Michael Mann Still Making 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

I'm a bigger fan of Michael Mann than most people, although I'm evenhanded enough to admit his last two films aren't all that good. But I still look forward to his work and even though Miami Vice and Public Enemies missed the mark on the whole, I still think some of Mann's best work could be ahead of him. Collateral wasn't that long ago, after all.

Geek Tyrant reports that Mann is still working on a film version of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. The last (and only) time the classic novel has made it to the silver screen before was in 1943. That time it starred Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman and was nominated for nine Oscars, winning Best Supporting Actress for, you guessed it, Katina Paxinou. So, yes, this one's probably overdue for another run. It has apparently been on a slow boil at Warner Bros. for four years, and Mann has another Spanish Civil War movie he's working on, too, based on the book Waiting for Robert Capa. However, I agree with Geek Tyrant that the filmmaker will have trouble getting either movie made. War movies aren't big business. Ask Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass, whose Green Zone may make 40% of its budget back here in the US.

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Sam Worthington Plows 'Texas Killing Fields'

The Sam Worthington race to conquer the free world continues unabated. Avatar's Jake Sully and the only really good thing about Terminator Salvation keeps lining up big roles, although the list looks longer because he's accepted a couple of offers and later backed out, such as The Tourist, which now stars Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

The latest dotted line signed by Worthington is the murder mystery Texas Killing Fields. Production Weekly Tweeted this weekend that Michael Mann and his Forward Pass label will produce, and Mann's daughter, Ami Canaan Mann, will direct. Has she ever directed before? Why yes, she was behind the camera for a Friday Night Lights episode just last month. OK, that's not a lot to go on.

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Overrated Directors: Hitch? Scorsese? Aronofsky?

Ben Shapiro seems like a bright enough guy. He's certainly more motivated than most, having entered UCLA at 16, expanded his horizons at Harvard, and built a small but multi-tiered one-man media machine. He blogs, he's a Fox News contributor, he writes articles for other sites.

And now he's talking movies at Big Hollywood, and I think he's just trying to get a rise out of people. How else do you explain someone saying Hitchcock "never made a great film" or admonishing the lack of editing in Martin Scorsese movies, even though Thelma Schoonmaker is one of the best and most artful cutters in the history of cinema? Shapiro counts down this ten most overrated directors of all time, and it's a brazen list. I do agree with him that some of the filmmakers he's chosen probably get a little too much credit; I'm a huge Michael Mann fan, but he is a stylist first and a storyteller second. Darren Aronofsky may not be reinventing the wheel, but he is not, as Shapiro puts it, "a talentless dud."

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Movie Review - 'Public Enemies'

Public Enemies Starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and Marion Cotillard Directed by Michael Mann Rated R

John Dillinger was something of a 20th century Robin Hood. What separates him from the infamous 21st century crook, Bernie Madoff, is the romanticized perception that Dillinger was only ripping off the government, not the common man. That, and Madoff never took anybody's money by gunpoint. Dillinger robbed a slew of banks in 1933 and 1934. Dillinger became legendary: He broke out of two prisons, once in full view of the police guarding its perimeter. He was coronated as Public Enemy Number One by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-tenured director of the FBI, then known only as the Bureau of Investigation. Dillinger had only been out of prison several months at the time, but had returned to a life of crime, pulling off heists in over 20 banks between May of '33 and July of '34. The nation, however, was fascinated. Throughout the midwest, Dillinger was viewed as a folk hero, living the kind of life many in this country only dreamed of during the time of the Great Depression. He'd walk into a bank, walk out a rich man a couple of minutes later, and disappear into thin air. He didn't kill people or even bother them, unless they happened to know a safe combination. That's the folklore version, anyway, and as a result of his legendary status, Dillinger is still celebrated in Chicago every July 22nd. In reality, though, he killed several police officers, which is nothing to celebrate. Naturally, this is a great idea for a movie; gangsters always are. And if you cast Johnny Depp as Dillinger an Christian Bale as G- man Melvin Purvis, deputized by Hoover to capture Dillinger, you'd think you'd have another kind of robbery: Public Enemies should steal money out of your wallet just for looking at the poster. It just doesn't work out that way.

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'Public Enemies': From Real to Reel Featurette

We ran a story several weeks ago about Michael Mann shooting the climactic scene of Public Enemies in the same spot where that scene played out historically. That stuff happens in movies. JFK is a great example, probably the best one of the past 20 years or so, of relying on actual locations to add authenticity to the film.

For Public Enemies, it turns out quite a bit of the major scenes were shot in the very spots where John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) developed his nationwide notoriety, breaking out of the joint and evading G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Trailer Addict has a side-by-side comparison of those actual buildings from the 1930s and their current occupation as filming locations in Public Enemies. It's pretty cool:

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