Will Menaker: Public Enemies

Tommy Gun, you ain't happy less you got one... There is a moment in almost every Michael Mann film where the camera lingers just over the shoulder of one of our protagonists , filling the screen with the back of their head and maybe a bit of ear as it follows Mann's clockwork men mechanically pursuing their work. The camera follows them as if it is the unseen and largely unquantifiable force or weight driving them. This signature shot nicely sums up Mann's body of work: the thoroughly detailed and somewhat detached procedural of men at work and the existential drift that moves them on either side of the thin line between law and crime. This has produced results both sublime -- The Insider -- and ludicrously awful -- Miami Vice -- so it was with some trepidation that I approached his latest, Public Enemies , an ambitious, but flawed epic of the Golden Age of American crime. Shot all in HD Cam, Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti have created a movie that looks ... (link)