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Public Enemies (2009)
Many layers of cinematic failure.
This film fails at so many levels that it's actually very educational.
First of, you can feel that the script lacked structure or a specific vision. I think the scriptwriters didn't know what the story was about, is it a love story, a historical telling of Dillinger's life or a battle of good v.s. evil.
So they went for the easiest copout in storytelling, a love interest.
This could have easily been a very good man's man movie, a classic HK or Reservoir Dogs type of crime drama but instead they went for romance because, it seems, American filmmakers can't write anymore for men.
Impossible to have a story about honour or brotherhood, the only motivation they can find for a male lead character is a love interest.
Also the use of video was more distracting than immersive, shots felt disconnected because of noise & colouration issues.
This film shows that if you don't know what you're story is about then all the other layers of the cinematic language will suffer in consequence, whatever is the acting, editing or even cinematography.
Into the Abyss (2011)
Artificially Spiritual
This documentary feels lost between a spiritual exploration of the consequences of death and an investigation of the events of a violent crime but fails in both aspects.
I really felt that the film didn't have a true focus and wandered into a plea against the death penalty but you could feel that the filmmaker doesn't understand the American mindset and questioned some of the protagonists with a certain layer of intellectual arrogance.
Herzog didn't seem to emerge himself into the culture of the south, his cold shots of the poor rural areas only seemed to be integrated to showcase the "lower class" status of his protagonists instead of giving a true sense of the culture.
So for a European filmmaker with a completely different cultural background, the subject matter of the death penalty must seem to a certain extend absurd & uncivilized but in the "wild west" inheritance of the American experience, executing a man for justice is embedded for centuries into the mindset of the United States.
Even if his questions seemed to want to probe the emotional state of his protagonists, he didn't seem to really want to understand the "why" the death penalty is considered an acceptable form of justice in the States.
And for that, I believe that this documentary feels judgemental instead of actually a 'document' of an event or of a complex cultural subject matter.