I\’m not sure about the rest of you, but the thought of a Michael Mann adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls makes me giddy. If anyone could film the story of a suicide mission to destroy a bridge during the Spanish Civil War, it\’s him.

This kind of experimentation is greatly rewarded by critics if it happened in the past, when they can talk about how \’bold\’ it was — for intance, with \’Breathless.\’ But doing it in a modern, popular context is a faux pas. Especially the \’popular\’ 1/2 of the equation. I feel certain that if this had been a foreign picture, or not a megabudget Johnny Depp vehicle, it would be reviewed far more favorably — seeing as though critics often rave for high-end mediocrity like the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is essentially at the level of a decent TV movie. But oh! Subtitles! I must be very smart to be enjoying this!

Public Enemies not only uses modern film (video) style — (ultra short lenses, high-grain, low light work — the kind of low-end, shakey/dirty look that Cassavetes films were originally critiqued for, and now praised.), but it employs these techniques for a purpose: the film is a film about gangster films, and it\’s final setpiece compares and contrasts these styles in the most direct and poignant way; Dillinger is watching Manhattan Melodrama, and the film is shown specifically as film, not as a movie screen shot on video. His longing for Myrna Loy is not simply a transposition of his feelings for Cotillard, but his own longing for his life to be the way it\’s represented on film, as opposed to his video reality. It\’s our longing for the romance of the movies.

But instead of seeing anything new in this, critics simply said \”the video looks like shit,\” as if it were just used because it was inexpensive — never mind the beautiful framing, the incredible use of the low-light that only video can give you — and even the errors that only can provide, like the video clipped colors of the flares around the plane and final crime scene. Exploiting errors unique to the medium are how, in film, we get things like lens flares, light leaks, and rollouts. Originally considered giant mistakes, they\’ve now become so popular as artistic modifications that they are available as plug ins for my phone\’s camera.

Not to mention that the staging of the action in Public Enemies is some of Mann\’s best in years. This is Mann working in top form, and unlike Miami Vice , the movie is jam-packed with action setpieces. All of these things lead toward this being a high budget hit.

Enemies didn\’t find its audience until it hit HBO, which plays it roughly every three hours. I can\’t tell you the number of folks I\’ve talked to who say \”oh yeah, I just saw that and it was actually really good. I skipped it \’cause I read on Rotten Tomatoes that it sucked.\”

So, in short, I blame the critics. We used to applaud when studios made daring stuff like this — French Connection, for example. But for most of today\’s reviewers, posing and backpedaling have become the format.

So i\’m hopeful that Mann will simply continue on in this vein, and with Agincourt, perhaps deliver us from the hell of Lord of the Rings stylistic mimicry that the genre is mired in. But in particular, if it\’s good work, i hope critics realize it before people have to catch it at 11pm on Cinemax before it\’s noticed.