Close Encounters Redneck Version

Very clever.

Cry Me a River, Johnny

Don't get me wrong, I think Johnny Depp is a phenomenal actor; he's been great in so many movies and believable as so many different characters. But I don't like him using his pretty boy face to play historically disgusting figures. Not really disgusting figures looks-wise. I don't mean that (well maybe sort of a bit). I mean like people throughout history who were just bastards, killers, drugdealers and just guys who should get what's coming to them. In real life, if we met these people on the street, they'd spit in our face. But on the screen, since it's Johnny Depp, we care about them.

Case in point I just watched the mildly disappointing Michael Mann film Public Enemies, starring Depp and Christian Bale. It was ok but could've been a lot better. It's so sad when these films have so much potential and just don't live up to it. Typical Mann film in some ways...lyrical and visually pleasing but gets a little lost in itself. Depp plays John Dillinger, Depression era bank robber and cop killer. Yeah, that's right, convicted cop killer. But he gets the star treatment here as a sympathetic figure.


Depp is just too damn pretty to be a killer. There are some scenes where he's classic Depp, lips pursed, looking longingly with those big brown puppy dog eyes. But the real Dillinger was a hard-core sonofabitch. And he looked like this.



Instead of someone as pretty as Depp, I'm looking for an old movie simply called Dillinger, starring old school actor Lawrence Tierney. Somehow I need to get my hands on it, this old movie from the 40's. From what I hear Tierney lived a bit more of an authentic life in Dillinger's spirit, always drunk or in brawls, not committing acts of murder or robbery mind you but just more of a 'tough guy' than Depp in this film.



Does this guy look familiar? Probably not at this age. I didn't recognize him when I first saw it. But Lawrence Tierney, old school tough guy who starred as John Dillinger in the 1945 movie, is the same guy who appeared as Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs. Same dude, just aged about 50 years. Still tough as nails, still probably a more authentic Dillinger at 75 then Depp at 40 (Dillinger just turned 31 when he was killed).



On this same topic, do you want to know something that really pissed me off? It's the movie Blow, with Johnny Depp as cocaine importer and overall loser George Jung. It so glamorized the drug trade and used Depp, once again, as a sympathetic visual. We saw him spiral downward, sure, and at times he looked like crap, but it was still Johnny Depp, we still knew he was him, that still under a mountain of coke, that he was a genuine and beautiful soul deep down. But that's not right. The real person, George Jung, responsible for how many millions of tons of blow and destroyed lives in this country, that dude was/is just evil.

But here's Johnny Depp playing Jung on the big screen...



A frickin' tropical vacation. He looks like a Mai Tai. Wouldn't we all want to be him! C'mon everybody, let's have a glamorous life too, full of women and palm trees and money and cocaine.
But now here's his character in real life, the real George Jung...



Ugly loser of a person. Looks more like the Elephant Man or that kid from that Cher movie with the deformed face. Anyway I haven't seen that movie Blow since it first came out on video, about 6 years ago and was so pissed off about the glamorizing of coke that I vowed never to watch it again. Kinda of appropriate (I'm not saying I'm glad or anything and true I really liked his other work on Beautiful Girls and Rounders) that the director of Blow, Ted Demme, died of a heart attack a few years ago high on coke playing a basketball game. I'm just saying, preaching what your practicing and that shit is no good.