I walk to my room. But I open another room first. I take M's laptop and A's headphones. Then I open my door. Plugs and wait the lap to start. I am wringing my hands, I realize. The high I feel is of anticipation.
I am ducking work, breaking a mental promise of cutting down on cigarettes, and I am going to watch Public Enemies. It's been a while since I paid attention to art.
Idiot as I undoubtedly am, I rewind what appealed to me most about watching the film. I rewind, because I am logical idiot. Somebody said something about method in madness and madness in method. Bless him.
Be kind, rewind? Ok. Public Enemies has Johnny Depp, who I think, is the greatest living actor of his generation. I will gladly shoot a person if that person tells me that Depp isn't; and of course that'll be only after I tie the person to a chair and make him watch The Filmography--right form 21 Jump Street to Sweeney Todd. Then this film has Christian Bale, and well, a French lady called Marion Cotillard who happened to win last year's Oscar for best actress for her "staggering" performance in La Vie en Rose. Big deal, is my thought when I sit down to watch Public Enemies. Mann had a fetish for casting exotic faces for his films. For major part, these faces remain what they are--exotic--and little else. But I realise, as I watch the film, that I am mistaken. And how!
There's a part where Ms Frechette (the love played by Ms Cotillard, of John Dillinger, played by Depp) is arrested by the FBI and questioned. Brutally.
The man who is interrogating her is a fat bastard. He comes close and to her face, peers into her terrified eyes and asks where is Dillinger. She doesn't reply. He slaps, and then asks again. She says she want to use the bathroom. He pretends not to hear and goes out of the room. Minutes later he comes back, and discovers that she has wet herself. "Look, what you have done!" he says. And you feel the brute in the man, the pig. He asks again. No reply.
He slaps again, and the sound of his sweaty palm making contact with the cherubic face is so loud that you, uh, I wince. Her face goes into a quiver, which is more like a tremble. You, uh, I want to tear the man to shreds.
But this is not what is astonishing. It's the way she mouths "do you know what will happen to you after Johnny finds you, fat boy" dialogue. Her tone carry such poison, such reproach that I wonder whether she is the same character who was slapped around by that "fat boy". I am in awe.
Thus, I discover Marion Cotillard. For the first time.
After the end of Public Enemies, I light up again. The movie was good, but far from satisfying. With the likes of Depp, Bale and Cotillard anything lesser than "great" is not acceptable.
It's midnight. And I am positive that I can sit through another one. Forget sleep now. I'll make up in the morning for that.
Now there's Russell Crowe's A Good Year, which incidentally, was a colossal flop of 2006. But I had seen parts of the movie, and it made me want to watch the whole thing. And the director, Ridley Scott, is one of my all-time favourites. And so off to the world of a British guy called Max Skinner (Crowe), who inherits a chateau in France from his uncle. Max goes there in order to sell the (damn) chateau so that he can continue minting money from the London exhchange, in which he excels. Fairly lightweight stuff, so to speak. While Michael Mann a bit overboard with the loud gunshots, Scott directs this as if he himself is sipping wine in a chateau in a quaint village in the south of France.
A Good Year is a montage of cliches, and depends a whole lot on its Crowe's stardom. But oddly the one actor that amuse me is (surprise, surprise!) Marion Cotillard. She is there as Fanny Chenal, again portraying a (slightly wicked) French lassie, who brings the proceedings to life.
Fanny is in her own words "very, very choosy... also very, very suspicious; very, very irrational, and have a very, very short temper...also extremely jealous and slow to forgive."
"Just so you know," she winks. And I discover Marion Cotillard for the second time.
Two films back-to-back, and the skeptic in me is ashamed. May be she really deserve that Oscar. May be she'll turn out to be better than Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet. But as of now, I am an admirer.
After I watched the two performances which caught me by surprise, I decide that I should post something about it my blog here. So...as Pretty Boy Floyd says in Public Enemies, after he is shot by the FBI: "I'm done for; you've hit me twice."
