Hollywood horseshit

I didn't have high hopes going into Public Enemies. I had seen some ridiculous quotes from Johnny Depp saying John Dillinger was a personal "hero" of his and the commercials suggested the stylized, glamorized treatment you would expect from Michael Mann. But I had enjoyed the book it was based on and hoped that the well-researched subject matter would prevail. What the hell was I thinking? I should have known that once the material was filtered through the Hollywood dumbing down process that what ended up on the screen would only approximate the facts as presented in the book. A couple scenes were pure fiction: the scene where the FBI physically tortures Dillinger's girlfriend after her arrest (one agent is shown whacking her across the face with a phone book!) and the scene where the agent who has just killed Dillinger kneels down to listen for his last words (there were no last intelligible words; the bullet that killed him had severed his spinal cord and exited above his eye; he died almost instantly). The final scene (also complete fiction) where the agent visits Dillinger's girlfriend in jail to deliver Dillinger's supposedly romantic fictional last words is like a bow placed on a giant pile of shit.

I had avoided seeing Revolutionary Road when it was in theaters because I had expected to be similarly disappointed. I didn't think the movie could live up to the excellent Richard Yates' novel it was based on. I was wrong. It's one of those rare occasions where the filmmaker actually respects the original material and does his best to bring it to the screen. A nice surprise.