Comments on: Public Enemies: Using the High Def format for a period piece? Weird, bold, still weird.

By: Coleman Moisant

Coleman Moisant — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:25:35 +0000

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By: GY

GY — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:21:35 +0000

Finally watched this on DVD, thinking that the electronic nuances of the film would be smoothed out on the small screen. Wrong! It’s still as most people say here, really video-like. The blacks are all murky and the action strobey…Great film, nice action, but why the Viper looks so video like in Mann’s hands is a mystery. Maybe the guy never worked in video and finds “video” a new look. I don’t.

I didn’t notice anything video like in Zodiac if Fincher was using the same camera. Superman Returns on the Panavision Genesis also worked for me, but that was likely a lot of greenscreen. Crank shot on the HDCam SR was great. So why Mann consistently delivers more video like products with his movies will be an ongoing quirk.

By: fred

fred — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:51:05 +0000

I just watched the bluray, it looks cheap no matter what format its played back on, i guess the cheapness of those hd cams is that bad. Very distracting, i don’t known what mann was thinking. Makes a bad film all the worse.

By: A.J.

A.J. — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:54:51 +0000

I was able to tell the difference in a few of his interior shots under low light. It has to do more with controlling the f stop of the HD camera than anything else. At 1/48 of a sec. at 24p you are close to getting a bit of a strobe even though your Iris is open 100%. One is to use the gain which unfortunately introduces more grain, I avoid doing this at all cost. I prefer to shoot action sequences at an f stop of 100 or more obviously this requires more lighting on set.

By: Adlai

Adlai — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:18:43 +0000

I loved the acting and the plot, but I did think the movie was held back by the choice to shoot it in a way that emphasized the camera equipment used. I knew nothing about the movie going in, my girlfriend wanted to see it, but once I saw how cheap and underlit the movie looked, especially the interior and night shots (shot by regular street or tungsten, with no color correction or white balance made) I just assumed that whoever made the movie was either a recent film school grad or the production had simply run out of money and shot it as cheaply as they could. I was surprised when I saw Michael Mann’s name come up in the credits. But I guess an artist does what an artist does.

By: SeanO

SeanO — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:40:34 +0000

It looked incredibly awful. I’ve seen Collateral, Miami Vice and Zodiac. I don’t remember noticing a weird look in any of those (which is a good thing). But with Public Enemies there were moments when it looked like a cheesy reenactment from the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

By: Georgia

Georgia — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:56:21 +0000

I just loved the movie…and admired the quite remarkable shifting between 35 mm and High Def I was also expecting something realistic from Mann so I got my money’s worth with this piece
hope he will do more projects like this!
and Depp with Bale are just right for the job

By: NA

NA — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:55:42 +0000

The way they shot the movie got in the way of the story for me. The story and acting were great but some scenes took me right out of the moment because they looked like home video. The motion blur was all messed up and not realistic. Some scenes almost had a 60p ESPN look to them. Hopefully this doesn’t set back the digital revolution any. The lesson for this is to find out what they did in shooting this and never do it again. Whatever settings they used should never be repeated.

By: Dan B

Dan B — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:11:35 +0000

Just seen Public Enemies and Manns choice of hand held shooting style plus infinite depth of field screams ‘home video’ to me, which also equates to ‘cheap’ in my mind. I think the visual cues we take from moving images are so ingrained – a bit like adding bars at the top and bottom of a film says ‘expensive’ and ’shot on film’

I think the answer could be a mixture of old and new technologies so that our brains can get used to this new medium and what it can offer over film..

Kudos for Mann for trying new styles out though. This is an emerging technology.

By: HansKlopek

HansKlopek — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:43:45 +0000

There were some definite inconsistencies with it. For instance, in that last scene between Billie and the agent who shot Dillinger down, that absolutely looks like it was shot on film. There were other scenes that look the same way. If it took away from your experience (and from what a lot of other people are saying, their experience too) it might have been better to put HD away for a film. He could have come back to it in a more appropriate venue.