public enemies

I'll stick with the traditional Wednesday mini-review today and leave updates on the tyre/wheel situation for later (it's not working out well).

Interestingly, I watched this at my Dad's while I was visiting him down in Devon.

He recently got broadband, as I've discussed on the blog before, and as part of the package he got BT Vision, which is an on-demand thing from BT. The box actually also gives him access to Freeview, which is digital television via your aerial, but we watched Public Enemies via a streaming service.

You actually pay for the films a bit like you would if you were downloading them from iPlayer or something like that; however, they appear not be downloaded, but streamed.

I was rather curious (and a little dubious) that this would work. He only has the most basic package, so his internet speed is not the greatest and I was puzzled what system it would use and how it would work.

As I've discussed before on the blog I know of two streaming types - YouTube style, where it caches the video and iPlayer style where you watch live. Unfortunately, BT Vision appears to use the latter method and presumably because his speed is not great, it didn't work very well.

If you've ever watched the iPlayer on a low bandwidth connection you'll know what I mean - it kept stuttering, which really affected the experience.

The odd thing, though was that picture quality was surprisingly good. I mean, I know TV is deceptive in that it's actually at quite a low resolution compared to most computer monitors, but it actually looked quite good. I'm guessing this was part of the problem - if the video was compressed a bit more, maybe it would have streamed better?

Anyway, the film itself seemed okay, although I guess that opinion could be affected by the poor viewing experience.

I think my biggest criticism about the film was that if felt like you needed to know about the period. It's basically about John Dillinger, who was a bank robber during the early 1930s.

Now the film looked like it was set during that period and the performances were quite good, but I dunno - it sort of lacked context. I mean, the 1930s was when the great depression happened and the early 1930s was also when America had prohibition.

Now while Dillinger wasn't a bootlegger, so I guess you could argue prohibition wasn't of quite a great importance, the Great Depression was. I mean, the whole mythos and rose-tinted view of gangsters, bootleggers and bank robbers was virtually caused by the depression.

The whole "Robin Hood" feel to them was erroneous, but it was what people felt about them and yet there's nothing that really conveys that in the film. I mean, unless you knew it was the depression, you really wouldn't have a clue from the film.

It lacked context in that sense.

I have to admit it also felt both too long and not long enough. In other words, it felt like they were trying to cram too much in, so you get an odd sense of jumping huge chunks of time in order to show little snippets, and yet because there were so many snippets it kinda went on a long time.

I've a feeling that was the aspect that was most affected by it stuttering, though.

I think generally if you watch the film I'd say do a bit of reading about who Dillinger was before hand and you may enjoy it a bit more.