Movie Bliss: A Hopeless Romantic Seeks Movies to Love by Heidi Rice

Author:Heidi Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

4) Joys for the Boys (and the Girls, Too)

Some suggestions for when it’s his turn to choose and you need to sneak some girly thrills under his testosterone radar.

Public Enemies (2009): Johnny Depp as a Bad Man with a Tommygun

Directed by Michael Mann

Starring:

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger

Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis

Marion Cotillard as Billie Frechette

Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin Karpis

Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd

All right, I’ll come clean here and say everyone who knows me—and quite a lot of people who don’t—are well aware I have a bit of a soft spot for Hollywood maverick Johnny Depp. Not only is he a mighty pretty bloke, he’s so wonderfully quirky and unpredictable in the roles he chooses to play. Let’s face it, anyone who can fit Michael Jackson and Keith Richards impersonations into one career cannot be boring.

But if Johnny has one minor weakness for me (apart from his dodgy teeth in Pirates and Charlie) it’s that he very rarely appears as a romantic hero in a movie, even though he’s invariably the leading man. For the purposes of this book, I’m not going to count Captain Jack Sparrow, even though he should have been the love interest in Pirates, because for some strange reason Keira chose that plonker Orlando Bloom instead. Come on, Keira, decent dental work isn’t everything!

Anyhow, that travesty aside, Johnny seems to be a little shy about exploiting his popularity with the ladies. Bless. So it was with great enthusiasm that I watched Michael Mann’s lavish period biopic Public Enemies and discovered a touching, tragic romance lurking behind all those testosterone-fuelled, bullet-ridden gun battles.

Now, before I get completely carried away, I should point out that as much as Hollywood movies often like to romanticise the exploits of Depression-era bank robbers (a young and gorgeous Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, for example), director Michael Mann and his star make no bones about the fact that public enemy John Dillinger was a very bad boy indeed—violent, ruthless, vainglorious and even a touch unhinged, with (according to this movie at least) only a throwaway resemblance to Robin Hood.

Dillinger robbed banks, shot and killed people, and while he may have had his own particular code, he wasn’t someone who most people would want to meet while working as a cashier (me included). Depp’s Dillinger may be wildly charismatic and devilishly handsome (this is a Hollywood movie after all) but that dangerous edge isn’t always attractive, especially when he starts punching a guy at a hatcheck with very little provocation. True to his form as an actor who takes risks, Depp is prepared to show Dillinger’s dark side and for that I applaud him.

So hang on a minute, you’re probably shouting, where’s the romance?

If this guy’s a violent sociopath and Johnny’s not afraid to play him that way, what’s to make him romantic? Well, as all we writers of romance know, when you’ve got a particularly challenging hero, what you need is a heroine who’s up to the job of taming him, or at least showing he has another side.

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