A few words about...™ Public Enemies -- in Blu-ray

I couldn't agree more.  I like Mann's work and it is an interesting film, but to me the video look of the film didn't fit the material and took me out of the story. What's more interesting to me is that HD video doesn't have to look like it did in this film which means this particular look was a stylistic choice. One that I don't understand.

Still, glad to know the Blu-ray is solid.

I didn't participate in any of the discussion threads when the movie came out, so it's nice to hear I wasn't the only one bothered by the anachronistic image qualities.

This was one of the worst transfers I've ever seen for a modern film on blu-ray... yet I ran to internet to read reviews and I'm told that this was probably the film elements that caused this.

There seems to be a few trouble spots for me. The shootout appears as a grainy, jaggy, edge enhancement mess. Anything with dark scenes also looks like a mess.

Sometimes dark walls turn into a swarm of grain so thick and "buzzy", it's distracting.

Edge enhancement is applied VERY, VERY liberally. We are talking Jesse James/Gangs of New York territory. I saw this in the theaters and don't remember it looking like this. I own about 200 films on Blu-Ray and this is probably the worst.

 Mann should have called this one  " Days Of Our Lives"

Guess I'm one of the few that found the running time fine, it didn't drag for me at all. Also, I didn't have an issue with the image quality. The audio on the other hand had it's fair share of being very unbalanced.

I watched it on my little bedroom TV, 32", and it looked really grungy in places. There were several brief shots that looked as if I was looking through a dirty window screen. I don't even know what to call that! I really like the film on content but this is one butt-ugly movie. My wrath will likely escalate once I've viewed it on my 58" screen.

I saw this in the theaters and although I thoroughly enjoyed the film, I can't say it was beautiful. It was deliberately grainy at times. And the use of video was obnoxious. It was immediately obvious every time they switched to video (generally interiors and hand-held shots). Butt-ugly probably sums up this movie, yet story wise it was well done.

I agree that the use of digital cameras took the film out of its time and place, but I'm not convinced this is necessarily a bad thing. I think that a lot of people misunderstand what Michael Mann was trying to do here; Public Enemies isn't a period piece so much as it's an anti-period piece. A lot of historical films use soft filters and over-exposure to get a "period" feel, but that generally just romanticizes the past. The point of Enemies, I think, is to completely eschew all pre-conceived notions of how a film set in the 30s should look. This is really just a film about bank robbers... which happens to be set in the 30s. And while I greatly prefer film over digital (both in terms of shooting and projection), I admire Mann's decision to present the digital footage as-is instead of dressing it up to look like film. The artifacts didn't even bother me since they are, for once, actually part of the intended look.

Conversely, I think a good example of a period piece done wrong is The Black Dahlia. That movie used all sorts of pedestrian filters and artificial lighting to look like a 40s noir film. The result is something that looks neither like a film made now or in the 40s. It just looks fake. Enemies, on the other hand, uses naturalistic lighting, coupled with a decidedly modern aesthetic. I'd compare it more to Chinatown, which also opted for newer, smaller cameras to create a window into the past. I like this approach; it doesn't put the story into quotations. That's not to say that there haven't been amazing films emulating a "period" look (Schindler's List, The Godfather), but this isn't a necessity either. I think people are just kind of conditioned to expect the latter approach because it's what filmmakers usually go with. But this is mainly because Hollywood tends to forget that the rest of the world isn't a giant set.

In any case, I liked it.

Edited by esl88 - 12/11/09 at 11:45am

I Think this dvd looks great,sure a lot has to do with the fact that I think this was the
only good looking film I saw this year,Because Mann knows how to use color and
is only of the few who is great with Photograpy(Video or Film)
    I am not crazy with all steady cam work,and a wish someone would use a tripod
now and then.(That goes for Malick too)

While Miami Vice wasn't great(just a redue of a old show from the series,with poor
casting) It was great looking


Could this PE BR look better? It sure looked better in the Theatre,but I don't think that was 1080p....2000p???
Unlike Miami Vice which I saw transfered to film which look like crap in the Theatre.

From looking at the Making of footage,I couldn't spot any film cameras,what was  shot
on Film??

I've had a pretty negative reaction to the video sourced imagery of Public Enemies from the time I saw the movie's first trailer. The look of it is screamingly anachronistic and ill-fit. That kind of choice would be akin to me filming a mild romantic comedy with the music score being nothing but tunes from Slayer and Fear Factory. It just does not work. Video with 1930's gangster material goes together about as well as ice cream topped with laundry detergent.

I do have the opinion and prejudice that any major Hollywood movie should be shot on film using the best motion picture film cameras and lens systems available. They achieve the true "film look." And they yield a higher quality, more future-proofed image. Glorified HDTV video cameras do not deliver that yet. Far too many people are eaten up with the "digital" buzzword to realize "analog" still does a great job in some cases.

Nevertheless, I have seen "digital" done very well. I thought Sin City looked great. "Digital" has some obvious advantages for certain shooting situations. I might consider shooting a comedy 100% digital for all the extra improv footage one could capture without fear of a film magazine running empty.

However, the look of Michael Mann's movies has been going downhill after his first mostly "digital" movie Collateral. And in the case of Collateral I actually wish Mann would have left the native video look of the electronic cameras intact instead of crushing the RGB video color structure through film look filters. The video look seemed fully appropriate for Collateral. The footage of Miami Vice was marred by a lot of artificially added noise that was either added as a choice of style or to hide various flaws of using electronic HD cameras in low light levels and high gain settings. I never associated the TV series of Miami Vice with any sort of grungy, documentary style look. Miami Vice should have looked slick. Public Enemies? Well, I just have the impression Michael Mann and his crew are too eaten up with "digital" enthusiasm to be fully critically objective in how their footage looks. If they were truly impartial I think they would be renting out a bunch of Panavision or Arri film cameras for their next shoot.

I agree mostly with Eli (post #9), and I enjoy Mann's embrace of video.

He understands it's not cheap or anachronistic, people have just been conditioned to feel that way. They'll just have to re-condition.

I disagree. The customer/viewer does not have any obligation to re-condition. They enter the theater in whatever mindset they choose. The filmmaker (or in this case "videographer") must communicate with the audience better. If he takes unusual chances and the gamble blows up in his face it is the "videographer's" fault, not the fault of the audience. The audience should not have any sort of pre-requisite to be conditioned into a collective video camera fanboy in order to understand the show.

Simply put, the video look is a modern day, TV-oriented thing. Dillinger did not have TV way back in the 1930s. Movies on film existed back then. If we wanted to be really purist about it a movie on Dillinger should have been filmed in black and white in 1:33:1 ratio. But that would take even more guts to do than shoot a movie with electronic HDTV cameras.

It's interesting to note that, according to the American Cinematographer article on PUBLIC ENEMIES, Mann originally wanted to shoot entirely on film, but cinemtographer Dante Spinotti talked him out of it.

Vincent

Not just that, Vincent. They did a test between the two formats, using costumes and whatnot, and Mann liked the HD version better.

Who says the 'gamble' blew up in his face? Just because some people don't like the look of it, doesn't mean it's the fault of those who shot it. Being in the right mindset absolutely has to do with everything. Or is a movie bad when it turns out to be different than you expected?

And of course your second point is ludicrous. Does that mean that, for example, L.A. Confidential (happens to be shot by Spinotti too) doesn't look right either?

L.A. Confidential was photographed in a conventional manner that didn't call attention itself.

And that's really the point. The obvious video look of Public Enemies calls attention to itself like it is shouting "video" from the roof rafters. It is distracting. If a "filmmaker" is going to make an odd choice of shooting methods where the results are obvious looking those results need to fit the subject matter of the movie.

At the very least, Michael Mann and Dante Spinotti could have worked harder making their "digital film" look more like a film instead of a time-traveled TV episode of COPS. The way this movie looks, they might as well have left the RGB video looking like straight video. At least the image quality would have been quite a bit better. The same goes for Mann's last two movies.

Exactly. And don't forget about movies that are set before the invention of film. I guess they should be plays performed in front of an audience at the movie theater because that's all they had at that time.

You and Brian are missing the point, or perhaps ignoring the point deliberately.

The appearance of video, as opposed to film, is unmistakable. It has a certain look that calls attention to itself when it is used in mediums outside of broadcast television. People associate the video look with daytime TV soap operas, the 6 o'clock news, talk shows, live TV sports broadcasts, variety shows and sit-coms taped in front of studio audiences. That is the conventional view of where the video look fits. Video has a live, present day, immediate feel to it. It does not have any sort of historical vision of the past vibe to it at all. Film does.

The video look doesn't work well in feature films. And every "digital" movie being released tries through post processing in some way to mimic the film look as much as possible. Some electronically shot movies succeed pretty well in imitating the film look. None of Michael Mann's "digital" movies have accomplished that, although they have had the original wide RGB gamma range crushed down to a muddier level in a vain attempt to do the film look thing. It takes more than shooting in 24p and throwing a stock color curve at the video footage to achieve the film look.

This topic reminds me of one of the bigger laugh out loud anachronisms I saw in a movie. In John Woo's awful WWII Iwo Jima epic Windtalkers he needed footage of battleships firing off shore for a naval shelling sequence. What did he use? Stock NTSC SD color video footage of battleships firing. It looked like footage of battleships from the 1980s firing on Shite positions in the mountains outside Beirut. Blown up to 'scope, you could see the video scan lines unmistakably clear. Really bad choice there.

Mann has never tired to make his video look like film. If anything he has done the opposite.

The conventions you associate video with have nothing to do with his choices to use it, as he does not make those same associations. Nor will anyone else as video steadily continues to take over the industry. It's an antiquated viewpoint to be avoided.

Zack, if that's really the case then why don't the fans of video allow the video to stay looking like video? If video is so great, why are they trying to make it look like film? Why not leave the video footage in its native wide-gamma RGB form? Even Public Enemies was post processed to some degree to mimic the film look -even though it fails to do so worse than many other digitally-originated movies.

Mann's interest in using digital seems to be less about a particular look, but rather the ability to crank up the gain, and shoot in low light conditions with little or no augmentation by the DP. A perfect example of this style of working is the parking garage roof scene in Miami Vice. I haven't yet seen Public Enemies, but I suspect he is doing the same thing here. Personally I wouldn't shoot that way, but its not my film.

 

As to movies being shot on HD not looking like traditional films, I've seen many that I didn't know were shot digitally until after the fact. Get Smart is a perfect example, Zodiac would be another. Zodiac in particular with its emulation of 1970s film stock, in my opinion proves the old notion, it’s not the equipment you have, it’s how you use it.

Doug

Get Smart is a "digital" movie that didn't work as well as others on mimicking the film look. I didn't know anything about its production work flow, but the first time I saw the movie I knew it had been shot electronically rather than exposed on film. Zodiac is a much better example of digital photography pulling off the film look convincingly.

Miami Vice isn't a good example of digital done well. Many have complained about all the "grain" prevalent throughout much of the movie. I think some of that extra artificial grain was added to make the various noisy high ISO, low light shots look more consistent with each other. Overall, the image quality was pretty terrible, a noticeable step down from Collateral.

Film has a disadvantage of not having a sexy buzzword like "digital" to attach to it. Nevertheless at this point motion picture film camera systems still do a better job of capturing imagery than video cameras. I think the video cameras would have a better edge on the competition if the footage was allowed to retain its full RGB gamut range.

Because  there are people that don't like the look of video, and want it to resemble film more. So you get a spiral going on. People want it to look like film, the filmmakers change it to look like film, and so people are wondering why the filmmakers change it to look like film.

As is the case with the latest Harry Potter movie, people want the filmmaker's version of the movie, as long as they like it.

I think you are not understanding the point. You don't like the film. That means nothing really. Eli said it best in post #9 above. I completely agree. Either you get it or you don't. Fine either way, but no need to talk about how you prefer film over video, how video "doesn't work" (when it clearly does for many), etc. I happen to think it works brilliantly and the movie is one of the top 5 I've seen this year. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine. But don't draw conclusions about what works and doesn't in general. IMHO, you didn't get the film and focused on the visual elements. I suggest you read the ASC cover on this film. Digital also allowed, among other things, for the DP to use slower zoom lenses for that "personal"/up-close/etc. style which is one of the reasons I like the movie.

I suppose you don't care for Fincher's digtial video films either then - Zodiac, Benjamin Button? Or is it that you just don't like Mann's style? You said video doesn't work, so I'll assume the former. And in that case, you are missing out on some very good films IMO. Mann could have done many things. However, he does what he likes, not what you like. And it works. Miami Vice was not bad because of the way it was shot, but because the film was bad IMO. Stop focusing so much on the medium, understand the medium, and enjoy the film.

..,Yeah,,,,Annie Logue Film,,,,there ya go. In the blue corner, weighing in at 70 mm, the reining, heavyweight champ, Analog. Digital of course is in the red corner....

I watched Public Enemies again last night and tolerated it's look much better seeing it at a larger size. I cannot recall playing a DVD or BD on my 32" bedroom set that came off worse. Just the same, it's a homely movie. It even looks ugly when they're out at the racetrack on a sunny day.

You're right that film has a live, present-day feel to it, but that's exactly the point that some of us are trying to make. We like the look specifically for that reason; it has a documentary feel that is both immediate and uncompromising. Public Enemies was never supposed to have a "historical or past vibe" to it; the film's supposed to feel like it's happening now... in the 1930s. It certainly didn't feel like the past to the characters at the time. It's like if filmmakers seventy years from now decide to use older techniques to shoot a film set in 2009, making it feel more historical and less "immediate." I'm sure they will, but it feels pretty immediate now.

What's interesting is that digital is now what people affiliate with documentaries. Twenty years ago it was Super16. Now HD has taken its place and is used for the same effect. In any case, it works.

 

Michael Mann has no interest in making his digital footage look like film. If you want that look, you should shoot film in the first place. This is why most digital shoots have confused me in the past; if they want to look like film then what's the point of going for HD? Digital is a completely different technology that looks and feels completely different from film; these differences should be embraced more often. That goes for all formats: 16mm shouldn't be made to look like 35mm either. It never will. Another thing worth mentioning is that artistically it's hard to say that one approach looks "better" than the other since it's really a matter of vision. Lawrence of Arabia was shot on 70mm, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was shot on two-perf 35mm, and The Hurt Locker was shot mostly on Super16. I'm not sure if one looks "better" here, since each film attempted to do something completely different.
Edited by esl88 - 12/14/09 at 3:08am

Does Get Smart really look all that different from say, Enchanted which was shot on film? Not really. At this point the "Digital" look has much more to do with the way the color timing on the DI is done than how the images were captured originally.

Doug

But his is the strange part, because film is looking less and less like film. The Pirates movies for example. Shot on film, but after all the processing, doesn't look much like film to me. Again I think much of this has more to do with the over use of color correction tools in the DI process than anything else.

Doug

Agreed, and I hate it. I used to blame the advent of digital grading (and still do ultimately), but it's also just the style of the times. "The Dark Knight," which was at least partially processed photochemically (for the IMAX footage), looks fantastic in "The Dark Knight Prologue." The finished film didn't look bad to be sure, but they certainly washed away some of it's raw beauty IMO.

When I think of Mann's current use of HD cameras, I always think of a Miami Vice shot with the two mains on a rooftop, a storm covered Miami skyline in the background bursting with lighting. It embraces video 100% and it looks fantastic.