ever before, and the bottomless integrity of those old-time, left-wing muckrakers.

Context is the left’s Kryptonite, which is why “The insider” (and Hollywood) views and delivers the story of the American media through a soda straw.

Finally, watching the same Leftists who are in favor of schools handing out condoms, free needle exchanges, sex education for grade schoolers, legalized marijuana, abortion on demand (without parental consent), and euthanasia rail against cigarettes is always good for a laugh.

Why it’s a great film

One of the failures of the absolute junk Hollywood’s creating in an effort to undermine the War on Terror, artistically embarrassing stuff like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs,” “A Mighty Heart,” and the dozen or so others that brightened al Qaeda’s day, is that rather than focus on a universal theme everyone can relate to, they instead focus on the agenda. The result of this will always be the same, a laughably bad, spell-breaking heavy-handedness that manages to drive away even those moviegoers sympathetic to the message. Never forget that there were more than enough Bush-haters in America to make every one of those flops a major hit.

Michael Mann, however, is way too gifted of a filmmaker to ever fall into that trap and so the story he tells is one that focuses primarily on the timeless theme of finding the courage to tell the truth when the cost is so personally high no one could blame you for not doing so. Bergman (Pacino) has one of the greatest jobs in his chosen profession to lose. His whistleblower, former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), has a nice severance, a home, a family in need of medical benefits, and the perfect Get Out Of Telling The Truth Card known as a non-disclosure agreement.

Neither man will profit from telling the truth. In fact, both have everything to lose, especially Wigand who believes his life and family are in real danger. And yet, in the end, both men selflessly and admirably do the right thing. On the flip side, though, there’s Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) and Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall), two giants of the news business who, for lack of a better term, sell their souls for their own selfish reasons.

“The Insider” isn’t a political tale, it’s a morality tale. And a damn good one.

Well shot, well scripted, beautifully acted, and perfectly structured, “The Insider” not only takes you inside the fascinating world of high-stakes television journalism for a thorough tour of all the sausage-making, it also wraps its agenda in the simple idea of a complicated moral dilemma and shows us how the story’s characters react to it.

As someone who freakin’ hates the MSM and who sees the left’s war on smoking as just another assault against personal liberty, Michael Mann still manages to manipulate me to his side. And because I really do love Hollywood, I admire that when I should probably resent it.

What’s not on the list:

Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) — Good film but not terribly partisan.

There Will Be Blood (2007) — Good performances, beautifully filmed, and a first and second act that mesmerize. The third act, unfortunately, falters. Too dark, too unrelentingly ugly, too self-conscious in its symbolism, and ultimately this all ends up being surprisingly boring.  In the end we have no protagonist, no one to root for. And once we stop caring about the characters we’re watching, there’s really no story left to tell. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t sit through two hours in the hopes of a final confrontation between big business and organized religion.

Heat (1995) is more than just a heist film – it’s an epic, a shambling three-hour monster of a movie that soars and frustrates, leaves your jaw hanging in awe and you scratching your head wondering what the hell is going on.  The star power it unleashes is literally unparalleled, the direction by Michal Mann is superb, the music is incredible (go buy the soundtrack now), and the cinematography creates a vision of Los Angeles that is more real than the reality.

—–

I will not insult your manhood by recapping the plot.  Actually, it’s so dense and convoluted it would take forever anyway.  Plus, there are the tangents that I still don’t fully get – what the hell is that whole Natalie Portman subplot doing in there anyway?  And some parts you just have to see for yourself – think Waingro’s plot line.  Bottom line: if you have never seen Heat, go buy it immediately.  Until you do, if you are biologically male, you are not entitled to stand while urinating.

For many of us, Heat has a personal connection that comes from both its time and place.  I saw Heat in Houston the day it came out (December 15, 1995), having been waiting for it for months thanks to the remarkable trailer.  I was there for a buddy’s wedding the next day; at that wedding, I would meet my hot wife for the first time.  About a month after, the giant law firm I was then slaving away for moved into the 444 South Flower building.  You probably know it best as the bank De Niro’s crew robs.  Before I quit (I had more business than many of the partners but they offered me the same crappy $500 bonus they gave to the guy caught sleeping under his desk, so I counter-offered that I’d keep everything), I must have walked past the spot where Val Kilmer first opens up with his CAR-15 a hundred times thinking, “Dude, I know where you’re coming from.”

But even if the movie might not be wrapped around your life as it is mine, it’s likely to have hit you at some deeper level.  Heat is a man’s film in a very true way – it’s about loyalty, honor, and commitment.  It brooks no compromise – the men in it must do what they must do regardless of the cost and regardless of their personal feelings.  Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna gives up his potential for a normal life because Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley must be stopped.  And De Niro’s McCauley gives up his chance too because he owes it to his dead buddies to see that Waingro pays for his betrayal.

These are men who live this code.  They don’t whine.  They don’t talk about their feelings.  They don’t make excuses.  They are everything our liberal culture despises – real men, even if not necessarily good men.  And they sure as hell don’t buy into that “COEXIST”/“Violence Never Solves Anything” crap.

These men walk to their fates heads held high, knowing their ends are the results of their choices and accepting the responsibility for the consequences.  I’d take a Neil McCauley over a Harry Reid and his liberal ilk in a heartbeat – they both pillage money from decent folks, but at least McCauley doesn’t wrap it in sanctimony and pretend he’s something else.

The film’s classic set piece – one of many classic set pieces – is the high intensity bank heist and shoot-out scene on downtown Los Angeles’s Fifth Street.  Let me throw this out there: it’s the best gunfight in the history of the cinema.

—–

Watch Val Kilmer in particular.  Now, director Michael Mann had former SAS operators train the cast on weapons and tactics, and Kilmer really took to it.  Check him out as he pivots, fires a short(ish), controlled burst, then pivots again and engages a new target.  When he runs out of ammo, watch him drop the empty mag, slap in a new one, and re-engage in about a second.  That’s some nice suppressive fire there, Tex.

And listen to the sound effects – Mann understood the effect of the shock of the noise from the gunfire (especially in an enclosed space surrounded by skyscrapers) and cranked up the volume.  You feel every burst of fire.

Interestingly, Heat is a remake of Mann’s 1989 TV movie L.A. Takedown, a nearly forgotten flick made on about a thousandth of the budget.  Most of the key elements are there, including much less awesome versions of the bank shootout and the famous Pacino/De Niro coffee scene (the Heat scene was filmed at Kate Mantalini in Hollywood – you can sit at the same table).

The cast is remarkable not just because of the big stars but the ones filling in the supporting roles.  William Fichter is great as a scumbag businessman.  Henry Rollins, taking a break from bad slam poetry and punk rock, is a terrific petty criminal.  Danny Trejo is in the house too – he has a great death scene.

One guy who stands out is Big Hollywood’s own Jon Voight as Nate, the crew’s sickly fixer and voice of reason.  I saw him and, frankly, thought Voight was about to die.  I mean, he looks like he’s at death’s door – which is a tribute to Voight’s power as an actor.  You see him in Heat and come out thinking he needs either an Oscar or an IV or maybe both.

Hell, Jeremy Piven is in it for about a minute as a squirrely doctor and even he’s great.  Yeah, that Piven!

And the dialogue is alternately funny, harsh, and (again) true.  Michael Mann’s words take the cast’s work to the next level, elevating it into the iconosphere.  You could go an entire day speaking in nothing but cool lines from the movie.

Finally, there is the music.  Much of it is electronic, giving the film a kind of tech noir vibe that works perfectly.  Of special note is the Moby(!) cover of Joy Division’s ominous New Dawn Fades that plays while Hanna roars down the I-105 freeway after Cauley.  And a Moby original, the soaring God Moving Over the Face of the Waters, plays over the climax and the credits.  Who would have thunk it – a pinko, vegan twerp like Moby making some of the most amazing music ever on screen in a flick like Heat?

Now, if you’ve read this far and have not gone to get your Heat DVD, or went out to buy a DVD, or borrowed a DVD from someone much cooler than you, I’m not sure I can help you.  Heat is one of the rare movies that is truly essential – a movie that tells basic truths that many people don’t want to acknowledge and that strikes a common chord in its fans so that it has become a part of the American male canon.

To paraphrase De Niro’s Neil, you must have nothing in your life that will prevent you from seeing Heat in 30 seconds flat.

My problem with the list wasn’t so much the subjective nature of it. Taste is personal, and our likes and dislikes are informed by our life experiences. If he had made a list of critically acclaimed directors that he didn’t much care for, well, that would’ve been different. But by framing his list as an assault on the auteur theory and a discussion of which directors have been unduly praised, Mr. Shapiro changes the game. Furthermore, by placing Alfred Hitchcock at the top of that list – a man who directed a half-dozen of the greatest films in the history of the American cinema, helped reinvent the language of cinema and is one of the most widely imitated directors in the history of filmmaking – Mr. Shapiro’s list mutates from purely subjective to (at least partially) objective, and opens him up to some serious criticism.

Let’s leave aside the quality of his choices for a moment, however, and take a look at the actual criticism: It is dedicated mostly to his feelings and largely bereft of any discussion of the actual filmmaking these directors have done during their time in Hollywood. Consider his take on Ridley Scott, for example. Blade Runner is “bizarre” and “massively overpraised.” Thelma and Louise is “liberal tripe.” And, my favorite: Alien is “slow.”

Alien is too slow? I guess I can see his point: I mean, why would you want to slowly build tension and create a sense of horrific claustrophobia by indulging in little things like “character development” or “spatial understanding” when you can just blow stuff up real good? Why waste two hours on Alien when you can pick up Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem on Netflix, am I right? And, briefly, being “liberal” is no more a signifier of quality than being “conservative.” There are good liberal films and terrible conservative films, and vice versa.

Then there’s his criticism of Michael Mann, which comes down to four words: “All style, no substance.” Beyond being a cliched, lazy takedown of Mr. Mann – the skilled director behind the tense thrillers Heat, The Insider, Manhunter and Collateral – it ignores the fact that style is the substance when he is the director in question. There is, simply, no filmmaker working today with a better intuitive grasp of the setpiece. I would ask Mr. Shapiro to grapple with the central dilemma of Mann’s body of work – “Does Mr. Mann’s astonishing technical skills and amazing visual dexterity overwhelm his sometimes-stilted scripting?” — rather than glibly dismiss such a skilled technical force with four little words.

The treatment of Martin Scorsese isn’t much better: The brilliant Italian-American’s finest films are derided as “gross” because they make the author want to “take a shower.” Well, okay, but that’s kind of the point: Goodfellas and Raging Bull are movies that deal with distinctly unpleasant people living a distinctly unpleasant lifestyle. If those movies make you feel a little dirty, it means that Scorsese’s done his job right. And, again: No discussion of Scorsese’s storytelling skills or technical prowess or impact on the field of filmmaking at large. It’s just a gut reaction.

So, objectively speaking, there’s not that much “there” there? Subjectively speaking, I only have one strong objection: Alfred Hitchcock.

It’s hard to say just how wrongheaded Mr. Shapiro is in this regard. Hitch was a hit with audiences and critics; he made at least a half-dozen of the most influential films in the history of Hollywood; he is one of the most-copied filmmakers of all time and one of the most-referenced. It’s literally impossible to understand broad swathes of American (and international) cinema without at least a basic knowledge of Hitchcok’s oeuvre. If we want to get lowbrow for a second, there are more than a dozen Simpsons episodes that are seriously damaged without having seen the rotund Brit’s greatest hits. That’s more than half of a season!

Seriously, though, dismissing Hitchcock in the manner that Mr. Shapiro did is unfathomable. He writes, for example, that “Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.” To quote a friend of mine, the Rightwing Film GeekVictor Morton, “wtf does that even mean? Is Olivier in the Rains role or the Grant role? IDIOTIC!!” (We were on Twitter, so you’ll have to excuse the brevity.) What Mr. Shapiro’s disdain mostly comes down to is his distaste for slowly developing action: Anyone who reaches for the remote to speed Rear Window up and eliminate that delicious tension has a taste that is, shall we say, unrefined.

And you know what? That’s fine! If Mr. Shapiro had simply said “Hey, I don’t like Hitchcock,” I wouldn’t have thought much more than “My, my that poor boy has terrible taste.” I certainly wouldn’t have reeled off almost 1,000 words in response. I can appreciate, if disagree, with the fact that he doesn’t jibe with the great film critic Manny Farber, who admired Hitchcock for “filling his movies with what he is really interested in, and what is interesting to an audience – the use of the camera to tell more about people and a situation than that a muddle arose and was straightened out at the end.”

But to say that Hitchcock is overrated? It’s not just egregiously silly: It’s objectively incorrect.

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras. 

9.  Michael Mann: All style, no substance.  

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8.  David Lean:  Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour.  I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.  Great Expectations was good.  Everything else was downhill. 

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7.  Darren Aronofsky:  Aronofsky is a talentless dud who has bamboozled his way into Hollywood upper echelon.  Every film he’s ever made is a disaster. Pi is a jumble of nonsense that starts nowhere and goes nowhere.  It may be the worst film ever made.  Watching it made me want to rip out my own retinas, then replace them through surgery, then rip them out again.  Of late, Aronofsky has been spicing up his chaotic, disordered crap with explicit lesbian sex scenes, a stylistic trait he apparently cribbed from David Lynch (don’t worry, we’ll get to Lynch shortly).  Requiem for a Dream is noteworthy only in that Aronofsky somehow convinced Jennifer Connolly to participate in a lesbian scene involving mutual anal sex and a dildo (the scene, by the way, is meant to be depraved, but therein lies Aronofsky’s problem: he’s got to have sympathetic characters before we feel bad for them).  The fanboy press is already agog over rumors that his newest ode to depravity, Black Swan, will feature a sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.  Clearly, his target audience is pathetic losers in college dorms looking for an excuse to watch girl-on-girl action in the name of art.  Not one of his films has been a major commercial success. Yet somehow, someone keeps giving him money.  It’s enough to make one question the existence of a beneficent God. 

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6.  Mike Nichols: No.  Just no.  The Graduate is contemptible and snort-worthy spoiled 1960s-child angst.  The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing.  All future directors take note: having your main characters staring blankly into nothingness is not an ending.  It is a cop out.  Nichols’ directorial style is ordinary and he picks bland material.  And he was an icon for the Baby Boomers.  If that’s not a sign of their mental disturbance, I don’t know what is. 

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5.  David Lynch:  Pure and absolute suckage, with the exception of The Elephant Man.  Lynch is one of those annoyingly “deep” directors we’re all supposed to puzzle over.  Forget it.  There’s nothing worth puzzling.  He’s as empty as they come, and he makes up for it with graphic sex scenes, just like his imitator, Aranofsky.  John Nolte calls Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, “Mesmerizing, sexy, frightening … and all driven by a visionary director who created a hypnotic puzzlebox unlike anything we’ve seen before or will again.”  Uh … no.  This movie makes no sense, doesn’t try to make sense, and then fills the vacuum with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring feeling each other up.  This ain’t great moviemaking.  It’s Vivid Entertainment spliced with the worst of Raymond Chandler.  Unfortunately, that just about sums up Lynch’s career. 

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4.  Quentin Tarantino:  I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill.  But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.  Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.  His films are Wagnerian: long periods of boredom and “artistic” violence punctuated by moments of utter brilliance.  To paraphrase William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding, Tarantino’s films are like an army moving over a landscape in search of an idea.  Sometimes Tarantino’s films actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner … until the idea dies of servitude and overwork. Tarantino is to homages and gore what James Cameron is to spectacle.  Unfortunately, he is also to plot what Cameron is. 

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3.  Woody Allen:  He’s pretentious and unbearable.  His movies are like nails screeching on a chalkboard, only with less humor.  He is as nerdy as Peter Orszag, but he acts out his fantasies and illuminates his insecurities in film and expects us all to watch.  It’s okay for a director to be self-centered – Orson Welles was famously self-centered.  But you actually have to be an interesting person in order to spend that much time focusing on yourself.  Allen isn’t.  He’s a whiny narcissist with sexual inferiority issues.  And no one except for him cares about the status of his penis.  As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a “legitimate actress,” which alone should qualify him for the Seventh Circle of Hell. 

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2.  Martin Scorsese:  In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: “You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!”  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.  Nobody cares what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head).  The Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live.  Gangs of New York featured a brilliant performance from Daniel Day Lewis, and not much else (on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film).  Casino is nasty, brutish, and long.  Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching.  Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me.  The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.  The Color of Money is a snooze-fest (if you want to see a directorial clinic rather than Scorsese’s garbage, try Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, to which The Color of Money is a sequel).  Raging Bull is gross.  Mean Streets is gross and soporific.  Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.  Scorsese has never seen a main character he liked, a villain he hated, or a pair of editing scissors. 

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1. Alfred Hitchcock: He’s not even close to the worst on the list, but he’s certainly the most overrated.  He never made a great film.  He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there.  The psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho is laughable.  North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again.  It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.”  Not so much for Hitchcock.  Spellbound once again relies on amateur psychoanalysis.  Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.  Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.  Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.  The Birds quickly becomes inane.  If you want to see good Hitchcock, rent Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Restricted to the one hour medium, he’s at his best.  Left to his own devices, he’s slightly better than mediocre. 

Whom would you nominate?

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Many theories have been offered as to why the public made b.o. enemies of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, but the real reason, I think, has yet to be articulated.  And it’s this: Mann, perhaps our greatest living director, taught his cast how to do everything – fight, handle firearms, rob banks, ogle Marion Cotillard…

–  except the most important thing:  how to wear a hat like it’s a part of you, not a Page Six fashion accessory.  In other words, how to wear it like you mean it.

Here’s how not to do it:

Johnny always looks great, but the hair sticking out from beneath the brim should never happen (and, in the film, it actually does happen).  In the old days, men wore their hair to make their hats look good, not the other way around.

By contrast, here’s the master, the Great Cagney, explaining the facts of life to Leo Gorcey of the Dead End Kids in Angels with Dirty Faces:

Granted, no American male under the age of 70 really knows how to wear a hat, not the way the average schnook did in the period between the wars, and up until the Kennedy/Sinatra Administration.  For lots of reasons, almost none of them having to do with the myth that JFK didn’t wear a hat to his inauguration (see point 6), one day in the 1960s American men decided en masse to drop an item of apparel that for centuries had been considered as vital  to respectability as wearing trousers.

In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the Decline of America.  For, once men stopped wearing hats, they also stopped being men, which meant they stopped driving the culture, which meant the country was now ruled by fears, worries, feelings and emotions — in other words, by The New York Times — instead of right reason, a whiff o’ the grape and a taste of the lash, with which feminized consequences we are now living.   Although, come to think of it, the Punahou Kid has worn a hat upon occasion:

Now these mooks, on the other hand, knew how to wear hats:

Those are the Diamond brothers on the left, Legs (second in line) and his consumptive brother, Eddie; plus Fatty Walsh (no relation), and Salvatore Lucania, aka Lucky Luciano, all posing prettily for an arrest photograph.  No urban, ethnic thugs (the Diamonds and Walsh were Irish, Charlie Lucky was Italian) would have been caught dead without their hats on, and in fact one of the greatest of them all, the last of the fighting Jewish gangsters – Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz — was, in fact, caught dead with his hat on.

Here’s the Dutchman, still breathing, after he staggered out of the men’s room and collapsed at his private table in the Palace Chop House in Newark, N.J. on the evening of October 23, 1935, having just been ventilated by Charles “the Bug” Workman:

Even near death, and soon to deliver his Jocyean valedictory monologue, the Dutchman knew how to wear a hat.

Another famous gangster, this one from Chicago by way of Brooklyn and the old Five Points gang in Manhattan, also looked great in a hat, even though he was big and fat and had a scar running across his face.  Which is why they called him Scarface:

So what’s wrong with this picture?

No rake, that’s what.  No tilt, no swagger, no signature.  No torpedo would ever have worn his lid this way, especially not a bank robber or an urban gangster caught up in some gunplay. You didn’t wear your hat as if it were a beanie with a propeller on it, or a party favor — something that was likely to fall off your noggin at any moment.  You wore it like you meant it.  Like your life depended on it.  You wore it with panache. Just as each of today’s gang-bangers seeks his own individual identity in his baggy clothing, his gold chains, even his choice of arms, so did his criminal counterparts back then.  As Sinatra once said: “Cock your hat – angles are attitudes.”

The old gangsters made a statement with the way they wore their hats.  My own personal hero, Owney Madden (somebody should write a novel about him!), always cocked his chapeau sharply to the left, a trait he passed on to his childhood buddy from Hell’s Kitchen, Georgie Ranft, a man later to win fame as Guino Rinaldo in the original Scarface and, later, infamy as the Dumbest Man in Show Business for all the great roles (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, maybe even Casablanca) that he turned down.  In other words, this guy:

A good hat, a classic hat, a real hat – and if you want to buy one, go here: it’s where I buy all my hats, and you should, too – ought to fit a man’s head like a glove.  It should be made of fur felt, with a sculpted brim, a proper crease in the crown, an interior sweat band, an external band, and a button (attached to an anchored string on the band, which was meant to go through the buttonhole on your jacket on windy days to keep your hat from blowing not only off your head but down the road).  You should be able to wear it on the street, in the bar, in bed, in an open car, on the sideboard during a getaway, while firing a Colt Detective Special .38, or even seated at the typewriter.

You should never wear it indoors (unless you’re alone or in an all-male environment without the boss present), or in the presence of a lady, which is why we have the semiotics of hat etiquette, now as much of a lost art as cigarette etiquette.  Alas, the young actors – the ones with the workout bodies and the hairless chests – often look and act as if they’re playing dress-up with Grandpa’s old clothes.  Like this guy:

As opposed to this guy:

So come on, Hollywood – let’s get with the program.  If you’re going to make The Black Dahlia or Public Enemies or any picture set in this period, the least you can do is hire a coach who can teach all the young dudes that once upon a time a whole world of wonder, class, character, style and refinement — even among the bad guys — antedated the year of their births in the 1970s, when people looked like this:

Forgive me for often thinking that we would all be much better off returning to Depression-era style, before the advent of the Flower Children, when men were men, and when a real man also knew what to do when in the presence of a lady.  Hint: it starts with taking off your hat.

[Ed. Note: Michael Walsh has assumed the role of Editor-In-Chief of  Andrew Breitbart's latest "Big" sibling, Big Journalism, which launches this coming Wednesday, Jan. 6th.]

There were still some obvious flaws. There are a couple of choppy edits as well as questionable music in the scene where Dillinger walks into the cop shop. But the flaws most people discuss don’t seem to be a true flaw at all. I’ve heard and read many people say the film has no depth and the characters are shallow. This is simply not a fair assertion.

The film may appear shallow to some, but it doesn’t give us anything we don’t need to know. That is exactly what makes this film enjoyable; there is no abundance of useless information. It is about Dillinger’s short time as public enemy number one, nothing more.

Halfway through the film I realized something. We don’t have any recent films to make a good comparison with Public Enemies. The market is full of the more modern Scorsese flicks. Of course these films are great, but all take place after 1940. We also have The Godfather saga and DePalma’s updated Scarface, as well as Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, but these are far different than Mann’s film. They are all about more mafia related crime, not bank robbers.

It looks like Michael Mann reopened the classic gangster genre, and it was about time! There are so many great classic gangster films from the studio era such as Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), G-Men (1935), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). It would be ten years before we saw the end of the classic genre with White Heat (1949). However, Cagney’s Cody Jarret was more like Baby Face Nelson and less like John Dillinger, who was not a monster like Nelson.

After decades without a film of this sort, Public Enemies gives us a look into the 1930’s like never before. The high definition of the time period is without rival. If anything, this film gives us the most vivid sense of the classic gangster era we have ever seen.

Robert Warshow wrote a famous essay in 1948 about the genre entitled “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” In it, he discusses the tropes of the classic gangster figure. Warshow states that “the real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.”

This can be directly applied to Mann’s film. Dillinger was very much a product of his environment combined with America’s social and political atmosphere at the time. We don’t see the buildup of the depression or the crime spree that spawned the FBI. We just see the end result once Dillinger decides to take what he feels was taken from him after an unfair prison sentence.

Many of us can understand his hostility, which is what made him a tragic hero of sorts. At the time he was seen as a contemporary Robin Hood, since the banks were viewed as the real public enemy. Mann’s film gives us a story that is less gritty than past gangster flicks but still holds onto some of the characteristics that built the genre.

Also, if you look at pictures and video of the real John Dillinger, you will realize that Johnny Depp was able to emulate every movement of this man as if he really was Dillinger. Even though the scene where he goes into the police station is likely made up, it sure feels real. Depp’s Dillinger is extremely believable; regardless of the depth his character may or may not have.

Many people went into this film with a preconceived notion of what the “idea” of John Dillinger was. Public Enemies is more the story of how that idea wasn’t all that great and how it ended tragically, as it should have. All great gangster stories end tragically.

To refer back to Warshow, the classic gangster’s story should always be an exclamation on the “unlimited possibility of aggression.” Of course, Dillinger was aggressive but also a more humanist bank robber when compared to his counterparts. That is why the public took a liking to him in the first place. Public Enemies gives us a look at such humanist aggression and when stood up next to the classics, it still holds its own.

Johnny Depp is John Dillinger, a criminal before crime was organized who specializes in bank robberies and jail breaks. His dash, audacity and refusal to steal from the common folk has made him something of a folk hero to Depression-weary America, but J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) sees an opportunity to use Dillinger’s exploits as a way to firm up his fledgling national police force (the F.B.I.), but first he’ll have to prove his modern, centralized methods work.

Hoover’s initial step is to make Dillinger the first ever Public Enemy Number One. Next, he assigns straight-laced Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to head the manhunt. Unfortunately, one disastrous attempt to apprehend Dillinger follows another, proving that Hoover’s ideal — that of the clean-cut G-Man — will only result in dead G-Men. Purvis now understands that ruthless means are necessary to catch ruthless men and convinces Hoover to even the odds and swear in a group of Western lawmen and former gunfighters.   

Dillinger has two fatal flaws. First, he’s a step behind the times. Crime, especially in Chicago, is just starting to organize and today a day’s work in the underground rackets brings in as much money as any bank robbery. With the stakes now bigger than anyone ever imagined, Dillinger’s high profile brings unwanted heat which makes his ”friends” nervous and tempted to turn on him. His second problem is loyalty. Money doesn’t jazz him, a desire to live in the moment does. Breaking friends out of jail and visiting lovers watched by the Feds takes a higher priority over what’s prudent.

Physically, Depp’s resemblance to Dillinger is downright eerie at times. The actor perfectly captures the swagger and stare of the notorious gangster, and while it’s nice to see Depp in a straight-forward role for a change, the script doesn’t give him much more to do than “look” like Dillinger. Like everything about “Enemies,” the characters are strictly surface. The film looks great to be sure, but unlike Mann’s “Heat” or “Collateral,” we’re not rummaging around anyone’s souls here. Not even close.

The film’s central relationship is the ill-fated romance between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), but scenes that should be thick with foreboding aren’t. We don’t long for them to be together or hope against hope Mann will create his own history and have them run safely off to Costa Rica.

Bale’s Purvis is an even thinner character. He’s not given any kind of emotional life and other than a somewhat clichéd personal conflict regarding unsavory police tactics; what makes Purvis tick remains a mystery. We’re informed of his fate at the end of the film, but nothing in Mann’s characterization helps to make sense of what’s to come.

The rest of the players all seem to blend together, which is a shame when you have flamboyant personalities like Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Frank Nitti to work with. The real damage done by these flat, generic characterizations is to a narrative that can’t spark to life. While the story’s bogged down in a mundane cat-and-mouse game, the people who could spice it up with verve and surprise aren’t allowed to.  The colorful dialogue so rich during this era isn’t even put to use.

Even the action scenes lack oomph. Other than a terrific night time shoot-out set in the woods, the exhilaration that usually accompanies the pure physicality of a Michael Mann action set-piece just isn’t there. The staging of the bank robberies and personal confrontations also lack Mann’s signature style and unique energy.

What “Enemies” does do very well is create a time and place. Some great faces live under those fedoras and the muted but gorgeous digital cinematography nearly gives the film a lustrous black and white look. And give the filmmakers credit for controlling themselves politically. Hoover’s been the left’s favorite whipping-boy for years now and while he’s portrayed as coldly ambitious, his rumored sexuality is never mocked and he’s extremely reluctant to use the extra-legal means that prove necessary in bringing Dillinger down. 

There’s also one truly great scene, one of my favorites of the year and the reason I’ll see the film again. It takes place in a movie theatre, Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, to be precise, where Dillinger famously watched “Manhattan Melodrama,” starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and William Powell. Using only his eyes, what Depp conveys in this moment tells us more about his character than the entire two hours that came before.

It’s also at a look at what “Public Enemies” might have been.

Note:  Part 1 of this 4 part interview can be found here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

J.R. Head:  I felt that one of the most important things about the film was that it allows the folks that are left behind, the friends and loved ones, to get a glimpse of a soldier’s everyday life.  I served during relative peacetime but, even for me, it was difficult to explain what my day was like to my girlfriend, to my family… They were always imagining something bad happening.  And, let’s face it, peacetime or wartime, sometimes bad stuff happens.  We train hard, there are accidents and sometimes people die but for the most part you’re just doing your job.  I felt like “Brothers at War” gives folks a good look at what really goes on and allows them to relax a little bit.  Y’know, there’s not, say, a mortar attack every five minutes. 

“Brothers at War” Director, Jake Rademacher:  It’s a great tool for a soldier to allow loved ones a window, a good look at what life is like for them during a deployment.

JRH:  Exactly. That being said, why should someone who doesn’t have a family member serving see this film?

JR: Because they are going to gain insight that you can only gain from being on the frontlines or in the middle of a family living this war on a daily basis.  I had an advertising executive in New York say, “What I loved about “Brothers at War” was that you allowed me to ride shotgun on your journey and you never told me how to think or feel about anything.  I just got to take it all in and make up my own mind.”  I’ve had so many people thank me for not making it political.

When coming to see “Brothers at War” someone from outside the military family is coming in with a number of assumptions whether they know it or not.  As an audience it is always delightful to be surprised, to make discoveries, to be able to have your perspective challenged and informed.

In “Brothers at War” they get to dive right in and meet these guys, as they are, while they are doing this life and death work, creating relationships that will hold a special meaning for the rest of their lives.  For someone who wants to understand camaraderie and the special humor that comes out of living in this alien environment, this film is a good way in.

Insight and the intimate look into the inner relationships of a family is something that everyone can relate to.  In “Brothers at War”, Isaac comes home from war and his daughter doesn’t recognize him.  That happens in real time.  This one guy told me, “You had three grown men crying back here.  We all have young kids.  I go away for a week and I miss my kids like you wouldn’t believe.  I never really understood what those guys do until I saw your brother come home to his daughter after seven months.  I finally got it.”

My agent at William Morris, Erik Seastrand, saw the film and asked me all these questions about my brothers and about my relationship with them.  I mean, he really grilled me.  Finally, I said, “Come on, Erik, you know what it’s like.  You’ve got brothers.” He said, “No.  I don’t.” The film was a way for him to better understand brotherhood. In the end, it’s a film about brotherhood set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq.

It’s also a film about an American family facing the crucible of war.  I think anyone who wants to know more about who is fighting the war, the impact that it has on their families… I think they’ll find “Brothers at War” very interesting.  

After screening the film at Notre Dame, (fellow ND alum) Brandon Tuley said to me, “I learned more in sixty minutes of watching your film than I did in four years of watching the news.” So, save yourself four years of watching the news and come watch “Brothers at War” (laughs).

JRH: That’s good.  We should close with that (laugh).

JR: Before we do, I want to tell you a little about some of the folks without whose help we would not be sitting here discussing Brothers at War.  First, my producing partner, Norman S. Powell, was really a mentor to me as a director and producer.  As a filmmaker, he really coached me, taught me to trust my instincts, challenged some of my choices, and put a lot of love and time into making “Brothers at War”.  His expertise and tutelage were a tremendous boon.

Many have commented on the excellence of “Brothers at War,” and a lot of credit needs to also to Bob DeMaio who did a great job editing the film.  He understood what I was trying to accomplish with the footage, and his sensitivity and taste allowed all the layers of emotion and meaning to exist, bubbling under the surface of the film.

We have received repeated compliments regarding the cinematic look of the film.  Sony featured “Brothers at War” at their kickoff event for NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) this year alongside Michael Mann’s upcoming “Public Enemies,” George Lucas and the Dallas Cowboys.  Conor Colwell who shot some of the startling, beautiful, and at times poetic images in the first third of the film deserves much credit for the unique look.  Marc Miller was instrumental in teaching and coaching us both in coverage and look.  His years of expertise were invaluable.

Finally, there would be no film, without the courage of a number of small business owners from my hometown of Decatur, IL.  After I had gone through my own finances, I had to raise a lot of money fairly quickly to fund the making of “Brothers at War”.  I went back to my hometown and approached small business owners, family and friends to see if they would invest in my idea.  These small business owners, family and friends voted with their pocketbooks to make “Brothers at War” a reality.

JRH: That’s outstanding.

JR: It’s true. The majority of the financing for “Brothers at War’ came from Heartland families. 

JRH: My hat’s off to them.  And to you, Jake.  Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.  You’ve got a great film.  Good luck with it.

JR: Thanks. It was my pleasure.

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I recently went to see “Brothers at War” again, while it was here in Los Angeles. The film has lost nothing in the months since I’d last seen it. If anything, it’s gotten better. Get out and see it. Asses in seats, people. That’s how we get more films like “Brothers at War.”

Semper fidelis,

J.R. Head

“Brothers at War” opens today in Peoria, IL, Shreveport, LA and Oakdale, MN.  It will be coming soon to Carlisle, PA.