Quality of Film in "Public Enemies"

[Endymion]

I was watching “Public Enemies” on DVD last night. I enjoyed it a lot but was distracted with the quality of the film. If anyone else has seen the movie, you might know what I am talking about. Since I have no technical training, I have come here for an answer.

Does anyone know what kind of film the movie used and/or why it was used?

[Flip_Pancake]

Michael Mann shot with a digital camera, not film. Apparently everything appears a lot sharper with digital, and this enhances details, perhaps to a distracting degree.

This article might help shed some light as to why.

[MovieMogul]

@Flip_Pancake

Michael Mann shot with a digital camera, not film. Apparently everything appears a lot sharper with digital, and this enhances details, perhaps to a distracting degree.

Actually, I think the opposite is true–at least with the format Mann often uses (Collateral, parts of Ali). The color values tend to be muddy, quick motion tends to be blurrier, focal depth is more indiscriminate, and the overall feel of the visual image is synthetic, IMHO. For some films, this is fine because it can create a sense of immediacy (the way “video” often does), but with a period film like PE, it is indeed distracting and distancing. I love Mann as a director, but his aesthetic choices in shooting with the digital he does is a huge disappointment.

[Mahaloth]

@Endymion

I was watching “Public Enemies” on DVD last night. I enjoyed it a lot but was distracted with the quality of the film. If anyone else has seen the movie, you might know what I am talking about. Since I have no technical training, I have come here for an answer.

Does anyone know what kind of film the movie used and/or why it was used?

What was wrong with the film quality? I mean, the picture quality, since he used digital cameras?

[gladtobeblazed]

Been a while since I saw this but I remember hating the way it looked. It made the sets look fake, like a cheap soap opera.

[Endymion]

@Flip_Pancake

Michael Mann shot with a digital camera, not film. Apparently everything appears a lot sharper with digital, and this enhances details, perhaps to a distracting degree.

This article might help shed some light as to why.

Thanks for this link, it was a very interesting article. Still, I can’t help but be perplexed a bit because I know of other films that were shot digitally that do not have the “soap opera” look (I like that description of the film quality).

[MovieMogul]

@Mahaloth

What was wrong with the film quality? I mean, the picture quality, since he used digital cameras?

A few choice
[quotes]
(http://www.bananawho.com/2009/07/public-enemies-easy-on-the-eyes/):

Most troubling of all, especially for those familiar with Mann’s earlier work, is the cinematography, which must be one of the most wrongheaded stylistic decisions in cinema history. Put simply, Public Enemies is the ugliest big budget movie ever made. Mann shot the film on high definition video, and while films like the last two Star Wars prequels and Superman Returns have managed to get a reasonably film-like look out of digital cameras, Mann seems to have opted for a more primitive version of the technology, perhaps in imitation of the execrable Lars Von Trier’s equally execrable Dogma movement. The result simply bears out Roman Polanski’s opinion that Dogma films look like the cameraman is masturbating while stricken with Parkinson’s disease. The images have no depth, movement tends to blur in confusing and disorientating ways, even the night scenes feel overlit, and there are endless shaky-cam shots, every one of which ought to have been filmed on a dolly track. The final effect is to induce nausea in the viewer, and total incomprehension as to why Mann would lavish such expense on costumes, production design, and period detail only to photograph them as if he were making a 1970s no-budget BBC drama.

To hear the digital-age aesthetes tell it, you’d think the ugly “look” of Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s latest, was a flat-out accident. They imagine Mann and Dante Spinotti (his cinematographer for decades) slumping down in their chairs at a screening in Los Angeles, covering their faces with their coats, exchanging panicky whispers: “Why is it so grainy? Dante? Why is it so shaky?” Despite the very near-at-hand explanation of Public Enemies as a computer-age analogy to the muffled and very ugly gangster films of Hollywood’s “golden age”, the film still provokes cries of unforgivable optic incompetence. Armond White called the look “horrendous… unnaturally ripe colors, exteriors overbright and the interiors over-dark.”

As more movies are shot with digital cameras, there is increasing concern over hiding the foibles that mark the process as something noticeably different from shooting film. Bright light and fast, shaky movement, both served up in abundance in Mann’s film, seem to expose the video-ness of an image and in this way, a purist could argue, “take an audience out of the scene.”

[sulamith]

I love-love LOVE Johnny Depp, and I hate-hate HATED this movie because of the way it was shot. What Mann did to my Johnny is a travesty.

I saw it in the theatre, and it was so shaky and out of focus in places that it made me queasy. I wondered at the time if it was some “arty” thing that was supposed to add to the realism by making it more gritty or whatever.

I recall thinking at the time it was a shame because all those qualities did was take away from my enjoyment of the story and the entire experience in general.

And that’s something for me because I could enjoy Johnny Depp reading a phone book.

[In_Winnipeg]

I’m sorry, but I’m guessing that the REAL John Dillinger would make your Johnny Depp look like a pansy.

[wedgehed]

I was too busy wondering why they did such a bad adaptation of a very good book.

[Tim_R.Mortiss]

I saw the film in the theater (in fact, I saw it at The Biograph in Chicago!), and I agree with you: it looked horribly muddy.

Side note: when we came out of the theater, Lincoln Avenue for some reason had half a dozen cop cars on it! I almost ducked into the alley out of pure instinct!..TRM