Billie: How come you don’t know how to dance?
Dillinger: Frechette. That French?

Unfortunately, there’s also this. At a fancy restaurant, Billie feels awkward in her three-dollar dress and Dillinger looks around at the customers:

Dillinger: They’re all about where people come from. I only care about where they’re going.
Billie: Where are you going?
Dillinger: Anywhere I want.

In the theater I blanched at this conversation but in retrospect it works. Dillinger is at a high point here. He busts guys out of prison. He robs banks at will. Top of the world, ma. But tectonic plates are shifting around him. J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) is accruing power as the head of the FBI and places Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale), the man who killed Pretty Boy Floyd, at the head of a Dillinger task force in Chicago. Meanwhile, Dillinger’s sometime-ally, Al Capone’s former gang, now the National Crime Syndicate under Frank Nitti, is going corporate. They’re making money hand-over-fist, coast-to-coast, through wire-service gambling, and since they’ve paid off the cops to leave them alone, the last thing they need is the sensational bank-robbing antics of men like Dillinger attracting attention and possibly shining a spotlight on them. They make Dillinger an offer but he refuses and they cut all ties with him. Safe houses are closed off. Friends turn. This is the movie at its most intriguing. Dillinger isn’t simply a crook pursued by cops. He’s a man being squeezed by two corporate forces. He’s the last individual standing. And in this new world he finds he can’t go anywhere he wants.

The casting is intriguing. Depp, Bale and Crudup could play brothers they look so much alike. Dillinger and Purvis, in particular, are both professional men heading outfits that aren’t always professional or competent. They’re both guys doing jobs, but Dillinger is having more fun with his. Purvis, one feels, begins to lose his soul in the process. He places corporate results ahead of moral methods. He tortures out information. He’s basically us this decade. Crudup, meanwhile, still handsome, somehow suggests the fleshiness Hoover will grow into.

Depp is a revelation. I didn’t think he could do gangster but there’s always something hard and immovable in his eyes. Dillinger was supposedly one of the more graceful of bank robbers, and Depp demonstrates it, vaulting beautifully over a bank counter, machine gun in hand. I could watch “Public Enemies” again just for the dreamy, eerie scene where Dillinger is extradited back to Indiana. It feels like a mirage to me. I want to grasp at its meaning but it eludes me. Maybe its beauty is its meaning; maybe it wasn’t meant to be grasped.

Did Mann miss an opportunity by avoiding a tri-part structure and relegating Purvis and Hoover to secondary status? Is there too much a focus on Dillinger? Aspects of his story bored me. The romance. He meets her, wants her, gets her; then, of course, she worries he’ll be killed. “Dillinger: Wanted dead or dead,” one gangmember jokes, but it’s not a joke to her and she complains. But it’s a boring complaint, one we’ve heard in too many movies. It’s only in the second half of the film, when the FBI is watching her, bugging her phone using primitive phonograph technology, that this relationship becomes interesting. It’s even better when she’s caught and tortured for information. Cotillard is outstanding in these scenes.

Once Dillinger is squeezed by both the FBI and the Syndicate, he’s forced into partnership with less professional men like Baby Face Nelson, who promises big hauls and doesn’t deliver, kills unnecessarily and draws unwanted attention. The FBI closes in. More gangmembers go down. Eventually Dillinger is as alone as Frank was in “Thief.” He’s the last individual standing in a corporate world. There’s a great scene near the end when Dillinger drops off a girl downtown, then spies the Chicago Police Station across the street. He doesn’t just go into the police station, he goes into the Dillinger squad room, large, like a football field, and looks at all the photos they’ve taken, all the memorabilia they’ve gathered, all the equipment they need. To get him. Amusement shines in his eyes. The squad room seems empty, but slowly, dreamily, we realize, no, the men are just gathered at one end near a radio, listening to the ballgame. Dillinger stops, watches them, asks a question. They answer without looking up. He continues to smile. Tectonic shifts have occurred but he’s still a man who goes anywhere he wants. Even here.

I’m still gestating the film. I need to see it again. At the screening yesterday, someone brought a toddler and the kid talked through crucial scenes, distracting everyone. And since it was at a multiplex, a corporate AMC entity, there was no one there to complain to.

But I want to see it again. Maybe that’s comment enough.

Garrison Keillor is known for his supercalm demeanor on "Prairie Home Companion," and he used it to good, skewering effect in this 2002 article on Norm Coleman, the former Democratic St. Paul mayor who switched sides, went deep for the Bush camp, and was rewarded, in the absence of Paul Wellstone, with a U.S. Senate seat in 2002. Now, finally, thankfully, about-freakinly-time, we've taken it away from him. Godspeed, Al Franken. Good riddance, Norm Coleman. Good work, Mr. Keillor.

Empty victory for a hollow man
How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat

By Garrison Keillor

Nov. 7, 2002 | Norm Coleman won Minnesota because he was well-financed and well-packaged. Norm is a slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history, a hugger and baby-kisser, and he's a genuine boomer candidate who reinvents himself at will. The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west, went to law school, changed his look, went to work in the attorney general's office in Minnesota. Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side. There was no dazzling light on the road to Damascus, no soul-searching: Norm switched parties as you'd change sport coats.

Norm is glib. I once organized a dinner at the Minnesota Club to celebrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday and Norm came, at the suggestion of his office, and spoke, at some length and with quite some fervor, about how much Fitzgerald means to all of us in St. Paul, and it was soon clear to anyone who has ever graded 9th grade book reports that the mayor had never read Fitzgerald. Nonetheless, he spoke at great length, with great feeling. Last month, when Bush came to sprinkle water on his campaign, Norm introduced him by saying, "God bless America is a prayer, and I believe that this man is God's answer to that prayer." Same guy.

(Jesse Ventura, of course, wouldn't have been caught dead blathering at an F. Scott Fitzgerald dinner about how proud we are of the Great Whoever-He-Was and his vision and his dream blah-blah-blah, and that was the refreshing thing about Jesse. The sort of unctuous hooey that comes naturally and easily to Norm Coleman Jesse would be ashamed to utter in public. Give the man his due. He spoke English. He didn't open his mouth and emit soap bubbles. He was no suck up. He had more dignity than to kiss the president's shoe.)

Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president.

He was 9 points down to Wellstone when the senator's plane went down. But the tide was swinging toward the president in those last 10 days. And Norm rode the tide. Mondale took a little while to get a campaign going. And Norm finessed Wellstone's death beautifully. The Democrats stood up in raw grief and yelled and shook their fists and offended people. Norm played his violin. He sorrowed well in public, he was expertly nuanced. The mostly negative campaign he ran against Wellstone was forgotten immediately. He backpedalled in the one debate, cruised home a victor. It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm. 

If Micheal Mann's movies feel denser, heavier than most films it's because they are. They have the weight of history on them, the weight of detail. Here's Mann, from the director's commentary of "Collateral," talking up Tom Cruise. I'd copied it down years ago for a possible "In Defense of Tom Cruise" article that never happened, but it works here, on the day "Public Enemies" opens. I've been excited about this film for a while, writing about it here and here and here. In an odd coincidence, three years ago this month, I wrote about both Mann and Depp for MSNBC.com. Mann was my choice for subject, Depp was my editor's, but both were fun to write about.

In the meantime, here's Mann on Cruise and on why details matter:

ON HOLSTERING THE GUN
“The real sign of how integrated Tom was to become with the skills that Vincent, in fact, would have, is the expression on Vincent’s face after he shoots these guys and when he’s holstering his gun. He’s not thinking about holstering the gun. He can do that in his sleep. Immediately after he fires that last round his attention gets focused on Wilshire Boulevard down at the end of the alley. Is anybody coming at us from there? Did anybody hear these gunshots? What’s Max doing? He immediately switches over to the next task and that’s absolutely perfect craft. And it’s exactly what somebody who had a lot of trigger time, who had been in the kinds of conflicts we imagined Vincent had been in, that’s exactly what he’d be doing. He wouldn’t be worrying about how he holsters his gun.

“So that is a beautiful little movement and it’s a testament to the commitment of Tom to the work of turning himself into Vincent, and having deeper and deeper understanding as well as acquiring all the physical skills. There’s no cutting in it, and Tom draws and fires five rounds in 1.4 seconds.”

ON ED SADLOWSKI’S STEEL WORKERS LOCAL
“Tom and I did a lot of work in trying to understand where this guy came from. If he was in a foster home, if he had an institutionalized childhood. He was back in the public school system at age 11, that would have been sometime in the ‘70s. He would have been dressed very awkwardly, he would have probably been ostracized cause he looked odd, and the kind of brutality, you know, [of] pre-teens and early adolescents. We postulated an alcoholic abusive father who was culturally very progressive. He was probably part of Ed Sadlowski’s steel-workers local in Gary. He was a Vietnam Veteran. He had friends who were African American on the south side of Chicago. The Checkerboard Lounge is 30 minutes away at the Calumet Skyway, so the father probably, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was an aficionado of jazz. There was a great jazzy scene on the south side of Chicago. Modern Jazz Quartet. But it’s almost as if the father blamed the son, i.e., Vincent, for what happened to the mother. And the father drank. And as Gary was being reduced—you know, it looked like Dresden at the end of the second World War—the father never tutored the boy in jazz but the boy extolled the virtue of knowing about jazz because he heard his father talking about jazz—not to him but to other people—and that’s why he knew about jazz."

ON VINCENT ON KILLING HIS FATHER AT AGE 12
“Now this is the truth but Vincent doesn’t play it for truth. And, again, this is a moment where I believe Tom absolutely hits a very difficult thing to nail, which is that Vincent is brilliant and he knows how easily shocked is petit bourgeois Max, and he says things to absolutely horrify and appall Max.”

ON WHY DETAILS MATTER
“We all bring our whole history with us into any moment of the present.”

Sam: Everyone’s after me because of what I know. And I know this is going to work.
Mikaela: How do you know it’s going to work?
Sam: Because I believe it.

We have Sunday movie nights occasionally here on First Hill and last night the nine of us watched "Jaws." Some of us hadn't seen it since it came out; some of us had never seen it. I've seen it, what, four, five times? As recently as a few years ago, as long ago as 1975 at the second-run Boulevard Theater in south Minneapolis (99 cents anytime), five blocks from where I grew up. Back then I shut my eyes through several scenes: the initial skinny-dipping attack; Hooper scuba-diving under the hull of Ben Gardner's boat. Basically anything that combined "shark" and "dark." How much did this movie eff me up? I could barely take a shower for months afterwards. Rinsing, say, shampoo out, I'd think: "What if I open my eyes and I'm underwater and there's a shark coming towards me? WHAT THEN?" Stupid brain. Stupid Spielberg.

It was the movie that changed movies, that made the summer blockbuster possible, yadda yadda, but it's still smart, and it's still adult. It's got an early '70s vibe: the corruption of local government, personified by Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton, Mr. Robinson from "The Graduate"), who puts tourist dollars ahead of tourist lives; the class distinctions on the island, which Quint mocks; the use of locals as extras; the wonderful scene between Brody and his son at the dinner table, where the son keeps imitating the father; Quint's horrifying story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Hell, the entire introduction of Quint is great: the fingernails scraping the chalkboard, the frank discussion of the shark, the offer made with a glint of the eye. Add it to the list of great cinematic introductions: Pepe in "Pepe Le Moko," Rick in "Casablanca," Capt.Jack Sparrow in the first "Pirates." Off the top of my head. Feel free to add more below.

Spielberg frames his shots beautifully. I particularly like Brody, Hooper and Vaughn arguing and walking, and then, without a cut, walking into this shot, which is just perfect:

"Jaws" was the no. 1 movie of the year in 1975, and, for a time, the no. 1 movie of all time. (Adjusted for inflation, it's still seventh.) It was also, lest we forget, nominated for best picture. Back then we could do that kind of thing.

So... Any recommendations for next movie night?

"[Critics] forget what the goal of the movie ['Transformers 2'] was. The goal of the movie is to entertain and have fun. What the audience tells us is, ‘We couldn’t be more entertained and having more fun.’ They kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

—Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount, which is distributing "Transformers 2 for DreamWorks, in an uncredited AP article.

"People are always hurting each other but love keeps happening."

—David, in Craig Wright's play "Orange Flower Water," at ACT Theater in Seattle until July 20.

I could quote a dozen brilliant lines from this play. Some people are optimists, some are pessimists, but Craig, who is a friend, is both. Or he pulls his optimism from pessimism—as the above quote indicates. Both parts of the quote are true. Separate, they mean little. Combine them and you get a powerful statement of humanity. The genius is in combining them.

 The Annual Box Office Rankings for Best Picture Nominees, 1991-2008*

* Best picture winner represented in red.

Want one more?

*ditto

The problem isn't the number of nominees. The problem is the disconnect between studios, distributors, audience and the Academy. We don't make best pictures anymore. And if we do make them we don't distribute them. And if we do distribute them we don't go see them. And if all three happen, but the movie happens to be a cartoon or a superhero film, the Academy can't be bothered.

I'll say it again. The Academy is fixing something that ain't broken (the tradition of five nominees) because of something that is hugely broken. All of the above.

BTW: I charted the above for the drastic change that took place in 2004, but I never noticed —until I created this graph — how the best picture winner is almost always (eventually) the no. 1 or 2 box office hit among the five nominees. That's good to know. Or at least it was in the era of five nominees. Now it's useless knowledge.

At least according to this Variety report. Beginning next year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will nominate 10 best picture candidates rather than the five they've been nominating since 1944.

Some may applaud the move. It certainly gives the "Dark Knight"s of the world a better chance to show up. But the Academy is messing with tradition, and for a seemingly short-term gain in ratings and relevance.

My immediate reaction? Feels desperate.

More here.

And here.

UPDATE: It's 10 minutes later and the whole thing smells. The major studios, which can't make best pictures anymore, want their pictures nominated "best" nonetheless. The Academy, which can't seem to nominate popular and critically acclaimed pictures like "Dark Knight" and "WALL-E," wants relevance and ratings. This is the compromise. But it's a bad one. I remember baseball player Keith Hernandez arguing once that you only mess with tradition if the new rules increase strategy. That's why he was in favor of the three-point play in basketball and against the DH in baseball. The former increased strategy, the latter decreased it. Here? It dilutes it. Ten nominees means there will be more flotsam ("Frost/Nixon") and jetsam ("The Reader") in the race; stuff to push aside to get at the real race.

Bottom line: they're fixing something that's not broken (the five nominee slots) because of something that is (the major studios don't make best pictures anymore). What a shame.

By the way, and related to yesterday’s post: If you take all 243 films that were released superwide (into 3,000 or more theaters) from 2004 to 2008, and divide them by Rotten Tomatoes' ranking (“fresh” meaning 60 percent or better from top critics, “rotten” 59 percent or worse), and total and then average the box office for each category, this is what you get:

All Superwide Releases, 2004-2008

That's a $67 million advantage.

Are there extenuating circumstances? No doubt. "Fresh" superwide releases are more likely to open during the prime real-estate months of May, June, July, November and December—by a 66% to 47% ratio. Their marketing budgets may be bigger, too, but of course I have no data on that. (Does anyone?)

Most importantly, "fresh" films open, on average, in 231 more theaters than “rotten” films.

But even if you take away this advantage—by dividing the average box-office take by the average opening theater count—the “fresh” films are still much, much more lucrative:

All Superwide Releases, 2004-2008, by Theater Count

If you build it well, we will come.

Last week, John Lesher, the president of the Paramount Film Group, was fired and replaced by Adam Goodman, former head of production at Dreamworks SKG. Nikki Finke’s blog listed a number of offenses against Lesher, including drunkenness, while the L.A. Times said his biggest offense in his 18 months on the job wasn’t greenlighting enough pictures.

Maybe the two are related. I have no idea—I’m way the hell up in Seattle, and I don’t read much on internal studio dynamics—but the following, at least, demonstrates a problem Paramount has had for the last five years. It’s a table on how the big six studios (plus DreamWorks) fared with their superwide (3,000+ theater) releases from 2004 to 2008, ranked by average box office:

 Superwide Releases, 2004-2008, by Studio/Distributor

If you’re a regular reader you know I’m someone who believes that, with similar movies, good generally beats bad. People are more likely to go see a good popcorn movie over a bad one, and an exciting arthouse movie over a dull one. To paraphrase a famous movie line: “If you build it well, they will come.”

Paramount, according to this chart, builds them better than most, but, on average, fewer people show up.

The bigger question the table raises, though, is this: What’s up with Fox? They have the lowest percentage of fresh films and the lowest average box office per film as well. If you’re wondering what Fox's 39 superwide releases over the last five years look like, here you go. As sorted by top-critics-ranking on Rotten Tomatoes:

Fox's Superwide Releases: 2004-2008

It’s not pretty. I liked, well enough, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “The Simpsons Movie” and “Marley and Me,” but there’s no standout film here, and most of their menu smells like the glop of McDonald’s. In fact, they’re the only major studio over the last five years not to release a film superwide that garnered a 90% or better rating from the top critics in the country. DreamWorks (“Wallace and Gromit”) Paramount (“Iron Man”) and Universal (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) each did it once; Sony did it twice (“Casino Royale”; “Spider-Man 2”); Warner Bros. three times (“The Dark Knight”; “The Departed”; “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”); and Buena Vista, with a big helping hand from Pixar, did it four times (“Ratatouille”; “WALL-E”; “The Incredibles” and “Enchanted”). Fox? Nothing. Not even close. As you can see.

Equally astonishing is the kinds of movies Fox decides to dump into 3,000+ theaters. “The Seeker”? “Meet Dave”? “Elektra”? The preeminent popular genre of the decade is the superhero film and what has Fox done with it? They’ve taken one franchise that started brilliantly (Bryan Singer’s “X-Men”) and run it into the ground, while taking one of the more famous superhero teams ever created (“The Fantastic Four”) and never got it off the ground. You could argue that Fox’s most successful superhero over the past five years isn’t Wolverine or Mr. Fantastic; it’s Spider-Pig.

In the 1930s studios had personalities. Warner Bros. was gritty gangster stuff, MGM went after glamour and sophistication, etc. Studios are corporate-run now—smaller entities within larger multinational conglomerates—so we no longer ascribe a personality to their output. Lucky for Fox.

Bummer.

Hollywood Elsewhere, via Variety, reports that Sony chief Amy Pascal has pulled the plug on "Moneyball," the Steven Soderbergh adaptation of Michael Lewis' book, which was to star Brad Pitt as Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, and which was to begin shooting Monday. Earlier this month, Patrick Goldstein, expressing enthusiasm for the project, wrote about how it would adhere closely to the book. Maybe that was the problem. Too cerebral? Too much about baseball? Neither of which (baseball, cerebral) plays well in international markets?

Jeffrey Wells, for one, is doubtful:

What this seems to mean is either that (a) Pascal doesn't believe that stars like Pitt mean all that much when it comes to opening a costly film -- that the movie itself has to have the commercial goods or it's not worth doing, or that (b) she's half-persuaded that the 46 year-old Pitt -- 50 in four and a half years! -- isn't much of a star any more. Or a combination of both.

Who knows? Maybe Pascal knew she was taking a chance with Soderbergh, and, after the relative failures of two recent Sony offerings, "Pelham" and "Year One," she wasn't in the chance-taking mood.

As I said: Bummer. With that talent, and that source material, I had high hopes the movie would be good. Certainly better than "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigilo," "Stealth," "Bewitched," "Guess Who" or "RV," all of which Sony/Columbia, and presumably Pascal, not only greenlit but opened in more than 3,000 theaters in recent years.